Last week Spotify trumpeted a significant 10m milestone (in terms of paying customers) and now concert discovery service Songkick has announced it has 10m active users each month (up from 8.5m at the end of 2013, which itself was up from 5m in March 2012).
It has long described itself as the second biggest live music site in the world after Ticketmaster and is keen to play up just how active its users are. It reinforces a statistic is has used for a number of years – namely that the average Songkick user goes to twice as many gigs a year after they start using the service – and adds that these “aren’t just email addresses sitting in a dusty database somewhere” and are actually “real people using our products every month”.
It has also put a monetary value on just what its engaged audience means for the concert business. It has, it says, generated $100m in ticket sales to date and projects it will drive the same amount in revenues this year alone. Mobile, it suggests, has been the key driver here, with over 50% of its traffic coming from mobile devices.
Songkick is clearly succeeding it its long-stated ambition to shake up and simplify the concert business at a discovery and sales level as well as (through Songkick Detour) the venue and promoter level. That said, the sticking point for it (and all others in this space) is mobile purchasing of tickets which remains something of a protracted process and not quite as simple and elegant as, say, tagging a song on Shazam and purchasing it on an iOS device from iTunes.
Some ticketing companies like Seetickets are working with PayPal to help streamline this part of the transaction process and Songkick itself updated its mobile app last November to allow in-app ticketing buying, but it was UK-only at launch. When this is all smoothed out – and on a global level – mobile ticketing for gigs could really surge forwards.
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