When Songkick was born in 2007, it had an interesting goal: To perfect concert recommendation. Plenty of services do music recommendation, but the idea of recommending concerts you might like based on things like music you’re interested in and you location, was an interesting one. Now, with a few others in the space, including the similarly named Livekick, Songkick is embarking on a new tiny challenge: To create a giant database of every concert ever performed by every band, and to make the entire experience more social.
To be clear, Songkick is still very much focusing on concert recommendation, but its site is now much deeper than that. Beginning today, you will be able to enter in the name of a band and a city in which you’ve seen a show you’ve seen in the past, and Songkick will scan its databases for that show. If it’s there — and there’s a pretty good chance it is, given that the site already has 1 million concerts in its database — you can click on the “I was there” button, and it will be added to your Songkick profile. Each of these concerts has its own Songkick profile page, that acts as a wiki of sorts. Any user can add photos from that show, ticket stubs, set lists, write a review of the show and a host of other things.
And if a show isn’t there, you can add it. That’s a key part to all of this: Songkick wants to have every concert ever performed in its database, and it’s going to need its users to help make that possible. It’s done a huge chunk of the work with a million shows going back to a Bob Dylan show at the home of Karen Wallace in May 1960, but there is more to be done.
The overall idea is to extend the experience of going to a concert beyond the actual show. And to make it more social. Maybe you’ll see that you’ve been to a bunch of the same shows as someone else, and you’ll add them as a friend on Songkick, and you’ll probably run into them in another show. More importantly for the social aspect on the site, Songkick now allows you to track not only bands and venues, but people as well. So if you find someone with similar tastes in music or a friend, you can be alerted when they say they’re going to go to a show. It might also be interesting to track people of influence like music journalists or executives using the site, Songkick co-founder Ian Hogarth tells us.
Obviously, as is the case with any social site these days, Songkick information can be sent out to Twitter and Facebook. And while Songkick doesn’t yet integrate with something like Facebook Connect to port your social graph over, Hogarth envisions something like that happening in short order. Though he warns that you probably won’t want to track everyone you’re friends with on Facebook because Songkick is also about personal music preferences — which is a nice way of saying that a lot of your friends probably have crap music tastes. This is something I know to be true.
Still, the giant concert database is the most interesting element of this update. Hogarth at one point explained it as being like the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) for concerts, but didn’t want to limit it as just that because the service really offers so much more in terms of recommendations and social elements. Still, that’s a pretty good way to describe it as I’m finding myself using the database in a similar way. You know when you look up a movie on the IMDb and then you click on an actor to see what else they’re in, then you click on that movie? The same type of rabbit hole exists on Songkick when you start looking up concerts.
In terms of monetization, the company has some interesting ideas. Right now, the company uses the affiliate model for tickets to upcoming shows it sells through its site. But with this new database, there are some other options including obviously placing advertising on the site, which should happen soon, Hogarth notes. Another more interesting idea is to create a way to sell merchandise from past concerts you were at, or just went to. Imagine being able to buy a recording from last night’s show, for example. Or maybe a t-shirt at a slightly discounted price because no one would buy them for $40. That could be pretty cool.
Songkick was a Y Combinator company and raised an Angel round of funding back in March of 2008 and a Series A in December. The company has 14 people now working for it.
Just thinking – “what would be their revenue model”?
Check the second to last graf.
I guess the home page looked cool. I hope their servers are back in the morning so I can check out the rest of the site.
We’re up! Please come back and check us out.
Their site is just crawling. Won’t load CSS and pages can take minutes to load.
how do the affiliates work? they link to livenation and live nation gives em a cut?
Hi Ashot – that’s correct. Worth noting that the fan doesn’t pay any more than if they’d bought the ticket directly from the ticket site. Thanks for checking out our site.
Ian
In the same field, I think it is worth mentioning http://www.myco...ertarchive.com/ which is a pure and non commercial player.
It is also available as a Facebook app to display your concerts history in your Profile.
Why? Why would they want to do that? Looks like a giant waste of time and resources.
See also the 17 stories we’ve written about Songkick on TechCrunch Europe since it launched.
