Livekick, the Kayak-like concert recommendation and tickets search engine, has emerged from private beta. Founded by the entrepreneurs who started Grouper.com (which was bought by Sony in 2006), Livekick, which we originally reviewed here, helps users discover live concerts in their geographic vicinity and purchase the cheapest available tickets. Livekick’s current search engine includes more than 75,000 concerts in the U.S. from more than 20,000 artists at close to 40,000 venues.
LiveKick asks you for several pieces of information before recommending concerts. First, the site requires you to add you location. Second, the site tries to gauge your musical tastes by allowing you to select your favorite artists by name, or by importing artists from your iTunes library, computer music library, MySpace Music, Last.fm, Pandora, iLike, blip.fm or Rhapsody accounts. Livekick creates a musical profile based on your favorite artists and will automatically import new artists that are added to playlists and music services.
After establishing your musical taste and location, Livekick’s proprietary technology will crawl ticket sites like Ticketmaster, LiveNation, StubHub, TicketWeb, Tickets.com and eBay, as well as user-generated content sites such as MySpace Music, to inform you of promos, cheap ticket deals, and ticket sales for the concerts of the artists you listen to. The Livekick search engine performs daily updates of ticket pricing info for the concerts that it tracks in the US and provides real-time updated ticket pricing information from the concert ticket web sites. The site will take you to the site where the tickets are being sold to purchase concert tickets.
You can access your account to see recommended concerts on Livekick and the service will also send you newly announced concert recommendations via email or Twitter. The site also aims to be a dashboard for your concert activity by providing users with a customized concert calendar with your favorite artists’ performances (you can export this to your Outlook or iCal calendars).
The “Your Artists” feature tracks your favorite artists with tour listings, user-generated videos from their live concerts and links to artists’ web sites. Livekick also offers a downloadable desktop widget that will automatically scan your computer daily for new music files and adds new artists you listen to on your computer to your Livekick account. The startup is encouraging developers to use Livekick’s API to add the real-time concert listings to other sites. Livekick currently powers links for CBS Radio listeners to find out about live concerts by artists they hear on the radio, and to find the cheapest tickets available online. As we wrote in our original review, Livekick doesn’t aim to be a social network but wants to integrate with user’s existing social networks and behavior.
While Livekick’s site has a multitude of offerings and interesting features, it is hoping to make a name in a crowded space. Competitors to Livekick include Songkick, ShowClix, and hearwhere. It’s easy to draw comparisons between LiveKick and Kayak, both are powerful aggregators in their respective areas, travel and event tickets, that are saturated with competition. The compelling part of Livekick’s model is that it doesn’t require a lot of work on the users’ part and builds off of the musical technologies, like iTunes and others, to make its site more interactive. This could help Livekick stand out in the crowd.