The BBC has been testing a new service called SoundIndex, which lists the top 1,000 artists based on discussions crawled from Bebo, Last.fm, Google Groups, iTunes, MySpace and YouTube. The top five bands according to SoundIndex right now are Coldplay, Rihanna, The Ting Tings, Duffy and Mariah Carey , but the index is refreshed every six hours.

This is somewhat similar to Songkick’s “Battle Of The Bands,” which we covered in March. Songkick uses different data - MySpace, Amazon and blogs - to determine rankings, and the results are completely different.

SoundIndex also lets users sort by popular tracks, search by artist, or create customized charts based on music preferences or filters by age range, sex or location. Results can also be limited to just one data source (such as Last.fm).

SoundIndex was created in partnership with IBM (IBM’s Semantic Super Computing is used to crawl and analyze sites), and the UK’s NovaRising produces the site. The project is coming out of BBC Switch, BBC’s new teen service delivering content to 12 to 17-year-olds across multiple platforms, TV, Radio 1 and online.

Thanks to Tyler McNally for the tip.

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As music CD sales plummet and the long term price of recorded music trends towards free, live music will evolve from being a way to market new album releases to quite possibly the primary income stream for most artists - even the big ones.

That’s why services like iLike, which determine your favorite music based on your iTunes listening habits and then tell you about upcoming concerts for those artists, are on the rise. Relative newcomer Songkick goes even further - it makes educated guesses about what music you’ll like that you may not have heard before, and then suggests local live shows for you to attend.

Songkick founder Ian Hogarth says that 70% of U.S. adults attend a live music show every year, but we collectively spend 35 times as much on going to movies as we do on concerts. There is a big opportunity to increase the size of the market, he says. but people need more information on who’s performing, where, and when.

We first covered them at launch last year, and we also mentioned their “Alexa For Bands” project recently. Today though they’re releasing new functionality and also announcing a round of financing.

Songkick focuses on artists that are still alive (dead artists tend not to go on tour) - they’re tracking about 1 million of them in their database. Users can get recommendations on the Songkick site or via an iTunes plugin (Windows and Mac). And now Songkick is making their database available to partners. Larger partners can access the data via their API (music search engine SeeqPod does this). And smaller sites (music blogs, for example), can add upcoming concerts about artists they’re discussing to their blog posts and other content via a new “BandSense” product that auto-determines band names and inserts links to upcoming concerts.

API partners split revenue with Songkick 50/50. Blogs and smaller sites get 100% of the revenue for now.

Songkick was originally a Y Combinator startup and took a small amount of financing. Today they are announcing a second round, from The Accelerator Group and SoftTech VC. The company was founded by Ian Hogarth, Pete Smith and Michelle You.

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London based Songkick, a Y Combinator startup that launched in October 2007, aims to help music artists pack fans into concerts. They’ve been developing a number of new products that are slated for launch soon. But one that they quietly launched last week without much fanfare is something they refer to simply as “Battle of the Bands.”

It’s a sort of Alexa or Compete comparison engine, but instead of comparing websites it compares bands and artists. They track any band that has 50 or more followers on MySpace - about 1 million bands currently. They then scour the Amazon sales rank for their music, mentions in 1,500 popular music blogs, total MySpace friends and plays, and other stats to determine the overall excitement for a band at any given time.

Type in one or more bands and see how they compare over time.

Who’s the hottest band right now, according to Songkick? Vampire Weekend, who are currently on tour and had 30 blog mentions this week. Hear their music here. Soon, Hogarth says, they’ll add permanent links for battles and give users the ability to embed graphs into websites.

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Music lovers may be show a reluctance to pay for their tunes, but they’re turning up in droves for live shows — at least according to the latest box office numbers posted by eMarketer. Concert ticket sales are expected to $9 billion worldwide this year, up nearly 10% over 2006.

Freshly launched Songkick is a startup looking to capitalize on that growing market by providing a simple way to discover live shows for artists you love along with the cheapest concert tickets. The impetus for the site grew out of the founder’s frustrations over no single concert site providing a comprehensive list of all the concerts they want to see. There would be some on Ticketmaster, others on LiveNation, and still more on resale at StubHub. So, they’ve created a comprehensive database that tracks concerts as they appear on the 14 different ticketing sites and across dozens of blogs. Currently they only cover the U.K. and U.S.

You can search the database and track shows and blog posts about your favorite acts, or download SongKicker, which automatically tracks artists you listen to. SongKicker is a plug-in for that pulls artists you listen to from iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp. The process takes about 3 minutes and adds the artists to the tours you’re tracking. But worry not, you can always delete the band behind that musical guilty pleasure that isn’t really your taste.

Their site can also recommend new artists to you. But their recommendation engine works a bit differently than others. It’s not generated from the user base, like Last.fm, or through careful analysis like Pandora. Instead, Songkick crawls websites like Wikipedia and music blogs to pick up related artists based on positive or negative associations between the bands.

But the real payoff for the site is buying tickets. Kind of like a Sidestep for tickets, Songkick lets you find the cheapest tickets for these shows. Their search engine spans a variety of sources for both the primary and secondary ticketing market. Unfortunately, Songkick doesn’t actually expose the prices for each show directly in their search engine. You have to click through the site and do the comparison yourself. Songkick gets anywhere from $0.50 to $5 for each ticket sold.

Finally, they’ve packaged their ticketing search engine as a simple affiliate sales program for music bloggers. By installing a little plug-in, bloggers can automatically sell tickets related to the artists they write about through links at the bottom of posts. Their system finds the right artists by scanning the posts using the same positive and negative association technology as their recommendation engine. Positive posts about a band are coupled tickets, but a negative reference bashing Brittney Spears won’t start pushing her tickets on your fans.

Songkick is a Y Combinator financed startup currently bridging their operations between London and New York.

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