What happens when you sell the company you co-founded for an estimated $65 million and have a cushy VP gig at Sony? You set out and build your third startup of course. That’s exactly what Aviv Eyal did along with Yarden Tadmor, the former VP of Business Development at Quigo.
Their new company LiveKick can be best described as the Kayak of music concert ticketing. The service helps users discover live concerts in their geographic vicinity and purchase the cheapest available tickets. 500 invites for the private beta are available exclusively to TechCrunch readers here.
Setting-up LiveKick is a two step process, the first being indicating your location (US only), the second being adding your favorite artists. There are three ways to do this: Manually (artist-by-artist), linking to one of the five supported online music services (Rhapsody, Last.fm, Pandora, MySpace Music, iLike), or uploading an iTunes Music Library File.
This is where LiveKick’s under the hood technologies start kicking-in, beginning with its live concerts search engine that continuously queries ticketing sites such as Ticketmaster, LiveNation, StubHub, Tickets.com and eBay, as well as user-generated content sites such as MySpace Music. The Livekick search engine performs daily updates of ticket pricing info for the 69,000+ concerts that it tracks in the US.
A proprietary recommendation engine suggests what upcoming local concerts users would enjoy attending by crossing stylistic relationship data, such as performing artists and bands, with geo and venue data. The engine monitors for relevant events and sends an email alert as soon as new matching concerts are announced, allowing users to act quickly and buy tickets while they’re cheap or before they run out.
A point the company reiterated is that it has no intentions of being another music related social network (see Twones, which launched Yesterday). Instead it will focus on integrating with users’ existing social destinations and utilities.
There are a number of direct competitors such as Songkick, ShowClix and HearWhere—even last.fm and iLike have concerts recommendation features. LiveKick doesn’t mind though because it isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s just trying to make it slightly better. This is very much in line with Kayak.com which disrupted an already rich online travel ticketing industry.
The big question is whether it’s the best time to launch such a business. One argument would be that leisure spending is going to be tight in the foreseeable future so LiveKick’s timing is off. However, one could also argue that if users are going to spend the money, they might as well make the most out of it, which is where LiveKick’s offering theoretically hits the mark.
Passive comparison ticket shopping. I agree with this product.
Good luck guys! You’ve built a great product, I’m already addicted.
Nice work Aviv look forward to seeing when Oakenfold is coming to SF
My money is on Songkick in this space.
How fun – they’re the Kayak for Concert tickets and you called us the Kayak for Sports tickets (except we have concert tickets too now).
Recommendation aspect is very cool.
I wonder where they got their name from…
http://songkick.com
Very elegant and clear value-add. Awesome!
Tony ..you look just like John McCain….more so then Tina Fey looks like Sarah Palin
Wow pretty amazing ….$62 million….imagine if you didnt have any money at all and built a website like http://www.Bandsintown.com …..these guys are cool dudes…met em both …no funding and they are doing a ridiculous job…I think they eat Ramen 3 times a day….but its worth because they have helped find out about a ton of shows and new bands from their site….I would like to nominate them for a bootstrap award if I could….you should too!!! Im a shameless Fan!!! http://crunchie...&category=2
Totally shamless Jeff
I took a really quick spin on bandsintown and it feels nicely built. Thanks for sharing.
Passion drives my shamelessness…glad you took the time to check it out…have you seen DemoGirl? thats how i learned to use the site….they have a blog where some girl haha “DemoGirl” took time to walk you through it…its pretty neat….www.blog.bandsintown.com shes thorough and smooth about it ….
I absolutely know of DemoGirl, does a great job.
Will be interesting to see what they do in this space. http://gruvr.com has been doing geographically relevant concerts/tickets for months now (in alpha tho) and now seeing others follow suit. Many small ticket vendors aggregated by these sites are full of criminal scalpers who fled big sites like ticketsnow when it was bot by ticketmaster. caveat emptor! bandsintown, tourfilter, and gruvr really do rep the small indy bands right up there with big names, which on other sites is affectation. No VC funding either. JMHO.
wow, this is quite crap (at least so far) i’ve put in 10+ bands that i KNOW are on tour at the moment (hell, i have tickets for them next week!) and all of them come up as “Not on tour”. fail.
what bands?
school of seven bells and duke spirit are two examples. S of 7 bells are playing on monday and duke spirit just played last night.
i do see this site as being quite useful once the data situation is sorted though.
