We recently announced partnerships with Major League Soccer and Sporting Kansas City. Today we’re announcing SeatGeek Open, the platform behind it all.

Fifty years ago fans had to queue in line at the box office – cash in hand – to pay money for a ticket. Throughput was a function of box office attendants. The Internet made it much easier to sell a ticket; you needed one server to handle an on-sale and not a bunch of attendants. But, in the last 20 years not much has changed in the ticketing world. SeatGeek Open brings ticketing to the 21st century. We provide the technical infrastructure where any site can function as a box office.

The core premise of SeatGeek Open is in the name: openness. This is in stark contrast to the closed nature of the ticketing industry today. Teams and artists will be able to distribute their tickets wherever they choose. We’re letting anyone tap into our APIs and use them for free. Imagine renting an Airbnb in New York City and seeing the option to buy tickets to the upcoming Drake show at Barclays Center. Or perhaps you are shopping for your favorite team’s merchandise on Amazon and want to add tickets to your cart. SeatGeek Open makes it possible.

Stripe and Braintree empower app developers by reducing the messy world of payments to clean, well-documented APIs. SeatGeek Open does the same for ticketing. Developers can integrate tickets into their app with a few hours of work. Our open APIs encourage other developers to build new services which will enable teams to run more effectively. Rightsholders will be able to choose from dozens of services like pricing, analytics, marketing automation, and CRM.

Most importantly, SeatGeek Open means a better experience for fans. Every ticket they purchase (primary or secondary) on any site will be verified. The closed ecosystem perpetuated by Ticketmaster forces fans to stumble through a clunky user experience to buy a ticket. A distributed box office forces every ticket seller to step their game up. Fans have myriad choices of where to buy tickets, and it’s incumbent on us to build the best experience for the fan.

Our partnership with TopTix enabled SeatGeek Open. We wanted an API-driven inventory management partner who sold tickets at scale. In six months our software will be live at Sporting Kansas City, proving the benefits of open distribution.

In technology, the only thing constant is change. Ticketing has been an exception and SeatGeek is changing that.