With a redesigned brand and app, Eventbrite is aiming to be the Spotify of events

Ticketing platform Eventbrite has a new look—and an overhauled mobile app. The company just unveiled its first brand refresh and app redesign since 2019, signaling its increasing focus on surfacing event recommendations for its users.

Coming less than a week after Eventbrite shared its Q4 and full-year 2024 earnings—posting a loss of $8.4 million for the quarter and loss of $15.6 million for the year—the new app is designed, in part, to help shore up the company’s 10% year-over-year decline in ticket sales by emphasizing event discovery.

To do that, CEO and cofounder Julia Hartz tells Fast Company that Eventbrite’s strategy is cribbing somewhat from the music streaming world. “We believe that event discovery should be as intuitive as discovering music on Spotify,” she says. 

The redesign and strategy shift is also informed by Eventbrite’s consumer research, which found users between 18 and 34 increasingly driven to attend live events—which Hartz calls “fourth spaces”—by a desire to bring their online interests into the real world—from podcasts to cooking and crafting. “We’re highlighting that niche is the new mass, especially for Gen Z and live experiences,” she says. 

Driving Discovery

Putting a new app at the center of its strategy is how Eventbrite wants to capitalize on a highly engaged subset of users. Some 10% of the company’s 90 million monthly active users use the app, and that number is increasing at about 17% year over year. 

In a move pulled straight from streaming, Eventbrite’s Discover tab offers users recommendations based on past purchases. The new app also introduces It List—guides to events in 12 markets curated by more than 25 people Eventbrite calls “cultural creators.” In Chicago, for example, author Rebecca Makkai offers a guide to social art and literature events, and in Toronto, DJ Hangaëlle gives users a guide to the city’s nightlife. Users are able to save events they’re interested to come back to later, with a dedicated “Saved” tab in the app. 

“Curated discovery is a game-changer” Hartz says, noting that early tests found that users engaging with It Lists are twice as likely to buy a ticket. “That’s not a new concept, but we bring it to life in this new experience. We know a lot about consumers, what they want to do, and how to drive action from intent, which is a big leap when you’re thinking about buying tickets to an event.”

The new app also builds in a social function, allowing users to find and follow friends and see what events they may be attending. Hartz teases more features down the line, including user-generated It Lists. “[That would be]  another way of connecting with your digital community and getting your friends to want to go out and experience real life with you,” she says. 

Giving organizers a boost

Hartz’s comparison to the Spotify experience in the new app also extends to Eventbrite’s tools that help hosts promote their upcoming events. Since 2022, Eventbrite Ads has been a way for event planners to boost visibility of a listing—not unlike Spotify’s Discover Mode, which artists use to be promoted into a listener’s autoplay mix. 

The ads program, which was introduced in 2022, has been a solid growth driver for the company, posting year-over-year revenue increases of 34% in Q4 and 83% for the full year. Hartz told investors last week that events using the ads tool sold four times more tickets than events that didn’t. She says that’s in part because of how engaged its app users are versus users on social media. 

“While you’re getting a mass audience on Instagram, you’re getting a super high-intent audience on Eventbrite,” she says, noting that app users are two and half times more active in ticket sales than other users. 

That’s helped incentivize bringing the ads program into the redesigned app. “We’re expanding Ads placements to be in heavily trafficked places like It Lists and and category-specific landing pages,” Hartz says. We’re making it possible for creators to partake in that high-intent experience.”

Cornering the ‘fourth space’

In surveying the swath of Gen Z and millennials aged 18 to 34, Hartz says Eventbrite is seeing the long tail of pandemic-fueled isolation start to evolve into renewed interest in IRL experiences—but for increasingly niche interests cultivated online. Eventbrite found three-quarters of the people it surveyed planned to spend more money on live events in the next six months. 

With home, work, and public spaces like parks and cafes constituting the first, second, and third spaces, Hartz sees these events—among them cosplay speed dating, run clubs, and culinary experiences—as a “fourth space.”

“There’s a mashup  of niche interests coming together in really creative ways offline,” she says. “We think of ourselves as the infrastructure for fourth spaces.”

When talking about Eventbrite’s focus on surfacing new events for niche audiences, Hartz sounds more like the head of a streamer than a ticketing platform. It’s an ambitious framing, but it’s not an accident.

“We’re not ticketing large concerts and arenas and stadiums—we’re ticketing everything else that isn’t a backyard barbecue or birthday party,” she says. “Because of that, I think of Eventbrite’s content as a new type of media—content brought to life in tiny and massive ways. I think you could say that our competition is staying home and sitting on the couch.”

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