We’ve just rolled out a great new feature to get your gigs on Songkick into Twitter, and your tweets from gigs into Songkick!

What we’ll do

We’ll automatically tweet the gig for you when you click I’m going, I might go, or I was there. You can choose whether we tweet I’m going, I might go, or I was there events after you connect.

And when you’re at a concert, we’ll post your tweets on the concert page to let everyone know how it is!

We’ll use your upcoming events calendar to search your tweets for mentions of the artists, venue, or the hashtag #songkick on the day of the gig.

So if you’re going to Wilco with Blitzen Trapper at Troxy tonight, we’ll search your tweets for mentions of Wilco, Blitzen Trapper, Troxy or #songkick.

Some concerts already have tweets attached, thanks to our CTO Phil and developer MattJ:

• Lamb at KOKO London, last night
• Times New Viking with Pens and Male Bonding at Cargo, last night

We’re not pulling in tweets from festivals yet, let us know if that’s something you want!

How to connect your account to Twitter

Head over to your Account Settings, choose the “Share Elsewhere” tab, and click “Connect to Twitter”. You will be sent to Twitter’s website, and you will need to allow Songkick to access your Twitter account.

You can choose whether we tweet I’m going, I might go, or I was there events after you connect to Twitter.

Enjoy!

Gone are the days that you miss a gig because you forgot, or accidentally buy tickets for two gigs on the same day.  Just visit your “Upcoming events” tab and click “Subscribe to your events” to populate your calendar of choice with all of your planned events.  

When you open events in your calendar, you’ll also see whether you said “I’m going” or “I might go”, the venue’s address, and a link to the Songkick event page.  Now it will be even easier to plan your gig nights and buy your tickets all in one place.

Thanks to all our users for giving us feedback about features you’d like on the site — we’re listening!

We get a lot of feedback from our users, and after launch this increased hugely, putting more strain on our lovely Emily, who reads and responds to all you guys. So to make life easier for you and her, we’ve been busy working on 2 features that make having a conversation better.

First up is Get Satisfaction. It’s a community support website that has all the tools we need to listen to your ideas and help you with your problems.

We’re huge fans of Get Satisfaction, and decided to move our general feedback, bug reporting, and FAQ’s over there. You can check this out by clicking the “We love feedback” link in the top of every page.

It’s proven popular so far, and there’s some really interesting ideas you guys are voicing, so don’t be shy, head over there now!

The next feature we launched, to compliment our new feedback forum is a re-designed “flag a problem” widget.

This is a pretty big one, as a lot of the feedback we get is in regards to incorrect data, misspellings, and such. We wanted to streamline the process of reporting data quality issues, so we can tackle and fix them more quickly.

So next time you see something a bit funky or just down right wrong, hit the link and we’ll know about it in next to no time.

Anyone attending the hack day will have exclusive preview access to Songkick’s new API, allowing you to get hold of much of the data available on the website. We’re still finalising the details, but we’ll be making documentation available at http://api.songkick.com/docs/ (now http://developer.songkick.com/) as soon as each feature is completed. On the day we’ll be there to answer any questions and help you build your apps. We’ll also be able to make some changes to the API on the day if there’s something you’d like it to do which we haven’t thought of.

If you want to come along, sign up at the Hack Day registration page - places are very limited, so get in early. You should also drop us a line at musichackday@songkick.com (now support@songkick.com) so we can tell you when documentation is available and provide you with an API key in advance. We’d also love to hear what you want from the API, so if you have any specific feature requests please let us know.

Update: The first set of API features are now available. See the documentation for details.

Update: Documentation is now at http://developer.songkick.com/. Please use support@songkick.com to contact us about API access.

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…

More than that, we wanted to add another dimension to the recommendations on Songkick. Some might say, add counterbalance to the machine learning hegemony that is starting to overrun our small team. Our live music recommendation engine does a commendable job of matching up your music taste with local shows in your area. (How did it know that I’d love to see Calvin Harris again, even though I’m not tracking him? And Matthew Dear is playing in London? Another great suggestion, oh wise recommendation engine.) But if you ever felt like Songkick was lacking a human element, started to get paranoid that it’s just one swift and subtle move for the Songkick robot to go from concert recommendations to total mind colonization, wanted the voice of a discerning HUMAN critic, giving you reasons why something is good? Then the blogger recommendations are just for you. (OK, I’M THE LONE LIT MAJOR ON THE TEAM. SO WHAT?)

Sadly, we were a bit late in incorporating them, so not all of the recommendations made it up in time for our belated publishing date. (SORRY GUYS!) We have current concert previews for London, Edinburgh, New York, Chicago, and LA. If you write a music blog and want to recommend shows, please get in touch! michelle AT songkick DOT com.

