Ticketfly raises $3M to challenge Ticketmaster

Ticketfly, a startup that allows concert promoters to sell tickets and promote their events on social networking services, just raised $3 million in a first round of funding.

The San Francisco company’s cofounders and co-chief executives, Andrew Dreskin and Dan Teree, previously led TicketWeb, which was acquired by giant ticketing company Ticketmaster. But Teree said Ticketmaster hasn’t really figured out social media, leaving room for a competitor with a savvier approach to those tools.

With Ticketfly, a concert promoter enters their event information. Ticketfly’s Backstage Suite then can create a ticketing page, a concert website, Facebook events, and schedule automatic posts to Twitter about the concert. With other services, promoters would have to tackle each of these tasks separately, Teree said, so this saves them a lot of work — assuming they were going to bother to have a presence on Facebook and Twitter at all.

Ticketfly could also be seen as competition for ticketing startups like Eventbrite, but Eventbrite is a more general tickets and events service. Ticketfly is really focused on concerts, and its founders have strong connections in the concert industry.

It may seem a little naive for a startup to enter a market so dominated by a single company, but Teree said concert promoters aren’t happy with Ticketmaster, especially after its merger with concert promotion company Live Nation — they don’t want a giant corporation that’s also partially a competitor to be selling their tickets. So they’re already looking for an alternative. Ticketfly said that it has partnered with more than 50 promoters and concert venues, and is on-track to sell 1 million tickets in its first year.

The funding comes from High Peaks Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners, The NYC Seed Fund, and angel investors including Howard Lindzon and Roger Ehrenberg.

Ticketfly’s future plans include email integration, support for barcode scanning of tickets on mobile phones, and more sophisticated social networking and analytics tools.