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.

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.

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.

@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…

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!

Adding to the irony, the background photo on their home page is of Sonic Youth, who is one of the eariest supporters of gruvr … !

- 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

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!

Now I’m at imeem and thankfully our events recommendation feature has so far been 100% successful at not announcing concerts by dead people.

While that would be awesome, I don’t think it’s true.

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.

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