Newly-launched Tixxy is announcing partnerships with livestream platforms Veeps and Mandolin, that promise to keep music fans connected to their favorite artists in real and virtual spaces.

New predictive concert recommendation service Tixxy (yotixxy.com) doesn’t mine users’ data or force them to make space for yet another app. Instead, users sign up for free with their Spotify or Apple Music accounts so that Tixxy can send text messages letting them know when their favorite artists are performing nearby. Founded by tech innovator and former Hawthorne Heights drummer Eron Bucciarelli, Tixxy makes it easy for showgoers to stay in the know about shows as soon as they’re announced, while sending text messages instead of push notifications drastically increases the likelihood that they will read announcements. “SMS marketing is almost ten times as effective as notifications,” notes Bucciarelli. “We don’t send people irrelevant messages. We want to establish trust with users.”

With Veeps and Mandolin as new partners, Tixxy can now also let users know about a variety of upcoming virtual events. Veeps offers a streamlined platform for hosting ticketed livestreams, featuring thousands of new and well-established artists - from Young M.A and Eyedress to Rufus Wainwright and Norah Jones - playing live from living rooms, studios, and major venues everywhere. Mandolin, voted best livestreaming platform by Pollstar, offers one-of-a-kind hybrid concert, VIP, and fan experiences; helping artists, venues and festivals, like #iVoted, Telluride Bluegrass Festival and Lil Wayne’s UPROAR Hip-Hop Festival, prosper by deepening connections with their fans via new avenues and data only available through digital engagement. 

The last year of cancelled live shows has forced artists and entrepreneurs to work together in finding creative new ways to cater to long-distance fans. “Artists need to rebuild connections,” says Bucciarelli. “They’ll need to make sure fans feel safe and excited at shows.” And now, Tixxy users will know as soon as the artists they love schedule shows of every kind, whether out in their local world or right on their own devices.

Mary Kay Huse, CEO of Mandolin, said, “We’re excited to partner with Tixxy to make sure that all of the events on Mandolin – from livestream concerts to digital meet and greets, on-demand playbacks, and more – reach fans as easily as possible.”

Concert recommender app Tixxy is announcing a partnership with event commerce platform Lyte to help venues reach fans directly.

Tixxy, a concert announcement service that sends SMS messages to hopeful showgoers when their favorite artists announce sales for local and virtual shows, is launching a partnership with Lyte, a technology platform that has reimagined ecommerce for live events by enabling fans to reserve, return and exchange tickets through its proprietary reservations system. Lyte's fan and industry-friendly solutions have been utilized by hundreds of major events worldwide, festivals and artists including Newport Folk Festival and tours with the likes of Mumford & Sons and Wilco. 

Both Tixxy and Lyte aim to make performing easier for all of those involved in producing live music experiences. Formerly of platinum-selling band Hawthorne Heights, Tixxy founder Eron Bucciarelli knows well how hard it can be to spread the word to fans in time for them to make it to a show in their area. “We’d get messages from fans asking when we were coming to a city we had just played,” he remembers of his touring days. “It was so frustrating.” By sending targeted text messages, Tixxy makes sure its users know when their favorite artists are coming to town as soon as tickets go on sale.

By helping its partners sell straight to fans, Lyte keeps the control and the benefits in the event rightsholder’s hands, passing savings and security onto the fans as well. “Lyte reimagines the ecommerce experience for live events,” notes Craig Snyder, Director of Business Development at Lyte. “With Tixxy, we will reach more fans and get more of them into the events we partner with.”

Together, Tixxy and Lyte offer music fans quick access to the shows that matter to them, especially important as brick-and-mortar venues start to reopen and the livestream world, richer than ever, continues to thrive.

About Lyte:

Lyte is a reservations technology platform that has reimagined e-commerce for artists, venues and fans. In an industry where the standard is “no refunds,” and concert-goers have to compete with robots and brokers for the tickets they want, Lyte's mission is to fill every seat with real tickets at fair prices and make the entire experience delightful and simple. 

Lyte’s technology has delivered millions of dollars in savings by enabling fans to reserve, return and exchange tickets through its proprietary risk-free reservations system that top live entertainment brands are also now using to confront the uncertainty created by the pandemic. Lyte’s industry-friendly solutions have been utilized by festivals, major tours with the likes of Mumford & Sons and Wilco, and recently featured in Rolling Stone and Billboard.