Clean and simple layout, I like it.
Clean and simple layout, not so new idea, but I like it.
I look forward to 10,000 people claiming to have seen the Sex Pistols at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall…
Alan – you’re right, that’s an issue we’ll have to watch out for. What a great example as well! I’ve actually got a book dedicated to the Lesser Free Trade Hall gig called “I swear I was there” which collects fans memories from the night and tries to distill who was actually there. It’s pretty amazing that a single gig inspired an entire book!
Our hope is that a mixture of social pressure (not wanting to lie in front of your friends) and the ability to verify you were really there by uploading things like scans of your ticket stubs will help. Some users have uploaded 100s of their stubs to the site already and it seems to be a pretty popular thing to do so far.
Ian
Although it’s not working for me yet, I REALLY like how it scrobbles your iTunes artists. It seems like such an obvious idea, but even Jambase makes you load several pages just to add 1 artist to track, and Jambase is one of the more comprehensive concert trackers out there, IMHO.
Maybe not a new idea, but it’s these small UX steps that make a big difference for music lovers who listen to countless new artists each week.
I;m one of those people, and I still haven’t found 1 site to pull me away from good ‘ol alternative newsletter listings. Although, I’m certainly open to better suggestions, particularly in the LA area
.
I really like Jambase’s database of shows. I think Going.com’s event recommender is underrated. I’m excited to see these things combined, and really hope this works. Looks promising so far!
Clean, simple and looking great
Once again, a site that is potentially useful, but virtually no way of making money. It’s amazing ideas like this get funded. Maybe I’m lacking imagination, but if I was running a VC firm, there’s no way I would be interested in funding this idea. Of course, I wouldn’t have put any money in Facebook either.
congrats to the songkick team, i know they’ve been working on this for a while.
much better release than the non-news of livekick yesterday.
In sorta of related music news… MG, you got CNN coverage today buddy:
http://www.cnn....back/index.html
HA!
Congrats to Ian and the whole Songkick team on a great product.
Going to have some fun reminiscing of concerts from back in the day.
Nice idea — but all I get is “connection error” when it tries to upload my track/artist list.
Sorry Jose, our real time feeds are struggling a bit right now with more traffic than we anticipated. Hopefully will be back to real ‘real time’ soon!
Ian
I’m still waiting for a website that can apply extreme analysis to setlists, like http://dmbalmanac.com/ does for Dave Matthews setlists.
That Dave Matthews fansite is one of the coolest out there. Fansites like that have been a huge part of the inspiration behind our new site. Setlists is just one part of it though – there are fansites that do a fantastic job of photos, or ones that collect incredible trivia – for example there is a Nirvana fansite that collects all the off the cuff comments Kurt Cobain made between songs.
We’re hoping to build some of this advanced functionality after we’ve nailed the core feature set.
Thanks for trying out our site.
Ian
Congrats you guys! I was so excited to see this piece in TC. Apparently it’s not the first so I have some catching up to do. Your site looks great btw.
Cheers,
Richard
Leverage other peoples tastes is what recommendations engines are all about not sure I understand why the live music dimension is more relevant than recorded. Recorded music also lets you pick the time you consume it..live music doesn’t do that.
Why I’d chose to befriend a fellow concert goer virtually rather than in the flesh (at the gig) is also beyond me.
That said..ive been wrong before..watch this space for
Ballkick – I was there when Barnsley were relegated in 1991
TrolleyKick – I shopped at that cornershop before it became a tesco metro
Opencoffeekick – I was in that cafe Nero when some chinless VC offered me $100K on the basis of a 5 slide powerpoint
http://www.totallivemusic.com has a larger database and seems like a better experience.
Yes man, not sure what you have been smoking pal.
Total Live Music Sucks S**t
I wonder why no credit is given by Songkick for information ripped off from other sites such as http://www.chic...naunicycle.com? Prosopographers and the like have worked long and hard in gathering and authenticating concert dates and details – if folk such as Songkick are simply going to use the work of others, at least they should have the courtesy to say where the information comes from – even if they cannot bring themselves to ask permission to use it.