Ticketfly partnership makes music events more intelligent and more social

Ticketfly is rolling out new partnerships today that make the pre-concert experience more social for attendees, and eliminate a lot of the logistical headaches for venues and promoters.

Ticketfly partnered with technology providers Aloompa and Intellitix to make event management smoother at venues, with radio frequency identification (RFID) authentication of tickets and passes, ticket scanning, and box office tools, all of which are available on Android devices and the iPhone.

For attendees, Ticketfly partnered with car sharing service Zimride to help concert-goers find carpools to events right after they have purchased tickets online. Ticketfly is an enterprise technology provider focused on providing end-to-end solutions for music promoters and venues, such as ticketing solutions, email and social marketing tools and analytics.

“Events are inherently social, and we love to facilitate the community-building component,” Ticketfly co-founder Andrew Dreskin told VentureBeat. “Music festivals are a very interesting and exciting part of the live event landscape in the U.S. You can never pirate the live experience, so people continue to go to music events.”

Dreskin says live festivals have come to the forefront of the music industry in the U.S. with events like the Ultra Music Festival, Bumbershoot and the Treasure Island Music Festival drawing crowds both regionally and nationally. Sometimes crowds come from even further afield.

By partnering with Zimride, Ticketfly is expanding access to events and helping attendees reduce their environmental impact at the same time. “The ability to marry Zimride’s ridesharing solution with Ticketfly will save fans and venues millions of dollars on transportation costs while creating a new community for fans to meet before and after the show,” said Logan Green, founder and chief executive officer of Zimride in a statement.

Winter is a slow time for the music festivals, so launching its new integrated product now may give Ticketfly and partners a chance to stomp out any bugs before the festival season ramps up again. In April, Coachella will kick off the music festival season followed by Bonnaroo, Sasquatch, Outside Lands and many more. These major music festivals of the spring and summer will allow Ticketfly and its tech collaborators to see how well their technology has worked together. Some Ticketfly partners are currently providing services to festival organizers such for Bonnaroo and Outside Lands, while Ticketfly certainly hopes to do so with its integrated offering.

The fees paid for purchasing tickets represent a $10 billion opportunity, says Dreskin. The face value of all tickets sold worldwide is more than $50 billion. “That’s pretty juicy,” says Dreskin.

Ticketfly is based in San Francisco, and has raised $15 million in funding. The company has 70 employees and has been generating revenue for the past 30 months, said Dreskin.

Image via Christian Holmer/Flickr