Songkick CEO Matt Jones has hailed the company’s partnership with Adele following a “transformative” 2016 for the ticketing and concert discovery site.
In a new blog post, Jones (pictured) explained that Songkick utilised anti-touting technology when selling two thirds of the house for Adele’s four Wembley Stadium shows this summer.
“By teaming up directly with major artists including Adele, The Avett Brothers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pixies, Metallica, Olly Murs, Sigur Ros, and many others, we’ve prevented more than 100,000 tickets from entering the secondary market via scalpers and bots these past 12 months – saving fans over $50 million in total,” said Jones. “And by selling directly to fans, we’ve seen that tickets sold through our technology are 4x less likely to end up on secondary sites."
He added: “It was exactly one year ago when we first teamed up with Adele to ensure her tickets ended up in the hands of her real fans, and to date, we’ve sold almost half a million tickets for Adele worldwide on this touring cycle.
"One out of every five attempts belonged to scalpers, bots, and fraudulent accounts, and were prevented from access to the advance sale. This left less than 2% of the venue’s seats from appearing on secondary sites for all four dates. By comparison, the industry average is typically 20% for in-demand shows.
“Our success in combatting scalpers [in 2016] proves that any artist can take control of the live experience, and better connect with their fans if they have the right tools to do so.”
In November, Songkick announced a product integration with Shazam, which will roll out this year and will see Songkick’s list of upcoming events featured within the Shazam app. Songkick already has partnerships with Pandora, Spotify and SoundCloud.
“While the secondary market has exploded and scalpers are making high-demand shows less accessible than ever, as many as 40% of tickets continue to go unsold across the industry each year due to lack of concert discovery,” said Jones. “The market inefficiencies we see today are the same ones we faced 10 years ago when I was promoting shows, and in many respects they’ve gotten worse since then. That’s why I’m so proud of what we’re doing at Songkick.
“Discovery is in our DNA, and our innovations attack two massive problems at once: getting real fans into high-demand shows at the prices artists want them to pay, instead of what scalpers want to charge, and getting more fans into other shows where poor discovery is constraining ticket sales.”
