Music lovers may be show a reluctance to pay for their tunes, but they’re turning up in droves for live shows — at least according to the latest box office numbers posted by eMarketer. Concert ticket sales are expected to $9 billion worldwide this year, up nearly 10% over 2006.
Freshly launched Songkick is a startup looking to capitalize on that growing market by providing a simple way to discover live shows for artists you love along with the cheapest concert tickets. The impetus for the site grew out of the founder’s frustrations over no single concert site providing a comprehensive list of all the concerts they want to see. There would be some on Ticketmaster, others on LiveNation, and still more on resale at StubHub. So, they’ve created a comprehensive database that tracks concerts as they appear on the 14 different ticketing sites and across dozens of blogs. Currently they only cover the U.K. and U.S.
You can search the database and track shows and blog posts about your favorite acts, or download SongKicker, which automatically tracks artists you listen to. SongKicker is a plug-in for that pulls artists you listen to from iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp. The process takes about 3 minutes and adds the artists to the tours you’re tracking. But worry not, you can always delete the band behind that musical guilty pleasure that isn’t really your taste.
Their site can also recommend new artists to you. But their recommendation engine works a bit differently than others. It’s not generated from the user base, like Last.fm, or through careful analysis like Pandora. Instead, Songkick crawls websites like Wikipedia and music blogs to pick up related artists based on positive or negative associations between the bands.
But the real payoff for the site is buying tickets. Kind of like a Sidestep for tickets, Songkick lets you find the cheapest tickets for these shows. Their search engine spans a variety of sources for both the primary and secondary ticketing market. Unfortunately, Songkick doesn’t actually expose the prices for each show directly in their search engine. You have to click through the site and do the comparison yourself. Songkick gets anywhere from $0.50 to $5 for each ticket sold.
Finally, they’ve packaged their ticketing search engine as a simple affiliate sales program for music bloggers. By installing a little plug-in, bloggers can automatically sell tickets related to the artists they write about through links at the bottom of posts. Their system finds the right artists by scanning the posts using the same positive and negative association technology as their recommendation engine. Positive posts about a band are coupled tickets, but a negative reference bashing Brittney Spears won’t start pushing her tickets on your fans.
Songkick is a Y Combinator financed startup currently bridging their operations between London and New York.
I’ve been playing with Songkick for the last couple days and it works great. I can’t say I’m completely unbiased, but it’s definitely doing it for me.
I just need a Mac plugin for iTunes and I’m set.
Very nice looking site. It’s a crowded market but they seem to have great execution and affiliate fees are always a solid business model.
Give us the Songkicker for Mac!
looks great! interesting that they have chosen to use a different method of recommendations to most… and i love the widgetised ticket sales.
Nick, how does this service compare to existing ones like OnTour (they’ve got a rather nice Mac dashboard app that uses your iTunes library to recommend nearby concerts based on your music library, including filtering results so that they only show musicians you’ve rated positively).
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
Pete, Songkick co-founder here.
@ 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..
bandsintown.com, bebopular.com, gruvr.com, sonicliving.com, tourb.us, tourfilter.com,
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.
Had a quick look and compared results to JamBase, SonicLiving and Upcoming.
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?
@ 7 sonic living is not bad. hopefully they just get bought by last.fm or pandora.
i agree this works well.
had to add…met this dude..produces all his own music…
this guy came out of nowhere…
http://THEjawz.com
take it easy..
guy
I’m a fan of SonicLiving…think its the best. Also agree, there are no cheap tickets…only one real source anyhow.
Pete, congrats on putting together a great site and one I think I will be using a lot from now on.
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.
Don’t really care for this Songkick site… they gave it a nice shot tho. I really like showclix.com and tourb.us and Oyaka.com for ticket prices. I think they do a better job at this.
Hey Songkick crew:
Great job with the product! I’m looking forward to notices about my favorite live music.
Greg has a good point… there’s a lot of activity in this space, but I don’t really see bloggers focusing on it yet. There’s a lot of interesting differentiation in strategy and technology behind these sites- lots of variety signifies to me that it’s still early.
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.
Thanks everyone for the comments. We know there are some great live music sites (our favorites are Sonic Living, Last.fm events, and Tourfilter), but we feel there is still a lot missing. Live music discovery needs to become as effortless and fulfilling as possible. On a Friday night it’s still so much easier to go to a movie.
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.
I started using SongKick as soon as I read this article and am loving it. As a music blogger I know first hand how hard it is to research and find when a band is coming to town which is why I believe most bloggers hardly include that information in their posts. However, bloggers always make sure to include an Amazon affiliate link, maybe the monetary incentive of SongKick will get a lot music bloggers to hop on board.