As music CD sales plummet and the long term price of recorded music trends towards free, live music will evolve from being a way to market new album releases to quite possibly the primary income stream for most artists – even the big ones.
That’s why services like iLike, which determine your favorite music based on your iTunes listening habits and then tell you about upcoming concerts for those artists, are on the rise. Relative newcomer Songkick goes even further – it makes educated guesses about what music you’ll like that you may not have heard before, and then suggests local live shows for you to attend.
Songkick founder Ian Hogarth says that 70% of U.S. adults attend a live music show every year, but we collectively spend 35 times as much on going to movies as we do on concerts. There is a big opportunity to increase the size of the market, he says. but people need more information on who’s performing, where, and when.
We first covered them at launch last year, and we also mentioned their “Alexa For Bands” project recently. Today though they’re releasing new functionality and also announcing a round of financing.
Songkick focuses on artists that are still alive (dead artists tend not to go on tour) – they’re tracking about 1 million of them in their database. Users can get recommendations on the Songkick site or via an iTunes plugin (Windows and Mac). And now Songkick is making their database available to partners. Larger partners can access the data via their API (music search engine SeeqPod does this). And smaller sites (music blogs, for example), can add upcoming concerts about artists they’re discussing to their blog posts and other content via a new “BandSense” product that auto-determines band names and inserts links to upcoming concerts.
API partners split revenue with Songkick 50/50. Blogs and smaller sites get 100% of the revenue for now.
Songkick was originally a Y Combinator startup and took a small amount of financing. Today they are announcing a second round, from The Accelerator Group and SoftTech VC. The company was founded by Ian Hogarth, Pete Smith and Michelle You.
Just wanted to say that the actions of 2 or 3 mega bands does not equal a trend. When we start seeing numbers of new or b-list artist start giving away music and making money on just the show then its a trend.
Songkick sound like a nice service tho.
Seems like a solid idea to me, I just hope its not ahead of its time
so do they sell the tickets themselves? or do you still have to go through shitty ticketmaster and get ripped off like crazy?
@gilltots
If live will be the primary stream they better rip off people a lot more effectively than they are. They’ve got to make up for tour downtime, post-touring career time when their music used to keep selling, etc., if they can’t charge for music. And that leaves aside studio artists altogether, they can only be allowed to sell t-shirts I guess because enlightened consumers have decided that if the marginal production cost of something nears zero you can just steal without any problems of conscience. Genius.
There’s one problem with going to most live concerts. Going to a live concert for a major act usually involves dealing with the borderline criminal/monopolists at Ticketmaster, or worse, the scalpers like Stub Hub. It’s a lose/lose proposition for anyone who believes in free and transparent markets.
You guys should mention JamBase, a company with huge up-to-date database of concerts. They’re based in San Francisco, and the #6 result on Google for “live music”
Enjoy the MAZIC only on http://moviemazic.com
There’s no way they’ll break through the TicketMaster wall. Ticketing is way older than recorded music and TM already mastered all the monopoly tricks. They’ve successfully rentseeked their way into being a defacto nationwide entertainment tax.
Great news about the API but I have crawled though the site and there is no details of an API at this time? Could we have an update on that pls?
Any idea how the transparent ticket market should look like? Generally speaking, Internet could serve as a transaction platform IMHO. What are the barriers?
Sounds like a pretty interesting concept, I might have to check it out. To learn about new bands, I have generally visited their respective MySpace sites and have then clicked on their “friends,” who have tended to be artists similar to themselves. Songkick will make this much quicker!
Also, there is a relatively interesting article regarding concerts and how online word-of-mouth has made it easier for smaller bands to score gigs… check it out:
http://www.thes.../article/305417
I really like this idea. This idea scales to small clubs (no Ticketmaster, etc.) and to any artist, regardless of audience size (I hope). Looking forward to trying it out. There are so many “things” to consider if you are an artist, this may be one of the ideas that jump off the page?
“Songkick founder Ian Hogarth says that 70% of U.S. adults attend a live music show every year”
70%? And what qualifies as a “live music show”? I would bet the percentage of people who actually spent any dollars to see a music show are an insignificant fraction of this number.
Hmm. Seems to have a few hiccups to work out. They list Johnny Cash as being on tour: http://www.song...ist/johnny-cash
While that would be awesome, I don’t think it’s true.
