London-based startup Songkick has just launched its social network for gig-goers, which lists a million gigs, new and old.
The Songkick site is a database of concerts and tour histories crawled from around the web, so users can not only see upcoming gigs, but add pictures, ticket stubs, and review and reminisce about their favourite concerts.
It's a well designed and appealing site, and could turn out to be a great resource for music lovers, and works as an online scrapbook for users to record and share their experiences at past gigs.
Every artist on the site has their own page, which lists all their concerts both upcoming and in the past. For gigs in the near future, links are provided to buy tickets online:
For artists such as Bob Dylan, there is a wealth of detail about past concerts, and users can edit each concert listing to say that they were there, add a review, setlists, or upload ticket stubs, photos, posters and videos.
Each artist page shows the other Songkick users who have also attended gigs, ranked by the number they have been to, so you can connect with like minded users.
Any photos, videos and posters are displayed further down the page:
Once you sign up for the site, you can link to your Last.fm profile, as well as downloading the 'Songkicker', a piece of software that will look at your music on Winamp, Windows Media Player, or iTunes.
This is then used to track and recommend upcoming concerts for artists it has found in your iTunes library:
Songkick has a team of 14 staff working out of East London. The site makes money through commission deals with online ticket sellers. It has created a compelling website, which is easy to use, and should turn into a fantastic resource if it can get enough people involved rating concerts and adding content to the site.
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
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Unsure
4:09PM on 9th June 2009
Love sites like this that add real value to the web, and think it's been done pretty well (easy to use, nice integration with Last.fm). Hope it does become as ubiquitous as IMDB.
4:51PM on 3rd August 2009
I wonder why no credit is given by Songkick for information ripped off from other sites such as www.chickeonaunicycle.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.