Songkick Tracks Live Music for Users
Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 08:03AM A Go-to Site for Tracking Music Acts
By BEN SISARIO
Film buffs have the Internet Movie Database. Music video aficionados have YouTube and Vevo. But what’s the go-to Web site for live music?
The touring market is the fastest growing sector of the music industry, yet when it comes to big-tent sites that represent the experience as a whole — and do more than just sell tickets — there are few contenders. One young company called Songkick is trying to change that by feeding its users personalized news about live shows and creating an extensive Web home where fans can share all their concert memories.
Songkick’s main function is simple on an almost Web 1.0 level. After users sign up to track their favorite bands, the service sends free e-mail notifications when those acts are going to be in town, drawing from its database of more than 100,000 concert listings around the world. To fill in any gaps, it can also scan a user’s playlists on iTunes, Pandora or other digital music services, and recommend relevant events.
“We want to make it as easy to go to a concert as it is to go to the movies on a Friday night,” said Ian Hogarth, the company’s chief executive.
Songkick, which was founded in 2007 and is based in London, has also begun to make noise within the concert industry. According to some counts, as many as 40 percent of all concert tickets go unsold. Songkick’s method of user-sanctioned target marketing helps sell more tickets, said Sarah McGoldrick, marketing manager for C3 Presents, an independent concert promoter in Austin, Tex., which supplies listings data to Songkick.
“They have the right idea,” Ms. McGoldrick said. “They’ve gotten people engaged with the Web site, and that means that when they get e-mail they see it as relevant, and not as spam. And the most crucial step in any live entertainment marketing is, if you’re not relevant then you’re wasting your breath.”
With a string of deals to syndicate its data around the Internet, Songkick has also emerged as perhaps the most ambitious listings site. Over the last year, it has begun working with YouTube, Yahoo and the BBC, and it recently signed a deal with the Warner Music Group to manage the Web dissemination of its artists’ tour dates. A mobile app is coming soon, and the company also made a prominent hire: its new chief technology officer is Dan Crow, a veteran of Apple, Google and start-ups like Blurb.
For fans accustomed to the laborious process of scouring for concert listings on blogs, MySpace pages, bands’ Web sites, nightclubs’ sites and e-mail, Songkick’s personalized system can simplify the hunt and turn up news they might have missed.
“It does the heavy lifting for me,” said Joe Zadeh, a 29-year-old tech worker in San Francisco who has been using the service for a year. “If it wasn’t for Songkick, I just wouldn’t go to as many concerts. Because it’s just too much information, too much noise to keep up with.”
Songkick isn’t the only music listings site. Pollstar, the concert industry trade publication, has an extensive online database, and other services like JamBase and Bandsintown allow users to track their favorite bands. But Songkick has emerged as the leader. According to comScore, the site’s monthly traffic has long since surpassed all its competitors’, except for the two gorillas of the market, Ticketmaster and Live Nation. (The two companies, which merged last year, maintain separate Web sites and operate as separate divisions within Live Nation Entertainment.)
Chris LaRosa, music product manager at YouTube, said that integrating concert information had become more important as sites like YouTube become one of music fans’ first stops in discovering new music.
“If you look at a live concert, it’s really a content purchase,” Mr. LaRosa said. “People come to YouTube to preview what concert they want to go to.”
Songkick takes a cut of purchases made via its links, but the company wants to do more than sell concert tickets. Over fried chicken before a concert in Brooklyn one night recently (Handsome Furs, a husband-and-wife duo from Montreal), Mr. Hogarth, a cherubic 29, argued that by focusing on regional markets and doing little to retain customers, the concert industry had left open a huge opportunity: a big, overarching Web site dedicated to the experiences of fans.
Using sites like the Internet Movie Database as a model, Songkick has built an archive of two million concerts going back to the 1950s. Each concert record has an “I was there” tag for users, who can add posters, photos and links to reviews, building up a media-rich “gigography.” Eventually, Mr. Hogarth said, the company could sell memorabilia or live recordings through the archive. (So far the site does not have advertising.)
“There’s a need for a consumer brand that represents live music fans online,” Mr. Hogarth said. “Not focused on the venue or the particular ticketing system, but focused on the fan. And we believe that can be a huge company, similar to the way Yelp represents restaurants online, or Netflix represents movies online.”
He added: “If people are going to think of one brand when they think of live music, we’d like that to be us.”
Born in London, Mr. Hogarth studied artificial intelligence at Cambridge University and formed Songkick with two friends who, like him, were irritated by how difficult it could be to find concert information. Listings are scattered across the Internet, and ticketing companies’ impersonal e-mail blasts didn’t help much. After developing the basic idea for Songkick, Mr. Hogarth and his founding partners, Michelle You and Pete Smith, had a quick rise: the company received seed money and guidance from Y Combinator, an elite tech incubator in Boston. Among its investors are Index Ventures, whose media bets have included Skype and Last.fm.
But the company has already stepped on some industry toes. Songkick gets listings information from promoters and ticket services, but also has its computers trawl for it around the Web; last year Pollstar planted some dummy listings and saw them turn up on Songkick. Gary Bongiovanni, Pollstar’s editor, said his company had not taken action, but noted that in 2000 it sued another service, Gigmania, for doing something similar, and won a default judgment.
“I have no respect for anyone who tries to build a business off of other people’s hard work,” Mr. Bongiovanni said. In response, Mr. Hogarth said that Songkick no longer used Pollstar’s data.
At the Handsome Furs concert, Mr. Hogarth kept his backpack on, and made sure to stay through the encore. To stay fan-focused, Mr. Hogarth said, the company forbids its 20 employees from accepting free tickets. Instead, each employee gets a monthly gig allowance of about $40.
“As soon as we are on the list, the guest of the promoter, we’ll forget about the pain of not getting your ticket at 9 a.m. when the on-sale starts,” Mr. Hogarth said. “We’ll lose sight of what it means to be a fan.”
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