Spotify grows its events profile with tickets from Eventbrite

Less than a week after acquiring Ticketfly from Pandora for $200 million, today Eventbrite has announced another deal to mark its deeper move into music events: the company will now show information about concerts and music festivals Spotify. Specifically, it will recommend Eventbrite-powered events relevant to the music people are listening to on the streaming music service and their overall music preferences.

Interestingly, although Spotify has already launched a Songkick-style nearby concert recommendation service, it has yet to move into ticketing for events directly itself. My guess is that this Eventbrite integration is one way of testing the water for such a service. We've heard anecdotally that the company is, in fact, looking to build out ticketing of its own, "since that is where the money is," although it has yet to launch anything.

For now you will not purchase on Spotify's site, but on Eventbrite's "in two quick taps," similar to how you purchase tickets there on the back of other distribution partnerships that Eventbrite has with Facebook, Bandsintown, Discotech, and Songkick.

We have reached out to both companies to ask about what the breakdown is for revenues for sales for events when the referral for the sale comes from Spotify, and also whether Eventbrite will use account information from Spotify when making the sales (that's another reason why you can imagine Spotify would be a killer place to make ticket sales: it already has a lot of users' payment details). The idea, however, seems to be that this relationship should be beneficial for both sides:

On the side of Eventbrite, it's giving the ticketing and online event listings service a direct marketing route to would-be concert goers most likely to be interested in buying tickets. Just earlier today, Spotify announced that it's now at 140 million users, giving some significant scale to that strategy.

On the side of Spotify, it's providing potentially another route to revenue generation for the company: Spotify today also announced that it will be paying out some $2 billion to artists over the next couple of years, on annual revenues this year of $3.3 billion.

But all the same, for the average musician, it's hard to make a living from streaming music -- or simply any recorded music, for that matter -- and so they are increasingly looking to things like merchandise and touring to make up the difference.

That's led Spotify to making some acquisitions and building analytics tools to expand on this idea of "artist as businessperson" -- for example it purchased CrowdAlbum for marketing tools last year. And promoting concerts is one more step in that direction. Eventbrite claims that 42 percent of people discover artists and bands through streaming services and that "half of these fans go on to purchase tickets to see those artists live."

Events will appear near albums, from artists if you follow them (which you'll get by email), and on their artists' pages, and on Spotify's Concerts tab where it runs its nearby / relevant concert recommendations.