GiG.FM – Find & Share Concert Tickets (On Twitter)

Hey- a quick update on the http://gig.fm startup and the progress we’re making…

GiG.FM Private Beta Launched
We’ve rolled out our private beta and have been getting some great responses and feedback. We’ve driven our first ticket sales and we’re making some improvements to keep testing/optimizing for subscriber and ticket sales conversation, as well as viral sharing of shows.

If you’re not part of the private beta and want in, please Follow @gigfm and I’ll send you an invite as soon as we release more invites. (By the way- it’s best to sign up on whatever computer you keep your iTunes library on so we can read it for you.)

Below is a sneak peak at what GiG.FM looks like at your user Home.

This is your Personalized Concert App that GiG becomes once we’ve read your iTunes to know the Artists you like, and we have your Location from reading your IP or getting your Zip.

From here you see all the upcoming shows in your area by your favorite (iTunes) artists. Each show has simple links where you can buy tickets, “tag” the show to let your friends know you’re going or dig it, or Tweet the show or email it to a friend with a short gig.fm url.


Twitter Integration & Engagement
We’ve done a pretty nice Twitter integration so users can create GiG.FM accounts via the Twitter OAuth and instantly share shows with a short gig url (http://gig.fm/~3VI). It’s part of our strategy to brand GiG as the social tool for sharing and organizing concert going. We’ll also be integrating in Facebook Connect in the future, as we want to include/cater to Facebook users and drive sharing of GiG concerts/urls into Facebook.

Here’s a quick example of how GiG users who’ve logged in with their Twitter profile can instantly Tweet shows via GiG and it will post a short gig.fm url for that show where their friends can go and get tickets or say if they want to go too…

GiG.FM - Tweet A GiG

And here’s what it looks like when a concert is posted to Twitter via GiG…

The gig.fm short url for that show is used. This makes it easy to drive a GiG users Twitter Followers back to GiG to check out the show details, sign up for GiG and get tickets if they want to go.


Data & Multiple Ticketing Sources
GiG has nearly 500,000 artists in it’s artists database now. We’re covering all of North America and our content on our site/pages cover 75,000 cities and neighborhoods in the U.S. and Canada, as well as roughly 3,500 venues. This content and data is part of our content strategy for SEO and driving traffic/subscribers, as well as providing a personalized and targeted service for our users.

GiG pulls in concerts information from it’s partnerships with several leading ticketing companies. This puts us at roughly 20,000 concerts on sale via GiG in a given month. Lots of ticket sale revenue opportunities.


Email Follow Up
GiG automatically emails you when new shows by your favorite artists are booked at a venue near you. That way you don’t have to be searching the web hoping you don’t miss great shows or tickets before they sell out. These are the automated Concert Alerts GiG sends to you based on your iTunes/favorite artists.

Here’s an example of an automated email alert letting me know 2 of my artists have an upcoming show…



Social Interaction Around Shows
Users can invite their friends to GiG, and Follow them, and be Followed. GiG users can also “tag” shows they are going to as “I’m Going”, and shows they’re interested in as “I Dig It.” Their Followers on GiG see the shows they’ve tagged, and soon this activity can automatically be posted out to Facebook or Twitter so their friends can know about the show and know about the show and join in.

In the future we’ll be doing some really cool stuff as we aggregate all the users talking about shows in your area, of your favorite artists, and let you follow what’s going on at a given concert or be a part of the conversation around it.


Next Near Term Milestone
Our next major milestone will be getting out for our public opening/launch, and beyond that we’ve got some biz dev opportunities in the works that could drive our subscriber base growth quickly. We’ve got some development to finish first though, including upgrading our infrastructure and shoring up our data handling. And even though we love the Twitter API and how it lends itself so well to real-time stuff like concerts, we’ll be integrating Facebook Connect as well to encourage signup and sharing via Facebook.

Beyond that, the rest of our strategy we’re keeping under wraps.

Hope you enjoy GiG and find some great shows to go to.

GiG.FM. Get out!