Astoria, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 01/25/2011 -- GigsWiz, the next generation ticketing service where artists, promoters and venues work together to sell more tickets for live music events, is today officially launching in the UK.
GigsWiz is also announcing agreements with a number of UK promoters including FeedMe Music, HotVox, and Substance Gigs.
GigsWiz is a direct-to-fan ticketing service, which offers artists easy-to-use tools for selling and promoting their gig tickets online via their websites and social media channels. GigsWiz shares part of the ticket fees it collects with bands and artists, whilst helping promoters and venues to sell more tickets and faster, as well as identifying fan hotspots for best gig locations.
Today's official launch at Midem, where GigsWiz is a MidemNet Lab finalist, 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.
Joonas Pekkanen, GigsWiz co-founder, says, "The biggest problem event organisers currently face in concert promotion is getting artists to help in promoting ticket sales online. By providing the artist a share of the ticket sales revenue, GigsWiz becomes a key factor in increasing ticket sales."
GigsWiz not only saves artists' time in promoting their gigs online, but also provides them with a new revenue stream.
GigsWiz offers an easy-to-use service where artists, promoters and venues work together to sell tickets for events. Artists sign up to GigsWiz Backstage and connect it with their Facebook and Twitter accounts. After that, GigsWiz automatically promotes all upcoming gigs with ticketing links. Event organizers, meanwhile, can create events on the GigsWiz Tickets service, giving them direct access to an immediate band fan base.
In addition to automated social media updates, GigsWiz offers embeddable widgets and Facebook apps for artists, promoters and venues. These widgets list upcoming gigs and link directly to the ticket purchase page. Gig info is also automatically posted to all relevant gig listing services.
According to Matt Lockwood, president of London-based Hot Vox Promotions, 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," he adds
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".
GigsWiz was founded in Finland, in early 2010 by three co-founders, Juuso Vermasheinä, Kai Lemmetty, and Joonas Pekkanen, all with strong entrepreneurial and digital technology backgrounds. The GigsWiz service has been in an invitational beta phase with several promoters since November 2010. The company has raised angel funding and is currently negotiating follow-up funding.
Details of GigsWiz' upcoming US launch will be announced shortly.
In addition to being a 2011 MidemNet Lab finalist, GigsWiz has been named as one of the Top 5 Music 2.0 Start-ups by The Guardian and selected as a Red Herring Europe 100 Winner in 2010.
Website: http://www.gigswiz.com/
For further information please contact:
Joonas Pekkanen, Gigswiz
mobile: +358 505 846 800
email: joonas@gigswiz.com