We spend so much time on music blogs, but there’s no immediate way to find out if the bands discussed are on tour. This is why we created a widget for bloggers that will identify whether any artist they mention is on tour, and automatically create a link to tickets. We really want to push tour info out to music fans wherever they’re already reading about music on the Internet.

Our Songkicker plug-in updates your user profile whenever you add new bands to your music library (as far as I know, SonicLiving’s applet does not do that–you have to re-scan your library from time to time) and keeps track of what you listen to. But we’re aware that your digital music library might not be representative of which artists you want to go see, which is why we have the Band Manager functionality to add and delete artists. This is something we felt was missing from Last.fm events.

We’re really excited about recommendations and discovery, which is why we’re working on a new way to recommend music that isn’t simply reliant on what the user base is listening to. It was really gratifying to generate meaningful recommendations when our user base was, oh, 5 people.

Last but not least, we know Ticketmaster has a monopoly on US ticket sales, but we see this changing in the future. Live Nation recently chose not to renegotiate their contract with Ticketmaster, so the market is likely to fragment significantly. For people like us and our friends who go to shows every week, saving $4 per ticket is significant. For others who try to get last minute tickets there can be huge variation in secondary market prices – and sometimes there are cheaper tickets still available on primary vendors.

We know we have a ways to go before we make the perfect live music website, but we have a ton of ideas to get there! Please send us any suggestions for features you’d like.

Chimaera, thanks for your suggestions–we’re already working on getting ticket prices and improving our artist pages.

As Nick points out, revenues are shifting to live entertainment - I’d love a link to that marketing study, BTW! This is because bands can’t make as much any more by selling recorded music.

I also sense a trend in live-ticket sales - away from big-ticket bands and
towards small indy artists - towards services like stubhub that take power away from the biggies like ticketmaster. TM is used to charging outrageous service fees, and there is conflict between the ticket middlemen and less need for them as fans buy tickets direct from performers - all good for us consumers.

Re SongKick - I had a hard time figuring out what it does from a brief visit to the page. It’s text-based, reminds me of tourfilter.com …

I do like the notion of a different way to find similar music - sometimes bands that sound similar to Pandora will offer very different experiences at a live venue. It would be great to see SongKick focus on that part of its technology and provide API access to the similarity data.

Great job with the product! I’m looking forward to notices about my favorite live music.

Your interface and site design is excellent - simple, easy on the eyes and easy to navigate.

I am sure you are always looking to improve and so I do have a few suggestions:
- When adding an artist it takes a while to do the search, and the Similar Artists function doesn’t seem to work.
- Add some kind of artist profile, rather than just “We don’t know”
- Actually include the ticket prices from each vendor, if this is possible?
- Watch out for duplicates - for example the same artist listed at venues named differently.

Overall it’s great to see a site that covers the UK. The others listed by other commenters here are almost all exclusively US. Maybe your initial market push should be at the UK as there is less competition.

had to add…met this dude..produces all his own music…

this guy came out of nowhere…

http://THEjawz.com

take it easy..

guy

SonicLiving looks to be the clear winner, with the Songkick, JamBase and Upcoming all having fewer and roughly equal numbers of shows. But each service has shows the others don’t.

The premise of getting the lowest price to the show sounds great, but in reality, tix are usually just sold by a single provider, so unless they’re on StubHub, there’s no competition. And thus no cheaper prices.

What’s the near-term gameplan for catching up with SonicLiving and providing other ticket options?

some other concert discovery notification sites that appear to be doing something very similar, they all have thier unique direction. And of course last.fm events.

@ MGZ: We know we’re entering a crowded space, but that’s because there’s huge demand for what we’re doing - people want to see this solved!

Use the site and discover for yourself how far we’ve come in differentiating ourselves from some of the sites already out there. But I will confide that we are setting out to make it as easy to go to live music as it is to go to the movies.

The first step to choosing to go to a concert is knowing about that concert, and Songkick is going to push that information as wide as possible, wherever fans are reading about or listening to music.. The widgets for mp3 blogs is a first indication of that..

No I am not affiliated with either, which is why I didn’t give out ontour’s address. I’m just a live music lover.

MGZ

Give us the Songkicker for Mac!

I just need a Mac plugin for iTunes and I’m set.