Songkick

I just got back to the office after the long weekend to find some great press about us bouncing about the interwebs.

First of all Elisa Bray does a round up of live music related resources. I hadn’t seen some of the sites before including Drummer Hunter and Better Than the Van and they’re pretty cool. If you’re in/looking to start a band they’re worth checking out. She kindly recommended Songkick for keeping track of tours in your area. Welcome to our new visitors from The Independent! The bit on Songkick reads:

If you struggle to follow your favourite bands’ tour dates, register with new site www.songkick.com, which will inform you about forthcoming tours near you, as soon as they have been announced. They’re tackling the right market – it’s all about the live show for bands these days – and they aim to become the most comprehensive online ticket search service. For a start, it’s much slicker than www.ents24.com. Enter the names of your three favourite bands and your home town and the site will email you updates so you can be the first to know about shows. While the site is London-based, it covers cities and towns across the UK and is most useful to fans living where bands’ tours are less frequent. The site also recommends other gigs that match the genres of your chosen three top acts.

There’s also been some great coverage of the Songbird/Songkick tour dates partnership including, Ars Technica, Digital Media Wire, Extendably, Pocket-Lint and Web Monkey:

But the coolest new tool is Songkick, which lists upcoming music events for specific regions but also narrows down your list based on the artists you’ve been listening to. (via Pocket-Lint)

Finally I wrote a guest post for TechCrunch UK about hacking in the UK and a need for more developer related meetups. We’re running our next London Hacker Meetup on September 4th – would be good to see any developers reading this there!

This week, Songbird released their beta, which comes bundled with a Concert add-on brought to you by us! We’ve been dreaming of a music player integration that will show you which artists are on tour as you’re playing music, and they’ve done it. Click on the “get tickets” button or the ticket icon and it sends you straight to Songkick to buy tickets then and there. How many times have you been listening to an awesome song and thought to yourself, “This band is amazing, I wish I could see them live! I wonder when they’re coming to town?” Now all that work is done for you. Although this doesn’t help me, since I’m listening to Biggie right now, who rules, but is not coming to a city near me any time soon.

Also, just to brag a big. Ars Technica calls this an “impressive feature.”

Ok I’ll be the second Songkick blogger to apologise for our lack of recent posts. We’re working like crazy on some new stuff so look forward to some product news hopefully next week.

In the interim I have some exciting news: we were chosen as Website of the Week in The Sun!

Here’s a scan of the article (it hasn’t made it online yet):

Thanks AB – you made our day!

We haven’t been blogging. Or by “we,” I mean ME. Sorry. So to make up for it, a glut of pictures from Roskilde Festival last month.

Two types of Slayer fans

Bet you can’t tell who would win in a fight.

MGMT

This dude was holding up a fox on a platform the whole time. I have no idea why.

I still maintain, they are Flaming Lips, Jr.

LUPE

The man was wearing the best boots EVER.

Kings of Leon (or as some say, “dad music”)

My Bloody Valentine

I waited in the special line to get into the front area of the audience. (The entire festival is so considerately planned, so Scandinavian. They hand out cups of water during the show so you don’t get dehydrated!) My Bloody Valentine ended with a massive PLANET of noise for at least ten minutes. It was completely disorienting. Deafening noise, like an airplane never quite achieving takeoff, for a stretch of time. It was remarkable–like a violent, foricible cleansing of the palate.

Jay Reatard

It was me and a handful of belligerent adolescent stoner boys all heckling the chubby older stoner boys on stage. Every show has a cheesy announcer come on stage and announce the act and ask questions like, “You guys having fun yet?” The poor girl who told l the crowd that the show was over got booed and absued. And then Jay came back on stage and played a few encores after his buddy mooned the crowd. I haven’t had that much fun in a long time.