Videos by American Songwriter
Songkick is a London-based music tech startup that is looking to disrupt the live entertainment event listings space. With their excellent product, Songkick is making implications for how artists, fans, and venues will buy and sell tickets and promote shows.
Users can sign up for a free account on Songkick.com or use Facebook Connect to log-in. Once you set up a profile, you can scroll through artists and select ones you want to track. You can also use Last.fm, Pandora, and iTunes to find artists to track.
Songkick pulls up upcoming concerts in your area – and also gives you the option to post these events to Facebook or Twitter, or to email a friend.
You can also follow friends, view a dashboard with all recent activity, see upcoming events by date, and track venues. (There does appear to be some room for inconsistency within the venue tracking and listing, such as duplicate entries for Schuba’s Tavern in Chicago.)
Songkick’s web-based service has become popular with music fans and now the company has launched a free mobile version of the product for iPhone and iPod Touch.
The app takes advantage of your device’s local information and scans your iTunes music library to find artists to track. Like the web product, the app pulls your location and then presents a personalized concert calendar. You can log in with your Songkick username and password (or again use Facebook Connect) and the app will sync any changes with the web service.
You can select “I’m going” or “I might go” to add a show to your calendar, and each listing contains a nice Google map of the venue location, and includes sharing options via email, Facebook, and Twitter.
Making ticket purchases in-app works in a similar fashion to the web service. The app pulls up the listing’s page on Songkick.com, and shows options for obtaining face value tickets (from a primary ticket vendor such as Ticketweb or Ticketfly) as well as secondary marketplace ticket resellers like StubHub, Ticket Network, and Tickets Now.
If you only want listings and aren’t in need of an informed editorial opinion or review, Songkick makes flipping through pages in your local alt weekly’s print publication (or website) nearly obsolete.
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