Londoners are in for a treat this summer, as alt-rockers British Sea Power are set to provide musical accompaniment to two classic documentaries at BFI Southbank.
The band, know for their outlandish live performances, will provide original scores to ‘Out Of The Present’, which catalogues the life of a cosmonaut in space during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and ‘From The Sea To The Land Beyond’ – a “meditation on the British coastline”. Here at Songkick we love seeing live music performed in unique scenarios and unusual spaces – so this is right up our street! The films will be shown back to back on June 15 as part of BFI’s Sonic Cinema programme, in what promises to be an unmissable collaborative experience.
For more info on each showing go here and here. Tickets are set to go on general sale in the coming weeks, so don’t miss out!
Red Hot Chili Peppers return to the UK in 2012 for two massive shows this summer and we’ve got three pairs of tickets up for grabs for both events! The open-air concerts, which take place at Knebworth and the Stadium of Light, have also got great supporting line-ups:
2) Twitter – follow us @Songkick and tweet your entry, something like this just make sure to include the hashtags #rhcpgiveaway and #knebworth or #sunderland so we know which show you’re entering for:
2. All entries must be received by 7 May 2012. No responsibility will be accepted for any entries that are incomplete or illegible.
3. 1x pair of tickets will be awarded to six different winners – 3 per market (Knebworth and Sunderland).
4. A winner will be picked at random. The judges’ decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into.
5. This competition is not open to employees or contractors of Songkick, or any person directly or indirectly involved with the event or any artists on the line-up.
6. All prizes must be accepted as offered.
7. Winners will be notified by email on 8 May 2012.
We’ve all been subjected to a little bit of TMI on Facebook, but every now and then there’s something to be gained from sharing! Now, if your Songkick account is connected to Facebook, we’ll post to your timeline so you can share your concert plans and the artists that you want to catch on tour.
We’ll post to your Timeline whenever you mark your attendance on a concert as ‘I’m going’ or ‘I might go’ – so hopefully it’ll be easier than ever to rally up some troops to attend with. Clever old Facebook will also let you know if more than one of your friends are attending the same show:
One feature request we’ve had quite often from our community is a way to see which artists your friends are tracking, so now we’ll also share which artists you’re adding to your Tracker:
These posts will be aggregated by Facebook, so don’t worry about spamming your friends if you track a load of bands all at once!
For more information, head over here to our help desk.
It may be raining cats and dogs in London, but the sun is undoubtedly shining on the live music circuit this week! Check out our hand-picked selection of the hottest new shows across the globe – all on sale today. (April 27th)
The wait is officially over. It’s been three long years since Bloc Party last played a show on American soil, but Kele and co are back, and with new material to boot. A string of festival shows are already on the cards – Lollapalooza, Osheaga, Outside Lands – but news broke last week of an epic three night residency at Terminal 5, with support from The Drums. With a fourth LP on the way, music fans (us included) wait with baited breath to see what direction Bloc Party will take next. New Yorkers can buy their tickets this morning for the newly announced show on 7th August and find out first hand.
The Killers, Justice, The Kooks, Sigur Ros and more will descend on the Spanish capital in September for a knock-out two day festival, as DCODE returns for it’s second edition. Last time out saw The Hives, Sum 41 and Kasabian steal the show, and things can only get better with this bumper line-up set for 2012. Two-day passes go on sale today!
Hip-hop legends Cypress Hill have announced a one off UK show at the HMV Forum in Kentish Town. The group, who’ve been plugging away since 1988, are set to release a highly anticipated collaborative album with dub-step producer Rusko. What presence the new material will take on the live stage remains to be seen, but fans can certainly expect something special. This is the only British stop on a very brief European tour, so don’t miss out – grab your tickets this morning.
Motorhead, who have over 2400 past concerts listed on Songkick (and 56 upcoming shows for 2012!) will hit the UK later this year for a mammoth nationwide tour. The band celebrated 35 years on the road last year and show no signs of slowing down, as dates in London, Manchester, Glasgow and more have all been penned for November. Support comes from Anthrax. Tickets go on sale, today!
We love a good slice of concert history here at Songick, and today it’s been announced that a particularly exciting live moment is going to be brought back to life. The Beatles first full US concert is set to be screened in movie theatres across the States on selected dates in May.
‘The Beatles: The Lost Concert’ will show the full 1964 performance at the Washington Coliseum, where they played in front of 8,000 fans on a boxing-ring style stage set-up.
Here’s a peek at the setlist:
Roll Over Beethoven From Me to You I Saw Her Standing There This Boy All My Loving I Wanna Be Your Man Please Please Me Till There Was You She Loves You I Want to Hold Your Hand Twist and Shout Long Tall Sally
Not in the US? There’s some footage of the show kicking around on YouTube as well, worth a watch, even just to get a sense of the sheer hysteria – so. much. screaming.
For information on tickets etc head to www.lostbeatlesconcert.com and if you want more of a Beatlemania fix, check out some of the historical bits we’ve got on Songkick.
Born in the clubs of the 1980’s during the warehouse party and rave scenes, Electronic Dance Music (EDM) isn’t a revolutionary genre in itself. But in less than 5 years, what was considered a marginal and sketchy part of the music business seems to have invaded all levels of popular culture. From the striking presence of electronic music acts such as French duo Justice and Swedish DJ/producer Avicii in the Lollapalooza line-up, to the Grammy award success of American producer Skrillex, the growth of EDM has been one of the most remarkable genre success stories of recent times.
