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.”