Rebekah Campbell is a music industry entrepreneur. She started out by organizing a music festival to raise awareness of New Zealand’s youth suicide epidemic at the age of 19. What resulted was the largest youth contemporary music event Wellington had seen with over 15,000 people packed into the Civic Square and Town Hall areas. Twelve of New Zealand’s top acts performed including Tim Finn and the whole event broadcast live on national free-to-air TV. At age 21 Rebekah moved to Sydney to work for Grant Thomas Management and within 3 months signed the band George. Two years later George hit #1 on the ARIA Album chart and sold over 200,000 copies of their debut album Polyserena. Rebekah opened her own management company ‘Scorpio Music’ in 2002 and signed the youthful brothers of Evermore. Scorpio grew to become one of Australia’s largest and most successful management companies and represented artists such as Lisa Mitchell, Operator Please, Amy Meredith, Matt Corby and several others.
In 2008, Rebekah came up with the idea for Posse.com whilst promoting a tour for Evermore. Tickets to the band’s Perth show had stalled and Rebekah enlisted fans to help sell the tickets, offering them a commission for their efforts. The concept was so successful that Rebekah decided to build a network of promoting fans online.
Rebekah raised over $2 million from investors in the music and technology industries to kick-start the business. The current version of Posse.com launched with content from Moshtix, OzTix, Ticketmaster and iTunes in August 2010 and in the month of February, 8000 Australian music fans shifted over $165K in concert tickets.
Later this year, Posse will launch a platform that will cater for other types of products such as retail, sports and travel and will open offices in the UK and USA.
Rebekah will share her experiences of raising investment and what it takes to run a global creative venture.