Business News Live Business Top Stories

Eventbrite files paperwork for IPO

By | Published on Tuesday 24 July 2018

Eventbrite

In what is becoming a busy year for music-related initial public offerings, Eventbrite has reportedly filed paperwork in the US to set its IPO in motion. The ticketing company is joining Chinese streaming giant Tencent Music and wireless speaker marker Sonos is marching towards a stock exchange, following Spotify’s direct listing back in April.

According to the Wall Street Journal, self-service ticketing platform Eventbrite recently filed IPO paperwork with the US Securities And Exchange Commission. It was a confidential filing, but more information about the IPO plans will be made public in due course. The firm is expected to list later this year.

Eventbrite is one of the few start-ups to make real traction in the notoriously-hard-to-crack ticketing market. Although a plethora of start-ups have entered said market with superior technology, it’s hard to compete with legacy players which can offer event promoters access to large databases of past ticket-buyers and an assortment of financial kickbacks. And then there’s the fact that the biggest concert promoter Live Nation owns Ticketmaster.

But by offering more grass roots event organisers user-friendly tools to handle their ticketing, Eventbrite was able to build a large user-base without initially going head-to-head with the Ticketmasters of the world. It then gained scale by buying up rivals with a similar approach, like Ticketfly in the USTicketscript in the Netherlands and Ticketea in Spain.

As Eventbrite has gained scale through those acquisitions, it has started to sign up bigger event promoters, including in the music space, putting it more directly into competition with legacy players in the primary ticketing market. It now remains to be seen if Wall Street reckons that impressive growth makes this the ticketing business to buy into.



READ MORE ABOUT: