Songkick Adds Ticketing To iOS App, Announces 8.5 Million Unique Users, Over 50% Of Traffic Via Mobile

Today Songkick updates its iOS app with in-app ticket purchasing in the UK, Spotify playlist scanning to further identify your favorite acts and a new design. In addition, they've released updated figures with an impressive 8.5 million unique users with over 50% of the traffic coming from mobile and most new growth also coming from mobile. This brings up two important points for music tech as a whole. You've got to have an up-to-date mobile solution or you're already behind. And ticketing companies need to move more aggressively to provide streamlined mobile ticketing for both themselves and for companies such as Songkick.

I spoke with Songkick co-founder and CEO Ian Hogarth yesterday about the new app and related topics. In particular, he emphasized the need for easier, streamlined mobile ticketing services which they can't do on their own. Ticketing companies themselves will ultimately have to make this shift to benefit not only companies like Songkick but musicians themselves. Given the move of so many activities from the desktop to mobile devices, easy ticketing sales via mobile should lead to more ticket sales and, yes, mo' money, mo' money (note: I'm paraphrasing here).

In big picture news for Songkick, they've grown:

Unique Users Using Songkick Each Month

With 8.5 million unique users per month and a lovely growth trajectory Songkick is looking quite strong. You can see there were some scary dips along the way but the overall trend is pretty clear.

Over 50% of traffic is via mobile and most of the recent growth is from mobile. That speaks to the power of mobile users but I failed to ask Hogarth whether or not he had concerns about the lack of web growth. For a content company that would be a serious issue but maybe not for a concert tracking/notifications service since that fits mobile so well.

But here's the obvious catch, Hogarth pointed out that less than 10% of users buy tickets via mobile. A heck of a lot can happen between finding a great concert on your phone and getting to a desktop to buy tickets. A whole lot. The lack of streamlined ticket sales, even on the ticketing sites themselves, is likely costing musicians fans at live shows who ended up going to see a game, a fashion event, a whatever that came up in the interim.

Songkick has been linking to ticket sellers but their services are often awkward and counterproductive even for the desktop let alone mobile. But after a lot of work with partners, they're now enabling in-app ticket sales in the UK.

Hogarth said they were working with partners closely and intend to eventually roll out in-app ticket sales not only in the States but worldwide. So far people are definitely interested but obviously many established companies are dealing with legacy issues and making the transition themselves so, as well as being new for Songkick, mobile ticket sales are still coming into their own.

Until then they're making it easier to discover and compare ticket prices from vendors on your phone. Songkick will be rolling out that feature on Android sooner rather than later.

In addition, they've deepened their Spotify integration so that Songkick can now scan your playlists just as they scan your iTunes collection. This will simplify the process of identifying musicians you like so that they can alert you to upcoming concerts in your area.

The final piece of news about the iOS app update is a new design. I've only seen a few screenshots so I can't really speak to that but you should be able to download the Songkick iOS app today.

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Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.