Today, acts such as Avicii, Deadmau5 and Bassnectar sell out arenas where the likes of Coldplay and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were previously drawing the crowds. Last December, Madison Square Garden was headlined by a DJ act, Swedish House Mafia, for the first time ever. And then there’s David Guetta, who collaborates with the biggest American mainstream artists, including Rihanna, Snoop Dogg and the Black Eyed Peas. It is now electronic music that primarily draws the 16-25 year olds to festivals such as Lollapalooza, or the Electric Daisy Carnival which sold out on the day of release – three hours before the headliners had even been announced.
The breakthrough of EDM is a by-product of the age of DIY. The new low-cost technologies have opened amazing opportunities to a new generation of bedroom-DJs and producers, now able to create high quality music and become global superstars. Social media such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook used as awareness tools allowed them to directly reach their fans all over the world without the middle-man label. This bottom-up phenomenon, where the artist and his/her fans become independent from the music industry and can make a project happen, is an exciting revolution.
At a time where the whole music industry – and particularly physical and digital sales – is in crisis, live performances are the main revenue source for artists. This poses a challenge and an opportunity for EDM: while the ostentatious figure of Lady Gaga on stage is as much a draw as her music; dance music, where the producer is buried under his machines, doesn’t offer much of a visual experience. To deal with this weakness, EDM artists have developed amazing tools, heavily relying on new video mapping and light technologies, for example Amon Tobin and his last ISAM light show:
Others have created mix-media events, like the stunning collaboration between legendary DJ Richie Hawtin and world acclaimed sculptor Anish Kapoor, resulting in an audiovisual project of epic scale:
EDM has become an amazing and exciting place of innovation and creation, where artists from all sides – designers, composers, performers – can share their new ideas and work together, revolutionizing the way music is performed and enjoyed.
We’re excited to see where things go next, are you?
Regular blog readers will know already how much we champion our developer community. Many of our team are developers who are passionate about making the concert experience easier and more accessible for fans so more people get out to see the bands they like play live. We love seeing – and using – the cool stuff folks have made using our concert database through our API.
Today, we’re announcing a partnership with music intelligence platform The Echo Nest. Songkick’s extensive concert database will be integrated into the Rosetta Stone platform, a data translator for music services. Rosetta Stone helps developers take precise data from a variety of music sources to build any kind of app on every platform. We have a long history of working together with The Echo Nest, making both our APIs available to developers at Music Hack Days around the world to see what creations they can build.
Thousands of developers already use the Songkick API to create apps that are popular with users. Some of our favorites include Gigbeat, Kickalert, and Venue.FM.
Last weekend we gave access to our API through The Echo Nest’s Rosetta Stone to developers at the Rethink Music Hacker’s Weekend in Boston. One of our developers there on the ground has alerted us to two neat apps he’s seen come out of last weekend’s hackathon.
HipTapes is a music marketing app that lets artists create custom QR codes and push content to fans via posters, flyers, CDs, etc. By connecting Songkick with other apps including Facebook Graph, Echonest and LyricFind, HipTapes scans the QR code and lets users stream, bookmark or buy music tracks, purchase concert tickets, merchandise or write on an artist’s Facebook wall.
Wan Ling Yih has built a playlist generator that makes a playlist based on your upcoming concert calendar from Songkick in Spotify. The website will be up soon. We’re excited by what we’ve seen so far.
We hope that including Songkick information, the largest single source of live music data on the web, into The Echo Nest’s Rosetta Stone will make it easy for many more developers to explore building cool stuff with our data. With more developers using this integration, more music fans will hear about concerts first, before tickets go on sale. It’s good news not just for fans but for artists too. And we’re all for that.
Last week, we challenged you to come up with your best band name puns to be in with a chance of winning tickets to the Camden Crawl. There were loooads of amazing entries that had us chuckling, so it was no easy task narrowing it down to one winner!
Here are some of the ones that made the final cut:
Abba-Cardi and Coke - @warbzuk
’2pac’ of Supermarket own brand lager – @DPMCooney
Bacardi Weezer - @Kev_wan
Babycham-bles - @rjmlaird
But, in the end, it was this gem that we kept coming back to:
Jägerbombay Bicycle Club – @nicobryant1
So big congrats to Nico Bryant!
Thanks to everyone else who took part, great efforts all round. You can still get tickets to the festival, weekend wristbands are just under £70 quid for two full days of music.
The wait is over! Music fans across the globe will be making the sacred pilgrimage to their local record shop tomorrow (Saturday 21st April) to get their hands on limited edition vinyl and support the independent music industry.
Record Store Day (US/UK) is upon us once again, and in case you need convincing to get off the sofa, here’s our selection of the best in-store shows taking place across the globe tomorrow. Let us know where you’ll be headed / who you’ll be watching / what you’ll be buying!
Stalk Songkick right here! This is where we’ll procrastinate by posting about our latest musical obsessions, report on our concert-going, and tell you all about the cool new stuff we’re making—hopefully the last two in equal measure.
