Songkick

Here at Songkick we’ve always been really grateful for feedback from you guys – the good, the bad and the ugly – we’ve heard it all and genuinely appreciate the time people have spent letting us know what works and what doesn’t.

As the site has grown we’ve built up a great bunch of loyal Songkickers, who not only contribute tons of helpful ideas, but who’ve also really grasped what Songkick is all about. From Soapcompany, who’s personal gigography has now surpassed the 1,000 mark, to ghbradshaw, who’s added 1646 photos and counting since he signed up – there’s a whole host of dedicated live music fans who are helping make Songkick the home of live music online.

So, to extend our thanks we invited you along to our offices for a bit of a shindig on Friday 9th October… and we were very happy with the turnout!

Almost 30 if you came along and it was great to finally put those names to some faces. For any of you who couldn’t make it, here’s a quick summary of what went down…

First up we had a bit of a meet and greet: Anika (Anikainlondon), one of our interns, very kindly hand-drew everyone name badges which was a great help when it came to figuring out who was who:

Photo taken by Brooke Parrott

(check out Anika’s blog here: http://anikainlondon.wordpress.com/)

Once the beer had started to flow and we’d established which username belonged to which person, we pulled out a little icebreaker to get everyone moving around the room (I feel like I’m making this sound like speed-dating for music geeks – it wasn’t like that, honest). This took the form of a ‘Wordle’ – we looked through everyone’s gigographies to see which gigs people had been to together and then displayed it like this…

a_gun_racks’s wordle

…to show who’d been to the most gigs with who out of everyone there. We also gave everyone a list of said gigs, prompting conversations along the lines of “wow we’ve been to so many shows together”, “how good was that gig?!”, “how weird that you went to see so and so…”. It was a music nerd’s dream.

When everyone had circulated the room an acceptable amount of times (and grabbed another cake along the way), it was time for the Songkick Team to say a few words. After a quick introduction from each team member, Michelle took the lead and gave, what we hope, was an insightful glimpse into the future plans for Songkick. A question and answer style session ensued and then we let everyone lose on two blank whiteboards to share their feedback:

Photo taken by Brooke Parrott

We’ll be sifting our way through that soon!

Judging by the great responses we’ve had from all those who attended (and the fact that the party moved on to the pub after), I think it’s safe to say that the evening was a great success, so we’ll certainly be doing it again at some point in the near future!

We’d love to hear more feedback from those who came though – let us know in the comment section below what you thought of the evening and if you have any ideas for the next one

Thanks again to all those who came, and to Brooke (bookarooble) and Simon (gtvone) for the photography.

Photo taken by Brooke Parrott

Photo taken by Simon Pollock

Photo taken by Simon Pollock