GigsWiz: Artist-Powered Ticketing Service Officially Launched

GGigsWiz, the “next generation ticketing service” where artists, promoters and venues work together to sell more tickets for live music events, has announced their official launch at the future of music conference, New Music Seminar. Dotted Music has been looking after this intriguing service for quite a while during its “beta” period, so this is definitely a good reason to cover the service on the site now.

GigzWiz logo

If you haven’t heard of it yet, GigsWiz is a direct-to-fan ticketing service, which offers artists and event organizers easy-to-use tools for promoting, marketing and selling tickets to live events via their websites and social media channels. What is interesting, GigsWiz shares part of the ticket fees it collects with them with artists, while helping promoters and venues to sell more tickets faster.

The startup is a recent MidemNet Lab finalist (we didn’t have a chance to attend the conference this year to write about the event in details, unfortunately), entering the landscape of gig/show promotion in the midst of a rapidly changing touring and ticketing market. The idea behind the service is that fans are increasingly directly connected to bands online and the traditional marketing methods used by promoters can be highly inefficient at reaching those fans.

GigsWiz is a time saving service for artists, venues and promoters. Artists sign up to GigsWiz Backstage and connect it with their Facebook and Twitter accounts. After that, GigsWiz automatically promotes all upcoming gigs with ticketing links. Event organizers, meanwhile, can create events on the GigsWiz Tickets service, giving them direct access to an immediate band fan base.

In addition to automated social media updates, GigsWiz offers embeddable widgets and Facebook apps for artists, promoters and venues. These widgets list upcoming gigs and link directly to the ticket purchase page. Gig info is also automatically posted to all relevant gig-listing services.

GigsWiz was founded in Finland, in early 2010 by three co-founders, Juuso Vermasheinä, Kai Lemmetty, and Joonas Pekkanen, all with strong entrepreneurial and digital technology backgrounds. The GigsWiz service has been in an invitational beta phase with several promoters since November 2010. The company has raised angel funding and is currently negotiating follow-up funding.

Have you tried the service yet? Let us know in the comments!