Bandsintown, a platform for connecting live music fans to local live concerts and bands through personalized recommendations and notifications, is publicly releasing its API and launching an affiliate program which lets anyone share revenue from concert tickets sold on their sites.
Bandsintown, which was incubated at Launchbox Digital, basically aggregates concert ticket information from 62 separate ticket marketplaces (currently the site lists 200,000 concerts).
But the beauty of the startup is that they’ve exposed their API so that other music sites can integrate the concert listings. Bandsintown’s technology is compelling because it connects to music players like iTunes, last.fm, Pandora and other sites to learn a user’s music preferences, and then lets users track their favorite artists and receive alerts when there are events of interest near where they live.
The Bandsintown API lets people filter listings by by artist, location, date, and also recommends shows specific to a website’s or user’s musical tastes.
Now, Bandintown is creating further incentives for music sites to integrate its listings by launching the Affiliate Program. The revenue share is 50/50, so anyone who participates in the program will get half of whatever Bandsintown receives from its its third-party ticketing partners.
Hype Machine, TuneGenie, Pure Volume and Absolute Punk are music sites that are already using the Bandsintown API and participating in the affiliate program. Competitors to Bandsintown include Songkick, Last.fm, and Setlist.fm.
This is pretty cool. I was looking at how Hype Machine integrates the listings: http://hypem.co...ch/metallica/1/
It’s seamless and fits in very well with the site.
The only thing I question are the frames BandsInTown uses after clicking a link:
http://www.band...2e853b4d91196ce
If the user closes the frame, does Hype Machine still receive credit for the sale? That’s what gives me hesitation in signing up.
The user is cookied when the ticket page loads so Hype would receive credit for the sale regardless if the frame is closed or not.
If the user closes out the BandsInTown bar/frame, are you guys still able to track affiliate sales properly?
You listed setlist.fm as a competitor, but I think you meant http://HearWhere.com
We’ve got an API too.
nice job hijacking the post pedalpete
What happens if Ticketmaster or Live Nation launch a similar service, would it kill all these apps?
“Bandsintown … basically aggregates concert ticket information from 62 separate ticket marketplaces (currently the site lists 200,000 concerts).”
Ticketmaster and Live Nation are 2 of the larger ticket providers among those 62. There’s no reason they would sell tickets for events where they aren’t providing the tickets because it won’t make them any money. Even if they offered a similar service, their event coverage only extends as far as their own listings which is a small percentage of what is available through Bandsintown.
LN and Ticketmaster have a lock on most primary markets as well as most secondary. I would venture out of the 200K listings they control the majority of them. What proprietary software does Bandsintown (or any of these services) have that gives them a competitive advantage over someone else? Is this just a land grab play then?