“Songkick focuses on artists that are still alive (dead artists tend not to go on tour) ”
Back in 2000 I was working at a web 1.0 music coompany that let users upload their music collections and listen to them anywhere they had an internet connection. One of the features which was developed was a ‘concert alert’, based on the music you had uploaded and your location the system would filter a database of events and suggest things you’d like. Except somewhere along the line the code got confused between artists you’d uploaded and artists who were on tour so some people got alerts for artists like Elvis, John Lennon, The Beatles, etc etc.
Now I’m at imeem and thankfully our events recommendation feature has so far been 100% successful at not announcing concerts by dead people.
Forgive me for not reading others’ comments, but I do not buy music, nor do I steal it. All of the music I get are live shows distributed and recorded with the permission of the bands, who I then will see just about any weekend they are in the New England area, and any week day they are in Boston. I think the bands come out on top.
You guys are missing the hot story here though …by far the main
source for this ‘long tail’ live music data is myspace, and
it looks like myspace might be trying to block the live concert info for all these sites.
Just go to any myspace band profile like http://www.mysp...lanismorissette
and click VIEW ALL to get to the schedule details, and you see UNEXPECTED ERROR
THis has been ‘broken’ for about a week so far, and it’s impacting all the sites that read this data. Funny thing is, bands publish these dates to be consumed by the public at large, and google seems to spider those schedule pages. So it’s killling the ability of people to google band gig dates… bands are mailing us at gruvr asking if we can read their dates from eventful and the plenty other places where they publish gig info – we already do but that’s another story.
It’s especially strange in light of the myspace support for ‘open’ social…
Maybe you TC heavies could give myspace a call and get a confession!
The only tool they have for uploading artists en mass to the tracking tool is their own proprietary app. What, no Last.fm import option? How about Pandora? What about people who don’t listen to stuff on their home computers? This is a pretty basic option that needs to be there.
Oh, regarding tickets — that market is changing very rapidly:
- Ebay bought StubHub and now advertises it on TV!
- TicketMaster bought #2 TicketsNow — for $265M!
And read this re the UK RRS (mistitled as ‘RSS’)
http://www.bill...59dd823607d5dc9
Market transparency is coming. Meanwhile, there are some good tricks you can use to outwit the scalpers, check out these tips:
http://squidoo....concert-tickets
Basically, you wait until a day before the concert, when all the scalpers are in a panic and dumping their tickets for a loss. It works the same as the old days when you would intentionally arrive late to a Dead show to be beset by ticket sellers
After taking another look at songkick, I’m confused by their claims to be tracking small bands. Their home page is full of links to major bands, and each link leads to a ticket-selling page… I found no obvious way to discover true long-tail bands. It looks like pure link-spam for stubhub ticket sales.
Adding to the irony, the background photo on their home page is of Sonic Youth, who is one of the eariest supporters of gruvr … !
Looks like a cool service, if it works. Just to point out a couple of very wrong facts:
“Songkick founder Ian Hogarth says that 70% of U.S. adults attend a live music show every year, but we collectively spend 35 times as much on going to movies as we do on concerts.”
According to Michael Rappino, head of Livenation, 70% of the US public does NOT see even a single show in a year. Even so, the live music market is certainly not 35 X smaller than the market for theatrical filmed entertainment. Live music is about a $3.5b market in the US, theatrical movies accounted for $9.63b last year.
Still, I agree with the point…go see live music!
@kristen, thanks for that link, great article about the surge in long-tail concert economy…
@gentblu, I found no way to contact you but you might be interested in this
http://gruvr.com/developers/
@skooks, agreed – parsing of musical preferences from one’s song collection is a fey approach. Parsing thru Last.fm data produces
useless recommendation results for the most part.
For another thing, it doesn’t encompass the geographic aspect – people are strongly motivated by proximity when it comes to seeing LOCAL live music…
Thanks everyone for the great feedback!
gilltots – Right now, we don’t sell tickets ourselves. We aggregate the options and display the ticket vendors in a vertical search, much in the same way Kayak or Mobissimo works. We don’t charge anything for this, so you always pay the same price had you found the ticket on Ticketmaster / TicketWeb / See Tickets, etc. yourself. The concert ticketing landscape is undergoing massive changes right now (e.g., Live Nation ending their contract with Ticketmaster), so we think our ticket vertical search will be more and more valuable for the music fan.
@gentblue – email us support @ songkick.com for API details!
Andy and Scott Manley – We’re still ironing out some bugs, and the dead artist one is one of the most frustrating items on our priority list. And yes, how cool would it be if we could resurrect Johnny Cash.
jro & David – The statistic is definitely that 70% of US adults did NOT go to a live show last year. You’re absolutely right.
