GigsWiz Launches into Fan Discounts for Festival Tickets with The Human League

I mentioned in my previous blog post that we have “more new & exciting stuff just around the corner!”

Well, now I’m happy to spill it out.

We’ve actually managed to get a fair bit of early buzz with this already from a blog piece by The Next Web. It’s been an interesting week after the TNW’s article, to say the least… We’re extremely excited!

Here’s the official beef, though:

We are teaming up with The Human League, one of the most influential bands ever to come out of the UK, and The Magic Loungeabout, a major UK festival which the band is headlining, to offer Human League fans the opportunity to purchase a limited number of reduced rate tickets, exclusive to Human League Facebook fans who purchase tickets through this Fan Loyalty page. The campaign is set to start next Tuesday, 28th of June.

The Human League Fan Loyalty Discount Program for The Magic Loungeabout Festival 2011

Fan Loyalty Programme is part of a suite of ticketing and social media marketing tools that we’ve developed in response to requests from a number of artists and management who wanted to reward loyal fans while also picking up new online fans and followers. This is the first implementation of the program with more due to roll out shortly.

The new additional feature now allows artists to pass the reward – anything between 5 and 20 per cent – to their fans as a fan discount on the gig or festival tickets. This allows artists to give back to their fans, while getting new Facebook fans and Twitter followers. We are rolling the model out with selected artist over this summer, and are extremely happy to launch it out with The Human League, a band that also believes in continuously reinventing itself.

Here’s a quote from The Human League’s manager Simon Watson:

“When the guys at GigsWiz approached us because they were ticketing a festival we are headlining, they explained how their model worked and that there was an incentive for bands to help sell tickets.

We were more interested in something that would reward the fans who wanted to buy tickets to the festival specifically to see us play live. So we are pleased with what GigsWiz came back with because its important, particularly for a band like The Human League, to not only reward our fans but also pick up new fans, which this helps us do as well”.

There’s so much cool stuff that’s going on with the Fan Loyalty pages that I’d like to do a whole blog series of all the cool new features… So stay tuned for more info about the Fan Discount Programmes!

If you would like to do a pilot with a similar Fan Loyalty campaign, don’t hesitate to contact us!

GigsWiz’s fancy new look & a shell bomb waiting just behind the curtain

We’re back with a new look on our website (and our blog)!

We’ve been working behind closed doors all spring so behold – there’s plenty of more new & exciting stuff just around the corner!

We strongly believe we are the future of ticketing and therefore we want our new look to be also visionary. We wanted to make our new color scheme and visual style support the way we feel about our role as the trendsetters and pioneers of the new era of ticket sales.

Here’s what we came up with:

But the development work we’ve done really does not stop with this new look – far from it! We’ve worked hard based on the customer feedback – that’s you! – so we promise to tell you more soon.

In the mean while go see our new front page and tell us what you think!

GigsWiz is hiring… MORE!

Last week we started our search for a brilliant mind to expand our business in the US and now we are getting ready to hire a UK sales person as well.

Check out the requirements and submit your applications here for the UK Sales Person position at GigsWiz Ltd.

By the way we’re still taking applications in for the US Sales Consultant position. Check it out and apply if you’re US based, hungry, experienced in cold sales, know a ton of people in the biz and looking for killing it with the most exciting ticketing company in the market today!

Keep sending us those resumes for the UK and US positions!

GigsWiz Is Hiring

GigsWiz is hiring more sales force in the US to keep up with the wave of demand!

What we’re looking for is an enthusiastic and music industry savvy sales consultant with a killer instinct for closing deals.

Check out the details & apply here.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Artist-Powered Ticketing Now Launched in the United States

We are live in the USA!

We have opened up our artist-powered ticketing service for all US-based customers on February 15, 2011. Official launch took place at the New Music Seminar in Los Angeles. All promoters, artists, festivals and venues in the US can start using GigsWiz’s direct-to-fan ticketing service for efficient ticket sales, promotion and online & social media marketing.

Zac Kushner of OpenHouse Music New Orleans, one of our early US customers says:

“The very day after GigsWiz started selling our tickets, our event instantly rose to the top of Google searches. GigsWiz did exactly what they said they would do and exactly when they said they would do it. We are now using GigsWIz as our exclusive ticketing provider and recommend them to anyone seeking to maximize ticket sales from social media.”

The US launch follows our official launch the UK last month after an invitation-only phase. In the UK we have announced agreements with several promoters including FeedMe Music, HotVox, and Substance Gigs.

Watch the GigsWiz Video Demo:

US based promoter or a festival organizer? Start selling tickets immediately by signing up to GigsWiz Tickets!

New Concert Promotion Tools Added To GigsWiz Tickets

We have just released a set of swanky new features that enable event organizers send information about upcoming gigs to people who bought tickets to their previous gigs.

Above is a picture from our Events page. There you have your upcoming events and past events. On the action column you have small “mail” icon in the past events table. By pressing that icon you get to the email tool which enables you to email information about upcoming gigs to people who bought tickets to those gigs.

Here’s a short GigsWiz Tickets 101 Tutorial Video about the new tool:

The idea behind this feature is to enable you to hand pick future events which might be interesting to people who attended one of your past event(s).

We hope this will help event organizers sell more tickets and create value for their customers by helping them to find interesting events.

We are currently in the process of developing even more features that will enable event organizers to use our growing database of emails. Stay tuned!

Official launch at Midem – service now open to all promoters, artists and venues in the UK

We have made our official launch of GigsWiz Tickets for UK promoters and venues. The launch took place today at Midem, where we are a MidemNet Lab finalist. We also announced agreements with a number of UK promoters including FeedMe Music, HotVox, and Substance Gigs.

