Passionato Expands Into Online Music Tickets Sales

Classical music site Passionato now offers access to tickets for thousands of musical events across the UK

London – 2nd April, 2009 – Newly launched online classical music site Passionato (www.passionato.com/tickets) is expanding its offering to include information about – and the ability to purchase tickets to – live classical music and other events.

Passionato is partnering with one of the UK’s biggest ticketing firms See Tickets (www.seetickets.com), which has provided the back-end technology for the new ‘Passionato Tickets’ area on the Passionato website.

The Passionato Tickets landing page will highlight specific musical events across 9 genres of music and will be updated on a daily basis. Visitors to Passionato can also search (by date, venue or artist) a database of over 42,000 events across the UK. They can find information about events, review seating allocation and book tickets online. The search functionality allows people to also browse by category (classical, opera, ballet, musicals and others) as well as take advantage of the Passionato team’s regularly updated ‘Top 10 Musical Events’ and ‘Top 10 Theatre Events’.

Passionato, which launched on September 11 last year in the UK (with the US and mainland Europe and Asia to follow) and has been billed as ‘iTunes for classical music lovers’, has an active database of over 15,000 registered members (of which 50% are aged over 45, with a strong male bias) and has had over 250,000 unique visits since launch.

Rebekah MacLeary, Head of Marketing at See Tickets, says: “See Tickets is proud to be working in partnership with Passionato, with its well-defined customer base. This partnership provides us with a unique opportunity to target a highly-valuable and dedicated audience. Passionato Tickets is effectively a new channel through which the two companies can collectively promote the wide range of classical events on offer across the UK. Passionato is a great one stop shop for high quality classical music downloads, detailed recording information, reviews and – now – events.”

Rob Gotlieb, Director of Marketing & Business Development at Passionato, says: “The Passionato site now offers visitors the opportunity to search for events and purchase tickets, as well as download high quality audio (320kbps and lossless FLAC), use the Passionato Player, and learn from reviews and recommendations.”

He adds: “The classical music lover needs look no further – it’s all here on Passionato. By now expanding our offering and providing access to a huge range of classical events and ticket recommendations, we’re continuing to establish ourselves as the online destination for classical music.”

For more information or to arrange an interview please contact:

Rob Gotlieb
Passionato
rob {at} passionato(.)com
+44 (0)7908 398 826

About Passionato
Passionato is the world’s most comprehensive online high quality audio (320kpbs and lossless FLAC) classical resource, and provides access to over 300,000 tracks to download from the largest major classical labels as well as the key independent classical labels.

Launched in September 2008 and designed for classical music lovers, Passionato’s main features are: DRM-free recordings, transferable to any portable device and burnable to CD; high audio quality downloads (320kbps MP3 and lossless FLAC); access to free software (the Passionato Player), specifically developed to help organise users’ existing classical CDs alongside tracks purchased through the Passionato Store; an unprecedented level of recording information which users benefit from when they download a track, work or album, and when they import their own CD libraries to their computers; the ability to search Passionato’s recordings using over 10 fields, including by work, composer, conductor, ensemble and record label; and now the ability to search for live events and purchase tickets.

Please visit www.passionato.com/tickets

Passionato.
Classical Redefined.

About See Tickets
See Tickets is now part of See Tickets International. In January 2008, UK based See Group Limited was purchased by Stage Ticketing International, the Dutch based company owned by Joop van den Ende. Since then, Stage has de-merged its ticketing business in Europe from the parent company and created See Tickets International. This new company now sells in excess of 40 million tickets in Europe. The main territories are the U.K., Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and Spain but the company will look to expand into new territories.

The UK company is still run by Nick Blackburn and sells over 9 million tickets per annum. It handles ticket sales for West End Theatre, all the major rock promoters, sells exclusively for the Glastonbury Festival and in addition to ticket sales, provides box office services to Festival Republic and the V Festivals. See Tickets has continued to grow due to excellent working relationships with Producers, Promoters and Event Organisers. The company endeavours always to be flexible in its relationships and to meet the changing needs of the industry and its clients.

See Tickets is now a highly visible and trusted brand in the UK. In a difficult year, many event organisers have seen their sales increase through using See Tickets.

Please visit www.seetickets.com