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March 15, 2008

Songkick Launches “Alexa For Bands”

Michael Arrington

34 comments »

London based Songkick, a Y Combinator startup that launched in October 2007, aims to help music artists pack fans into concerts. They’ve been developing a number of new products that are slated for launch soon. But one that they quietly launched last week without much fanfare is something they refer to simply as “Battle of the Bands.”

It’s a sort of Alexa or Compete comparison engine, but instead of comparing websites it compares bands and artists. They track any band that has 50 or more followers on MySpace - about 1 million bands currently. They then scour the Amazon sales rank for their music, mentions in 1,500 popular music blogs, total MySpace friends and plays, and other stats to determine the overall excitement for a band at any given time.

Type in one or more bands and see how they compare over time.

Who’s the hottest band right now, according to Songkick? Vampire Weekend, who are currently on tour and had 30 blog mentions this week. Hear their music here. Soon, Hogarth says, they’ll add permanent links for battles and give users the ability to embed graphs into websites.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Noah Everett

    March 15th, 2008 at 1:07 pm

    So does that mean it may not be accurate? “Alexa for bands”.

    Noah
    http://heartlandish.com

  2. Michael Arrington

    March 15th, 2008 at 1:14 pm

    Noah - well, let’s hope it’s significantly more accurate than Alexa.

  3. Noah Everett

    March 15th, 2008 at 1:18 pm

    I kid, i kid…it actually looks interesting. Thanks for the heads up.

  4. Arid

    March 15th, 2008 at 1:35 pm

    is this the hottest bands of all time or the bands that are rising in popularity? I don’t recognize any of the bands on the top list.

  5. Yury Akulin : creative logo design

    March 15th, 2008 at 1:48 pm

    Alexa comparison is not accurate. The statistics is based mainly on blog mentions, not on MySpace profile visits. “Technorati for bands”, maybe?

    http://www.logodiver.com/

  6. Ian Hogarth

    March 15th, 2008 at 1:51 pm

    @ Arid - it’s the bands with the most buzz on the web right now. The ranking is computed weekly.

    There are some pretty mainstream artists in the top 25 - e.g. Kanye West & Moby.

    Bands can blow up so quickly nowadays because of buzz on the web from blogs or MySpace. The Songkick Ranking is designed to reflect that. Conventional metrics like album sales don’t represent how bands can break on the Internet.

  7. Michael Arrington

    March 15th, 2008 at 1:55 pm

    Yury, yes, the comparison to Alexa is around how they display the data, not how they collect or analyze it. Thought that was obvious, but hope this clarifies.

  8. Jesse

    March 15th, 2008 at 1:59 pm

    Interesting concept. I could see myself using a tool like this in the future to track trends and whatnot.

  9. Missingtoof

    March 15th, 2008 at 2:03 pm

    I’ve been usuing SongKick on my blog to let my readers know when bands I write about are playing. This new feature is helpful for me when I’m debating on which band I should write about.

    Kudos to the SongKickers for making tools for the often forgotten musicbloggers.

  10. Missingtoof

    March 15th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

    Also, I think figuring out bands popularity over all time has been done before and is practically useless information. Tracking the up & coming artists promotes music discovery.

  11. Sneezy Melon

    March 15th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

    Alexa=Inaccurate=Unreliable=Monkey-Poop

    So, really, does it matter?

  12. Henry Crun

    March 15th, 2008 at 2:13 pm

    Speaking as somebody who has been doing web analytics mashups for commercial reporting for a while, it’s really good to see this sort of thing beginning to happen in the consumer space. Moreover it’s refreshing to see it done in such an easy interface: A lesser talent would have cluttered it with animated widgets for album releases and whatnot.

    Another step on the route to perfect information in the marketplace.

  13. DaveS

    March 15th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

    Where’s the business model? None of the YC startups have business models.

  14. Ethan Herdrick

    March 15th, 2008 at 2:37 pm

    Fun!

    @DaveS This is just an interesting sidelight for Songkick. Their main service is alerting you to live shows in your town based on what music you listen to. And you never have to tell them what you listen to, you just install their software that passively keeps track of it. So they are the smartest retail channel for tickets. It’s brilliant.

  15. sharpshoot

    March 15th, 2008 at 4:06 pm

    @ DaveS Snaptalent (http://snaptalent.com) has a business model & solves a real problem.

    Songkick does the same - solves a real problem (concert discovery) and has a business model (ticket sales)

  16. Matt Spencer

    March 15th, 2008 at 4:18 pm

    @DaveS - get some therapy, you need to address your YC issues before they consume you.

    Was Paul very tough in the interview?

  17. non YC applicant

    March 15th, 2008 at 4:25 pm

    I find it comical that all the YC fanboys assume every negative comment is from a yc reject. Quite honestly, no one cares about YC. I’d rather suffer through two hours of CSPAN than hear Paul Graham’s BS.

    All of these YC startups are worthless and the worst part is because of TechCrunch’s support, they delude themselves into thinking they create value. Oh great, a few make VC funding too. That’s not success.

    Success is a business that makes money and serves real customers. The day more than 10% of yc companies do that will be the day Britney Spears makes the cover of Parenting Magazine.

  18. Mark G

    March 15th, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    It already exists more comprehensive and social

    http://trendrr.com

  19. YC Reject

    March 15th, 2008 at 6:38 pm

    @Matt Spencer

    Hopefully everyone can recognize the immaturity of that comment.

  20. Jason Vu

    March 15th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    Mike you mean it is something bad like Alexa?

  21. ZiZi

    March 15th, 2008 at 11:14 pm

    this is a good idea, all the haters really need to get a life, if everything is worthless and crappy, show us what YOU got before just fart all over people that actually try to do something… losers.

  22. More Investment?

    March 15th, 2008 at 11:23 pm

    Please don’t quote me on this but I’m pretty sure song kick raised more than 15k. I think that Paul Graham also put in some of his own money, around 100k. Please verify.

    8-)

  23. Jason D Schwartz

    March 16th, 2008 at 8:42 am

    I think there are a few 2 very important metrics that are missing from this calculation.

    1. Last.FM plays. How many people are actively listening to this artists music? Songkick is tracking MySpace plays, but that tells us how many people are giving the aritst a listen, as opposed to Last.fm which tells us how many people are actively listening.

    2. Bittorent/P2P traffic. How many people sought out this artists music? Right now they are tracking Amazon purchases, but anyone who follows the music industry knows that album sales isn’t a very good indication of an artists popularity.

  24. John Irwine

    March 17th, 2008 at 1:15 am

    Hmm.. several of my favorite myspace artists seem to be completely missing from the database. Lycke Li for example. Maybe they havent built their database yet?

  25. Peter

    March 17th, 2008 at 4:09 am

    I’ve been using Songkick for a few months now and love its functionality.

    I think #23 makes a good point about Last.fm though, that would be a great stat to include. Not sure about P2P traffic though …

  26. Michelle

    March 17th, 2008 at 7:20 am

    John Irwine - We actually do have Lykke Li in our database, but she’s not in our autocomplete. (I love her too!)

    Our autocomplete includes the top 10,000 most popular artists, so some bands don’t make it into the autocomplete even though we have them in our databse. It’s a bit confusing, so I apologize.

    (Lykke Li is on tour, btw. http://www.songkick.com/artist/lykke-li)

    We definitely plan on adding more data to Battle of the Bands soon!

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