Songkick, a music events tracker, has launched offering a number of services, including a Kayak-style search engine for concert tickets. The site is aggregating tickets from 10 primary and secondary ticket vendors in the US and UK, no mean feat. The service allows users to install a Media player plugin (for iTunes, Winamp and WMP) which automatically tracks artists in your music library and suggests when they are on tour. Songkick’s Ian Hogarth tells me that their average beta user was tracking 200 artists, 30 of which were touring at any one time. You can also add or delete artists manually.
For revenues Songkick has ‘Bandsense’ a kind of AdSense for mp3 blogs. Mp3 blogs are now a common way for fans to discover new music, covering every genre imaginable and allowing you to easily sample the music. Bandsense allows mp3 bloggers to automatically tell their readers about relevant tours in their area. Any time an artist is mentioned that is on tour, Bandsense automatically creates a link to the artist page on songkick so the reader can find out more. Songkick also has a built recommendation engine to recommend bands based on reviews and your own tastes.
The site is deceptively easy to use and almost too sparse in its simplicity. Links to ticket sites worked fine, but I haven’t had a chance to try out the media player plugin yet. I found adding bands to my profile was very intuitive and the system was smart enough to suggest similar bands. I’m not sure how much revenue Bandsense is going to earn – so perhaps the affiliate links to ticket vendors is going to be the better money spinner.