This means that all promoters, artists and venues in the UK can now join in the revolution and benefit from the next generation ticketing service where artists, promoters and venues work together to sell more tickets for live music events. The launch comes as the landscape of gig promotion is changing rapidly. Fans are increasingly linked to bands online and the traditional marketing methods used by promoters are increasingly inefficient at reaching fans.

Here’s a video showing how it all works:

For a more complete description of both of the services check out GigsWiz Tickets How-it-works and GigsWiz Backstage How-to-use.

We are on a quest to make the promoters’ and artists’ life easier and according to Matt Lockwood, president of London-based Hot Vox Promotions we feel we are on the right path as it takes a huge amount of time to update all the different websites with gig info at present. “Not only does GigsWiz save us time and trouble, it also helps us increase ticket sales with the direct access to artists’ fans online.”

Andy Boyd of Lazy Eye Management (Pete Doherty, Babyshambles, Vaults, The Valentines) adds, “We believe that these days artists can do as much as promoters to promote and sell tickets for live shows, and we’re looking at GigsWiz as one of the best ways to do just that”.

Details of GigsWiz’ upcoming US launch will be announced shortly.

That’s all for now folks! We’re always looking forward to hearing your feedback and ideas, so send them to support@gigswiz.com or post straight to our community support forums at GetSatisfaction.

All events now listed automatically on Eventful

We are listing our shows on Eventful

We are working hard to help promoters sell more tickets faster than what they are selling with their current tools. Our unique model is the co-operation with the artists to get them to help in ticket promotion. But there is another way we can help our clients as well.

Listing shows automatically

Most of the ticketing companies out there list their events automatically in some online services. The problem from the promoter’s point of view is that it’s not nearly systematic & all-inclusive enough. We want to change that. We are working hard to list our shows on all online listing services out there.

GigsWiz Affiliate Program

In order to get the most out of it we now have a special affiliate program and easy to use developer API for all our partners.

We are announcing our first affiliates soon.

Listing shows on Eventful

In addition to affiliate partners we now also push our events to Eventful. They have an open API where anyone can push information about events. Their platform still has a few bugs but our first events are already listed there (example here). From this day on all the shows created with our platform will be automatically published to the Eventful platform. Needless to say we are extremely excited about working with other listing companies as well. If there’s any specific listing services in mind that you would like us to publish your events automatically, please drop us a line and we will get things rolling!

More listings!

We are also working together with a UK based startup called Songkick. Songkick has been getting a good amount of buzz lately from the tech press with their comprehensive user-generated gig history data. With Songkick we are currently still listing our events manually but once we pick up speed (and they have the time to allocate to implement our stuff) they will list our events automatically on their service too. This should be happening very soon.

Again – if you have some listing companies in mind that we should work with, please leave a comment or send us an email (juuso (a) gigswiz.com).

If you happen to work for or own a listing services company and want to join our affiliate program to list our gigs, please feel free to contact our affiliate guy Juuso Vermasheinä (juuso (a) gigswiz.com).

We got some extremely good news from Cannes today!

MidemNet Lab 2011

We have some amazing stuff to share today!

Today we were selected as a finalist for the MidemNet Lab 2011 startup competition held in Cannes, France next January. There were only 30 companies in total selected and GigsWiz is one of the 9 other companies participating in the Industry Services category of the competition.

We are very proud and – of course – ecstatic about being chosen to present our business in front of the jury there. Midem is the biggest European music industry gathering and the second biggest in the world only rivaled by SXSW in the US. This makes it the prime place to shine. Which of course we will do with our phenomenal artist-friendly ticketing service!

Are you going to come to Midem? Drop us a line below or by email (joonas at gigswiz.com) if you want to hook up!

New GigsWiz front page is out & new features for Tickets

This is the new GigsWiz front page

We just released the new front page which makes it easier for promoters to find their way to the GigsWiz Tickets (and GigsWiz Backstage of which we’ll be writing a more detailed blog post soon). This is the first version of the front page and we will bring in new features there in the near future. In addition to what you see right now we are planning to show eg.

• list of cities with most artists
• list of artists with most reputation points
• list of most active promoters

Can you come up with other suggestions that would be useful to you? Please go ahead and tell us!

Attendee interests

We have also published a few new cool features on GigsWiz Tickets. One of them is the detailed sales view page for each event. When promoters create events they can choose to ask ticket buyers which band they came to see. They see the customers’ choices right there on the detailed sales view page.

We believe that what we have right here is actually the perfect replacement of the old-school method of asking people for input on the door. Or if you think of yourself as a concert-goer would you rather give your input on the door or at the time of purchase of the tickets?

Here’s a pic of the attendee breakdown feature:

This is just one example of all the new bells and whistles on the new detailed sales page. For example we also show detailed revenue information and the actual times of purchases there.

Login to see more.

Perfect pricing

In addition to the detailed sales view we have a small but quite handy feature helping promoters decide the best price point for their gig tickets. Pricing is probably the most important part of the whole ticket purchase user experience and – of course – the customer communication.

Usually when a promoter sets their desired face value of the event to a certain level the consumer price often looks a bit funny when the ticketing service adds their own booking fees on top.

See the picture below for an example: if the promoter sets the face value of their tickets to £5.50 then the actual price is going to be shown (and billed) as £6.33. We think that presenting ticket prices like this is not good for the end-consumer.

Our new small but significant feature makes it possible to preview the actual final price during the creation of the new event – it updates the final price of the ticket in real time when the promoter changes the face value.

We hope that going forward this feature will help promoters price tickets a lot better so that with our help the prices will end up looking like there’s some sanity behind them from the customers’ perspective.

What do you think?