So check out the homepage for each of these locations to see what our local blogger correspondents recommend! I also conducted a geeky Q&A with each of them, mostly to satisfy my own nosiness. Stay tuned for that tomorrow.

Enough blogging, I’ve got some Gossip Girl to watch. XOXO!

TechCrunch: “Forget the Movies, Go to a Concert” (Oh yeah, you do that.)
PC Mag’s AppScout: “Songkick Makes Tracking Live Shows Easy”
VentureBeat: “Songkick’s Recommendation Engine: It Goes to 11″ (WE LOVE THIS TITLE!!)
Ian’s quoted stating the obvious in BusinessWeek: “SXSW: Where Tech Mingles with Music”. Still, it’s BusinessWeek! I wonder if the article would have been different if Sarah Lacy had interviewed him. Hmmm…

So while our site got a beautifying session, replete with artist photos (thanks Flickr!) and improved design, we also added a ton of new features, including

• venue pages (finallyyyyy)
• event pages
• brand new homepage that tests out our concert recommendation engine
• personalized concert recommendations for users

Some people have asked what the deal is with our concert recommendations. If you sign up for an account on Songkick, in addition to a Saved Shows and Your Artists on Tour section (based on what artists you’re tracking tours for), we have a new section where we recommend concerts based on your taste. Why is this different from other sites that recommend music, like Last.fm or Pandora? Well, because the set of artists on tour is not the same as the set of artists with recorded music out. Think of your friend’s up-and-coming band without a record deal who plays shows at your local bar. The recommendations are still in an experimental phase, and I know we won’t get it right all the time, but I (in my full snob mode) think they’re pretty good!

We hope the recommendations increase your chances of going to see a concert. No, you probably won’t go to a concert for a band you’ve never heard of at all, but I think more often than not, we’ll recommend concerts for a band you know and like, but forgot about and aren’t tracking, or a band you heard your friend rave about a couple weeks ago and might go check out, or you read the blogs posts about them, see that Gorilla Vs. Bear gave them a glowing review, check out the mp3 on Hype Machine, and decide to go see them. That’s how we hope it works.

Mike Arrington of Tech Crunch wrote about out Battle of the Bands feature. WOO.

Anyway, we’re working our tails off over here for some exciting things coming soon. It’s like finals all over again, cramming to the last possible minute and staying up all night, except I’m too old to pull all-nighters and it’s affecting my rationality. Such is the life of a startup I suppose.

[10:38:18 PM] Michelle You says: i think there are radiohead tickets available!!!!
[10:38:24 PM] Ian Hogarth says: wtf?
[10:38:27 PM] Ian Hogarth says: get them!
[10:38:28 PM] Michelle You says: i’m so confused.
[10:38:35 PM] Ian Hogarth says: buy buy buy!
[10:38:37 PM] Michelle You says: where’s victoria park tower hamlets.
[10:38:39 PM] Michelle You says: but it’s for june.
[10:38:41 PM] Michelle You says: what if we can’t go?
[10:38:54 PM] Ian Hogarth says: we can sell them
[10:39:03 PM] Michelle You says: 2?
[10:39:05 PM] Ian Hogarth says: y
[10:41:54 PM] Michelle You says: FUCKKKKKKKKKKKk
[10:41:58 PM] Michelle You says: i knew it was too good t obe true.
[10:42:02 PM] Michelle You says: i just bought wheelchari tickets.
[10:42:04 PM] Michelle You says: OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGg
[10:42:09 PM] Michelle You says: AOIGTJAOIWJTGAOIJT@oi#jtOWLJ?T
[10:42:25 PM] Ian Hogarth says: wheelchari?
[10:42:36 PM] Michelle You says: FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
[10:42:39 PM] Ian Hogarth says: do you mean wheelchair only?
[10:42:46 PM] Michelle You says: i have no idea! what do i do?
[10:42:52 PM] Ian Hogarth says: get a wheelchair!

I will let you know how the wheelchair saga proceeds.

The user widget displays your bands on tour based on who you’re tracking. So, for example, here’s my personal widget.

The blog widget does something a little more complicated (and cooler, in my opinion!). It will actually read the content of your blog and identify artists on tour. That’s why you have to verify your blog URL, because we can’t read all blogs right now, but we can read 795 blogs! If you tried to verify your blog, and it didn’t work, just enter your email address, and we’ll let you know as soon as we can read your blog. So, for example, Songkick’s blog widget is live in the sidebar right now.

Let us know what you think! It’s still in progress.

We’ve now got one! Just like the Windows Songkicker it takes about 3 minutes to scan your iTunes library and from then onwards will let you know if any of the artists you listen to are playing shows in your area. Most people find at least 10 shows they didn’t realise were happening when they first use it.

You can get it at www.songkick.com/download

Let us know how it works for you.