Tixxy brings on Head of Growth Steve Peele II, Head of Promoter & Venue PartnershipsCody Grup, and advisor Randy Nichols

Predictive concert recommendation service Tixxy (yotixxy.com) is announcing the addition of three new team members. With experience in the realms of music, technology, and startup culture, these new hiring decisions promise to further the company’s goal of keeping music fans in the loop about their favorite artists’ nearby shows without mining their data.

For Steve Peele II, Tixxy comes as an exciting new opportunity in a long line of career successes, primarily in the burgeoning Cincinnati startup scene. As the owner of all things marketing operations of real estate transaction management service dotloop, where Peele worked for seven years, he facilitated the company’s growth and visibility to such an extent that it was acquired by Zillow Group in 2015. After leaving dotloop, Peele continued to put his digital marketing and SaaS growth experience to good use in growing local businesses including Astronomer and Everything But the House, as well as managing growth marketing at Inman News and serving as the head of growth marketing at integration leader API Nation. Most recently, Peele has served as a marketing director at top US-based software development firm Nexient, again championing marketing strategy through their recent acquisition by NTT data. He joins the Tixxy team as not only a marketing guru, but also a lifelong musician, ready to join the two worlds.

Cody Grup brings years of experience in the music industry to Tixxy. Since 2005, Grup has worked as a booking agent and talent buyer for a number of agencies throughout the country. As booking agent for the Love as Arson Agency, Grup worked with iconoclastic hard rock acts like Killwhitneydead and I Am Abomination. As a talent buyer, Grup has worked with Toledo’s The Verso Group and Michigan-wide agency Go Ahead Booking, keeping his finger on the pulse of the local music scene in ways that will be invaluable to Tixxy’s work with local venues.

Music and technology have long been a hybrid focus for Randy Nichols. The founder and managing director of Force Media Management, Nichols has also worked with expert New York-based artist management company Red Light Management as an artist manager and advised Bandsintown, Immensity, Tension Division, and atVenu, all innovators in the field of music and technology with which Nichols has been an invaluable collaborator. For Bandsintown in particular, Nichols’s strategies raised numbers of both platform users (from 500K to 55M) and artists (from 30K to over 500K) while generating over $1M in ad revenue. Most recently, his work with atVenu helped lead the group to new virtual-era relevance in the midst of major COVID-19-related industry shifts. His artist management expertise and versatility in a number of aspects of the music technology industry promise to aid Tixxy as it continues to grow.

“Having been part of the software and startup community for the entirety of my career, executed two successful exits, and generally drawn toward all things technology, joining [CEO Eron Bucciarelli] and the Tixxy team was an absolute no-brainer. Outside of the fact that I’m a diehard musician and music fan, Eron’s vision, industry knowledge, and track record speaks for itself,” says Peele. “What is most intriguing for me is how I can help guide our growth engine in a scalable way by bringing my SaaS marketing experience to a product that has a natural depth and reach within an industry I care so much about.”

With a wide range of experience and proven track records of innovation, each of Tixxy’s newest personnel promises to contribute to the platform’s ability to connect venues, artists, and fans quickly and securely, and to do it with a passion for music and technology alike

SMS-based concert discovery assistant Tixxy is now launching in the US with partners Sound Rink, 10th Street Entertainment, and AXS

Tixxy is now live for music fans eager to get back in the loop as live music returns. The Cincinnati-based start up is partnering with a range of companies providing fans with live experiences, all aimed at one thing: To fill the house with eager music lovers.

“We’re excited to bring Tixxy to music fans right at a key moment, when they may be even more likely than previously to miss a show,” explains founder and CEO Eron Bucciarelli. “We all want to get out again and listen to live music. Tixxy is a privacy focused, non-intrusive way to keep track of events in your town.”

And the next year promises to be full of exciting shows: Live Nation has reportedly booked twice as many concerts in 2022 as in 2019, according to Rolling Stone. Tixxy will take all these live dates from partners and major ticketing companies like Ticketmaster and send music lovers a quick text when a band they might listen to is coming to town. Bands and their teams pay nothing to get the word out. Fans can click through and buy a ticket, right then and there. Venues and promoters can offer their fans a new way to find out about events without additional promo costs. No more missed shows, and no annoying data mining or endless, non-relevant notifications. Users can sign up in seconds here.

Tixxy’s launch partners demonstrate the range of companies who see value in a text-based solution to live music’s most basic information problems. Sound Rink lets artists create unique VIP experiences that can be purchased with a click. These range from a special acoustic set backstage, to meets and greets, to limited edition vinyl. 10th Street Entertainment will promote its artists’ tours via Tixxy.

