Band tracker and concert reminder service Songkick is venturing into new territory on Tuesday. The site is launching a feature that lets users chronicle all the shows they've ever been to. Think of it like a virtual shoe box for your old ticket stubs.
Users can either add these shows by hand, or search from a database that includes more than a million concerts. Each show page includes things like set lists, photos, videos, and posters. This information has been aggregated from various Web sources, including blogs, band pages, and event sites. If users have their own videos or photos, they can also be uploaded directly to the service. Not included, however, is a way to link to audio recordings.
Concert pages include set lists, photos, videos, and the option to say whether you were there.
(Credit: CNET)In a meeting with CNET last week, Songkick CEO and co-founder Ian Hogarth told me the company's information-gathering tool, which finds this show information from around the Web, will continue to improve as users add more gig dates and titles. These same users are also able to submit their own sites, or music blogs they frequent, to help the tool acquire more information for the database.
Hogarth compared Songkick's efforts with IMDB in trying to create a simple database that lets people see all of a band's past work in one place. It also creates a mash of all the other bands they've collaborated with, letting users do a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," but with individual band members.
The new "gigography" feature lets you see all of a band's previous performances in one place.
(Credit: CNET)Along with shows, Songkick is adding festivals. These are just like individual concert pages, except they're for reoccurring music events. This allows for a timeline of all the previous shows in a festival series, so you can go back and see the performers and related news from each of those events.
So what's the incentive for spending the time to add all of these shows to Songkick's database? Hogarth says he hopes people come to the site with the same enthusiasm they have for keeping old concert tickets in a shoe box or scrapbook. "It's a way to relive some of the coolest experiences you've had," he says. "It's an enormous amount of pride for some people, and our system provides a very visible way to have it. More so than your bedroom."
Hogarth says that further down the line, that same information is what will help people be introduced to other Songkick users and discover music they may like. In the meantime, Hogarth hopes it will help jog faded memories and let you rediscover that awesome 15-minute guitar solo you forgot seeing 20 years ago.
Bands in Town is a simple ticket finder for upcoming concerts. It figures out where you're connecting from and filters the names of artists with shows in your area, complete with links to buy tickets and subscribe to a band for future tour dates.
Last.fm users can plug in their credentials to whittle down the ginormous tag cloud or artists. Doing this also highlights and suggests the ones you like or it thinks you'd like. Even without a Last.fm account, it's a far superior browsing experience compared to parsing your local paper.
To further aid the search, there's a set of simple sliders on the left-hand side where you can dial up or down how much you want to pay, and how far you're willing to drive to go see a show. There are also filters to set whether you're looking to see just indie and unsigned artists, or a high profile pop band.
Speaking of the bands, each artist has its own page that hosts a small biography, a "mix tape" compiled of streaming music, and a list of upcoming shows complete with links to selected ticket sellers. Missing, however, is some of that all-important information like when you should be getting up at 5 a.m. to buy tickets for a show.
Compared to Songkick (coverage), Bands in Town is missing the integration with music jukebox software like iTunes to figure out what you're interested based on your listening habits. Of course this won't be an issue for heavy users of Last.fm, but iPod users with a few years of rating history will be left out of the loop.
Disclaimer: Last.fm is part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes Webware.
Bands in Town does just what it says by telling you what concerts are coming to your area. It also links up with Last.fm to let you listen to a band before getting tickets.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
If you're a person who loves live music but hates having to keep up on when your favorite bands are coming into town, there's a great new service for you. It's called Songkick, and it's been designed to help you stay on top of upcoming concert dates, as well as discover new music from your existing tastes. It's making a complicated process wonderfully simple, and I expect it to be the next big thing in live music in the same way that Last.fm and Pandora were with prerecorded music tracks.
To figure out what you like in the first place, the service makes it easy by letting you import the library data from iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media player using a small plug-in. That same plug-in will also update the data if you add new music to your collection.
Each artist has a page on Songkick that lists some similar bands as well as pricing and direct links to buy the tickets from 17 different vendors. Users can also leave comments (called "two cents") about a band, although CEO Ian Hogarth told me they might add a bona fide rating system to complement it later on. Also on artist pages, and an integral part of the service is the blog listing guide. Songkick will scour the web and pull up any references to the band or artist in blog posts. These show up in reverse-chronological order on the band page, and can be toggled with upcoming tour dates.
Battle of the bands tracks three different bands of your choice against MySpace activity and sales data. (Click to enlarge)
(Credit: CNET Networks)To compliment the band mentions on blog posts there's a really great service the team has built called battle of the bands. Like Alexa and Compete, battle of the bands lets you compare up to three bands together to see which one's been the most "hot" in the past five weeks based on various interactions on MySpace as well as mentions in blog posts, and the Amazon.com sales rank. The system is built to accept other streams of data, so if and when Facebook begins to make the data on artist pages a little more transparent, those numbers could be integrated into the stats too.
This third leg of the service, called "BandSense" is a very novel concept. Bloggers who want to opt into the service can embed a line of Javascript into a single post or their entire blog template and get links to bands at the bottom of a post if they're mentioned. It's not just any a link spamming option, the service will only create links for bands only that are on tour. Clicking the band link in the blog goes straight to the tour dates and ticket pricing information, and if a user buys a ticket, the blog owner gets a cut. To compliment the system and keep bands you don't like (but mentioned) off your blog, you can create a blacklist. These blacklisted artists will get no such link love.
In the future Hogarth tells me there will be music integration on the Songkick band pages as well as the recommendations so you can listen to some tracks without having to navigate offsite. The only delay has been finding a way to do it democratically with all of the music hosting services out there. Songkick already has integration on partnered sites like Qloud and Seeqpod, and in the future intends to spread its tour date and recommendation engine even further.
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