Songkick

When we started Songkick our biggest goal was to create a place where every single concert was listed – from giant arena shows to tiny local in store gigs – a site the most hardcore live music fan could trust to know about everything.

It’s a tough thing to do. As an example Radiohead are one of our favourite bands in the office. We currently list their tour dates for their UK/US tour on their artist page along with links to the different ticket options. To do that we scrape 17 different ticket vendors in the UK and US as well as other websites. It’s a pretty powerful piece of software, but it isn’t enough.

Back in January Radiohead posted this on their site:

So, we’ve got a small gig tonight.

It’s in London at the Rough Trade East shop on Brick Lane, and we’re planning to play a short set of in rainbows material. It’s very limited free entry, first come first served. Also, as it might be a little uncomfortable for anyone queuing early, they’re planning a numbering system so people at the front of any queue can get snacks and toilet breaks in the store. Good bagels round there. But dress warm…doors won’t open until 7, and we’ll play at about 8.

For those who can’t get in – and it’s pretty small in there – we’ll have some screens and speakers outside, if we’re allowed. I think we are. And we’ll also webcast it. I’ll put the link up here, as well as any other info, later today.

I don’t know about you but that’s the sort of thing that sends shivers of anticipation down my spine – a tiny in-store gig by one of my favourite bands. Up till now the only way our scrapers could automatically get that gig up on songkick would be to run natural language algorithms on that chunk of text and figure out that they had a gig tonight at Rough Trade. That’s no mean feat and even Dr Phil our resident machine learning genius starts to frown with discomfort.

But fortunately that’s not the plan. We always hoped that if we started to get a really large percentage of the listings out there on our site using automated techniques then some passionate live music fans would let us fill in the gaps for stuff like that Radiohead gig. This has started to happen a lot recently with awesome users emailing us when we’re missing stuff. Now we’ve created an interface to let you do that whenever you feel like spreading the word about a show.

On every artist, venue and city page there is a little ‘add new concert’ link. For example on the White Rabbits artist page:

Which takes you here:

You can check it out here, we’d love to hear any feedback you’ve got.

We’re keeping track of every show people add and will be sure to shower the most dedicated contributors with free gig tickets from time to time to say thanks!

Hopefully the next time Radiohead announce a secret date it’ll be up on Songkick in minutes…