“We're very excited to be able to directly target artist fans through Tixxy. We know this is a game changer for alerting fans of VIPs in their area,” says Cody DeLong, CEO and Co-Founder of Sound Rink.

“As experienced artist managers, we have watched as the channels to reach fans have dwindled,” says Bryan Raisa, Senior Vice President of Tour Marketing and Partnerships at Better Noise Music/10th Street. “Tixxy gives us a direct, friendly way to find potential concertgoers in every market, without adding to our tour budgets or time commitments. I’m a huge fan.”

“Tixxy will help fans, but it will also help all sides of live music connect with potential ticket buyers directly and effortlessly,” Bucciarelli notes. “We’re looking forward to helping them all fill the house.”

Tixxy is your virtual concert assistant who reaches out via text to tell you about cool shows coming to town—but only the ones you’ll care about. Ad-free and privacy-first, the SMS concert notification chatbot links your Spotify or Apple listening habits to a growing database of concert dates, using only your zip code and basic travel preferences and predictively alerts you, so you don’t have to do any work. 

There are no apps to download, no push notifications, no data brokerage or irrelevant promotions. Just info about a local show based on your music tastes, with a link to buy tickets.

“As live music returns, artists will need to reach out to fans about their upcoming events,” says  drummer and Tixxy CEO and founder Eron Bucciarelli. “Old habits have faded. Artists will need to rebuild that connection. They’ll need to make sure fans feel safe and excited to get back to going to shows.”

The idea for Tixxy sprang from Bucciarelli’s own experiences as a touring musician. A founding member of the platinum-selling emo-punk band Hawthorne Heights, Bucciarelli saw firsthand how many fans missed shows, simply because they didn’t find out about them in time (or at all). The band saw meteoric success with its debut albums, playing the late night shows and winning plum spots on radio, but even with their following, they found getting the word out while on tour to be tough. “We’d get messages from fans asking when we were coming to a city where we had just played,” recalls Bucciarelli. “It was so frustrating. You couldn’t help but wonder ‘Where were you a week ago?!’”

The answer, Bucciarelli discovered, was simple enough. As local media outlets like alt weeklies died, and as social media throttled feeds and blocked direct organic access to followers, fans had fewer ways to find out who was playing in town. If they did hear about an upcoming show, it might be too late to arrange childcare, fit the expense into a tight budget, or make plans to head to the next city over. “Years later, no one’s solved this problem,” Bucciarelli explains. “Before the pandemic, 40% of tickets went unsold on average. The efforts of artists and promoters are still not enough to change that.” 

Bucciarelli envisioned a friendly, non-invasive assistant that would address this awareness gap, giving fans ample time to plan for the big night and bands more ways to fill venues. It would gather insights from fans’ listening habits, compare it to upcoming shows from current Tixxy partners like AXS, and match fans to concerts they want to see.

But what was the best way to reach these fans? Buciarelli’s second career as a music tech entrepreneur—he successfully started and sold Soundstr, a music monitoring device—and then as an inside innovator at a major consumer company helped guide Tixxy’s approach. “Social media has awful engagement and conversion rates compared to anything else out there. Sure, it’s measurable and has great reach if you pay for it, but it still doesn’t convert efficiently. Going viral is like hitting the lottery. It’s great if it happens but it isn’t a strategy,” he notes. “Email has higher conversion rates than social media, and push notifications slightly higher still. But SMS marketing is almost ten times as effective as notifications.” 90% or more of Tixxy’s messages are opened. 

To make the most of that effectiveness, Bucciarelli knew he had to keep things simple for fans and for artists. Fans only need to register with Tixxy, connect their streaming account, and answer a few short questions. Artists need to do nothing; so long as their show information is up-to-date, Tixxy will take care of the rest. The chatbot is free for all involved. (Tixxy takes a small percentage of ticket sales completed through its system.)

Tixxy’s business model means the company has no incentive to offer users spammy recommendations or to sell their data on to a third party. There are no ads. “We want to establish trust and rapport with users, not break it by selling data. We don’t want to send people irrelevant messages. It does us no good,” notes Buciarelli. “Our messaging is about trust, about understanding the overall lifetime value of the relationship. It’s like a music career: You can have a meteoric rise and fall, or steady, lasting growth. We want growth built on trust and long term value.”