Songkick, Your New Best Friend

According to Ian Hogarth, over 70% of people in the U.S. did not attend a concert last year...not a one. Why? Well, it's simply a pain in the butt for most people to look up bands they like to see if their even touring, let alone going to stop in near where they live.

This is why Ian, along with a few other bright chaps, came up with Songkick. Songkick is basically iConcertCal and JamBase's concert listings on steroids. Their goal is to make finding the concerts you want to see as easy as possible.

To do this, Songkick does a few things, but does them well. First, and a huge time-saver, Songkick is able to take a list of the artists in your computer's media player (i.e. iTunes) and load them all into your profile. This is especially nice if any of you have used Jambase's artist notifier and were somewhat annoyed at having to enter in each artist you like individually. This is very handy when you have, say, over 500 or so artists in your play list.

Songkick also e-mails you when your artists are coming into town. No more searching for dates and tours, it's all e-mailed directly to you. And on top of this, Songkick even will list the cheapest tickets for sale, as searched for from over 16 different ticket distributors in the US and UK. So now you've been notified of when the show is and you even know you're getting the cheapest tickets, life can't get any sweeter, right?

Well, actually, it can as Songkick also has a great section of concert recommendations based on the artists you uploaded into your profile. This is usually the trickiest part of any music based website as everyone's taste is different and the only two people to have gotten it right so far are a rocket scientist (seriously, the guy who wrote the algorithm for Pandora is a rocket scientist) and the geniuses at Last.fm. However, Songkick does an impressively good job and I would now add them to the previous list of two.

Overall, a great website with many more features that you should definitely check out. Thanks again to my boy Matt at parislemon for giving me the heads up on this. Who knew that being friends with the 8th most influential tech blogger would actually pay off?

More on Songkick:
Songkick Goes to 11
Ian Hogarth at Download Squad