The chief executive of Eventbrite has said that the event ticketing company’s targeting of music venues has played an important role in its financial growth in 2016.
In an interview with the Music Ally website, Julia Hartz said that Eventbrite, which was formed a decade ago, stands to be profitable in 2017.
“What was different this year compared to (the) past year was that we made a concerted effort to focus on and invest in music,” Hartz told Music Ally. “Because we have this great ecosystem of two million events that we ticketed last year across many, many different types of categories, we really didn’t need to focus on one category.”
In February Eventbrite acquired Queue, an event management system. Queue technology will be integrated into the Eventbrite service in the coming months. “This is a new market for us,” Hartz added. “We have never focused on music venues before.”
Hartz also addressed the issue of secondary ticketing. She said: “It’s an interesting problem because I think many people are misinformed about secondary tickets. The misinformation comes from the idea that there is a small group of people who are creating bots to go in and scalp these tickets to sell them at a higher value – and that the benefit is only going to the ticketing company or a small number of people including the broker. The fact of the matter is that more people are in on these deals that anyone would like to admit.”
Music Ally reported that 560,000 event organisers and 45 million ticket buyers use Eventbrite each year.
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