Gigulate, which aims to match music news, blogs and gig listings against each other in a sort of personalised TechMeme, today launches an API for its music news and concert database.
The API (available at Gigulate.com/api) will offer developers the chance to build on the Gigulate aggregation platform, which has an engine to pull in trusted music news sources.
The site already appeals because instead of being a user-driven music community site (there are way too many of those), it simply sorts through music news and matches that against live events. Since live events are one of the few options left for revenues, this seems wise.
This is music news treated as data since the site uses a mixture of RSS, data mining, crawlers and aggregation. So far it holds half a million articles about 5,000 artists, and hosts 10,000 concert listings from more than 2,000 UK venues. Gigulate claims to have 25,000 users now and to be in talks with a number of online publishing partners.
I think it’s significant that an new UK startup is working on it’s API so early in its development – it’s the kind of thing you expect from more mature sites so it’s to be encouraged. And at least they are thinking bug – the ultimate aim is to be the destination online for music information, intelligently crawling thousands of sources.
Gigulate – which also pitches today at GeeknRolla – was founded in August 2008 by ex-NME.COM editor Ben Perreau, and Absolute Radio developers Duncan Amey and John Martin.