Boba, I don’t know about you but I’ve uploaded my iTunes library and Livekick found plenty of upcoming concerts for me in San Francisco from these. I like the site as well – clean, fast, no distractions. Good job. I find the other concert sites messy and unpredictable. What bands did you add ot Livekick?
even more than the two above
suicide (playing on thursday)
four tet (playing on friday)
are not found… again, i *do* really like the feel and format of the site… it just seems that they’re missing alot of feed data. might i recommend that they check out shows.ohmyrockness.com for cross-reference’s sake?
I’m a school of seven bells fan myself living in NY and I found this on Livekick today:
http://livekick...York_NY-tickets
One drop-down, two Montanas.
good luck yarden!
Great idea, bidding outlet for concert ticket.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
Anything Bill Thompson and Aviv are involved in turns to gold! They write magical code! It’s easy to find my favorite bands anywhere I travel. I miss Grouper.
Looks very nice, beats every other site in this space, in my humble opinion.
GREAT MUSIC SITE BEST OF LUCK !
I hear ya Frisbee Dude! Those guys are magic! I miss my Grouper Friends! The Livekick widget alerted me to one of my favorite bands the other day. YES made their way through the southeast! The last time I saw them was in Los Angeles at The Forum!
ok shameless Sonicliving fan here
nice UI and interesting the recommendation aspect but a quick comparison with my account in SonicLiving.
Both have access to my last.fm, Livekick 8 concerts recommended in bay area, Sonicliving 40 concerts.
best of luck. works like a champ for me so far. found almost 2,000 artists from my iTunes, iLike, last.FM, Myspace playlists, Pandora and my digital music storage folder. cool deal.
Very clean interface, easy to understand. I like that it’s not as busy and confusing as some of the others in this space. Straight to the point.:show me the concerts from artists I love and give me plenty of ticket option. Great job so far.
Personally, I think fansnap.com is a much better rendition of “kayak for tickets” than livekick
Nice to see Grouper energy to the next level. The music industry is being redefined by some people outside that will bring it to the new next level. Thanks!!!
Livekick is a perfect one stop shop. I got the show, tics and everyone who needs to know about it with very little manual input. When is the mobile application going live?
They could have come up with a more original name, I’ll stick with Songkick.com
As a competitor in this space (www.HearWhere.com), I have to respond to Roi that I think this is a great time to launch a business such as this. Historically entertainment spending has done well in recessionary times.
I think that with the number of sites now available to find great local concerts should increase the number of concerts people go to.
Welcome to the club livekick!
Logo is soooo 1998 hahah
fb564829233 says, “logo is sooo 1998 hahah
i say, username, fb564829233 is soooo Compuserve 1994 hahahaha mr kettle meet mr pot.
Mine has performed flawlessly…Set-up was Easy, and I appreciated the fact that the Site will Associate Musicians with their Bands….
Looking for REO Speedwagon, I also got clued to Kevin Cronin’s Local Dates!
Also works great for most of my Favorite Regional, non-Mainline Bands -Nantucket, Metalliker, Southern Fire, etc…!
I found this feature great as well. The other concert sites don’t seem to have this build out yet. I get recommendations for band members on tour for bands I like. I’m recommending Livekick to all live music headz out there. Respect!
Check out gigfreaks.com – we have the same service (without the downloadable client though) for discovering concerts by entering a single favorite artist, with or without a location.
No registration or signing up!
hi illya, the downloadable client is an add on augmentation and not the main way artists are added. LK scans your iTunes or you can manually enter an artists name, or import from iLike, last.FM, Pandora, Rhapsody…..
I don’t know who Lynyrd Skynyrd will get to replace Billy Powell on Tour, but they’ve NEVER disappointed me…….
Even if it is in July!
Gob Bess Ya, Billy…We’ll miss ya…