LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — California-based venture capital firm Sequoia Capital has expressed their enthusiasm for U.K. music startup Songkick, investing $10 million into the company.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Songkick CEO Ian Hogarth said that the money would be used to fund aggressive expansion and innovation at the company.
Songkick, founded in 2007, allows users to track their favorite bands through Songkick's tour database, receive notifications of nearby tourdates and interactively share with friends through social media. Songkick currently claims to list more than 100,000 upcoming dates and has a database of more than 2 million gigs, with set lists, reviews, videos and other media.
According to Hogarth, Songkick attracts more than 5 million unique visitors per month, which would put it just behind Ticketmaster as the largest concert site on the web today.
“We believed if we made it easier to go to concerts, more people would go. We built the site and kept improving and expanding it. We released an iPhone app, and a Spotify app when they launched their platform. We demonstrated we could change behavior if we made things simpler. There were two things we learned in that process. The first was when someone starts using Songkick they to to roughly twice as many concerts the year after," Hogarth told the Wall Street Journal.