Skooks – We will create the option to import your Last.fm profile very soon! We know that there are so many avid Last.fm users out there who would much prefer this option.
gruvrdad, you get your very own reply.
I’m a huge fan of gruvr’s map functionality, btw. I think it’s really cool to see a band’s tour literally cross the country in front of you.
I’m not sure what you mean by us not representing smaller bands. Yes, the tag cloud list of artists on the homepage is limited to the top 200 artists, because otherwise that list would be unwieldy and long for a city like London! But if you search for (what I think are) small bands, you do find an artist page for them with tour dates. Maybe you’re thinking of waaaay smaller bands than me, but some up and coming smaller bands on tour on Songkick:
White Denim: http://www.song...ist/white-denim
Los Campesinos!: http://www.song.../los-campesinos
The Dirty Projectors: http://www.song...irty-projectors
If you go to any of these pages, you’ll see we list plenty of ticket vendors other than StubHub. So, no, we’re not a stubhub link farm. We always clearly differentiate between primary vendors and resellers so that there’s no ambiguity.
If you try searching (on the upper right) for the smaller bands you have in mind, please let me know who we’re missing. I, personally, am obsessed with getting all the tiny bands on Songkick.
And it’s great to hear that Sonic Youth loves gruvr! I’ve always admired them for how forward- thinking they are.
Michelle, you are kind to say nice things about gruvr ; I can feel my anger melting
Sites like yours can easily embed gruvr tour maps BTW — for example sonic youth is simply http://gruvr.co.../add/sonicyouth
A lot of what is in these posts seems either misleading or misinformed,
yet TC coverage lends instant credibility and tons of traffic (as per alexa graph). I have no problem with what you’re actually doing, just with the respresntation of it.
Still, I resolved to post less trollish screeds here after attending Mike Arrington’s fab Boston bash with the free open bar and top-shelf liquor ..thanks techcrunch!
So I will try to phrase my criticism in a more pointed way and maybe break it into 2 replies.
RE> not representing smaller bands. Yes, the tag cloud list of artists on the homepage is limited to the top 200 artists, because otherwise that list would be unwieldy and long for a city like London!
But there are ways to handle that. We put small bands right on the map with the big names, right in your face. People are amazed to discover how many shows are happening right next door – in gyms, churches,
cafes, baseball diamonds – basements! We filter adaptively within a radius based on click popularity, (kind of a micro-geo-digg idea) so you can see popular local artists outranking major acts, locally.
Plus the ‘long tail’ of live music exists outside of dense cities, which are just as easy to cover as the big ones. Just go a few miles away from an urban population center and you’re looking at all small bands. Foo Fighters
play Wembly, not in Wimbleton…
I see nothing on songlick.com homepage but top bands, and nothing that would indicate this ‘focus on small bands’ — or even suggest that one try searching for them. All google typically knows of your site is those tag links – not what your users search for – so that is how others will find your site.
TC> they’re tracking about 1 million of them in their database.
I’m curious where this number comes from, and it makes me wonder if anyone checked facts. A few naive clicks on myspace will uncover something like 4 million ‘band pages’ in search results, but
a bit more delving will reveal there are nowhere near 1 million touring bands to be tracked! Most of those are fake/tribute or non-touring band profiles.
>Maybe you’re thinking of waaaay smaller bands than me, but some up and coming smaller
Well, you raise a good question here.
If you’re truly tracking 1 million, they must be waay smaller than what we do.
How do you define small bands – any who sell tickets? I
n my mind, that is where ‘big’ bands begin.
I’ll toss out a proposal, our definition: a ‘long tail’ small band is anyone with
- a myspace profile having more than a few friends
- b which posts more than a few concert dates per year
That’s who *I* think is worth being tracked. Why?
I’m hearing four (4) local concerts this week:
1- Ghost Mice – myspace.com/ghostmice
2- Ellis Paul – myspace.com/ellispaul
3- Jonas Brothers http://myspace....m/jonasbrothers
4- Jeff Lewis – http://myspace....m/jefflewisband
Want to guess which one was the best time?
Hint1: I love the Jonas Brothers, they are The hottest band in the US right now… playing arenas in urban centers for thousands of screaming
adoring fans, $300/ticket, plus parking, taxi, traffic jam…
Hint2: The Ghost mice played in a large basement 4 miles away with no amplification, to dozens of crazed dancing fans, person-to-person, standing 6 feet away from me.