Ever wonder why you are the last to find out about great concerts? With the Internet you can keep in touch with bands that you like and get the inside scoop on their schedules. Or, if you are not looking for a specific band, you can use these sites to see what is playing in your town on specific dates. These sites will also offer you opportunities to purchase tickets – either straight from the venue or via resellers. These sites are all free – but they do make commissions on the ticket sales.
Livekick is a concert recommendation and tickets search engine that has just recently emerged from private beta. Livekick is designed to helps you discover live concerts in your area and find the cheapest available tickets. Livekick’s search engine includes more than 75,000 concerts in the U.S. from more than 20,000 artists at close to 40,000 venues.
Once you create an account Livekick gives you personalized concert recommendations for artists you like, and for similar artists. Adding artists is pretty easy as Livekick can import your preferences from iTunes, Last.fm, iLike, Pandora, MySpace Music, blip.fm or Rhapsody. Livekick will create a calendar based on your favorites and highlighting the extreme integration that Livekick brings, you can easily add any concert to your Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, or Yahoo Calendar.
In addition to the online calendar, Livekick can send you alerts via Twitter, email, an RSS feed or you can access Livekick.com from your iPhone. Livekick truly integrates with all the other sites and tools that you already use. Other features include “Your Artists” which tracks your favorite artists with tour listings, user-generated videos from their live concerts and links to the artists’ sites. Livekick also has a desktop widget that will do a daily scan of your computer for new music files and will add any new artist to your Livekick account.
Livekick has an API (application programming interface) that they are offering to developers at other sites that will allow these sites to add Livekick’s concert listings to their site. CBS Radio is one of the first to use this feature – but more are on the way.
Livekick has realized that most of us already have too many social networks. So instead of trying to get you to make Livekick the center of your universe, they are trying to make Livekick a part of your existing online experience. If they keep you coming back, they know they will make their money off the commissions from your ticket purchases. Livekick searches ticket web sites such as Ticketmaster, Livenation, Stubhub, Tickets.com and eBay as well as user-generated content sites such as MySpace Music.
Bandsintown is essentially a search engine for performances by your favorite musical groups – or any groups for that matter. The site works almost completely by search, either by band, or by location. Creating an account is easy – the key is to list the city where you are so Bandsintown can do the searching. Also you can link to your Last.fm account, a very nice time saving integration, or list some musical acts that are your favorites.
Searching is also easy – You can choose a date range – including shortcuts like tonight or this weekend. You can choose how far away you’re willing to travel, how much you’re willing to pay, and whether you want name bands or indie bands. Bandsintown weeds it all down for you to show you only what you really want to see in a tag cloud like you see below.
As I was writing this I noticed that the first entry in the upper left of my search list was Abe Vigoda which led me wonder why I had been using this site. But one click on “Abe Vigoda” revealed that this was not the old guy from the Barney Miller Show but in fact “an experimental, tropical punk rock band based in Los Angeles, California.” See – you learn all sorts of new stuff about music with these sites!
While you can do some basic searching without an account, setting up an account gives you features like notifications when any of your favorites are coming to town. You can also get a weekly email digest off all the groups who are going to be nearby. You can also get all the usual social media site benefits like making friends and seeing your friend’s interests. So far, the social media side of the site looks pretty underutilized. I know I just use it for the band info and I think the same is true for many other folks.
We hope you enjoy trying out some of these sites. But don’t forget about MusicPlayer – we’ll give you lots of analysis and new sites and ideas. Are there other sites you count on? If so, write a comment and let us know about your favorite music sites.
Oodle’s BandTracker could best be described as a bare bones version of Bandsintown. At last count they had information on 751,785 bands performing in 235,666 shows. You can search the database online and sign up for a free weekly email with new shows. Once a week, you’ll get an email from BandTracker letting you know who’s coming, who’s canceling, and what’s going on near you. Clicking on any concert will take you to Oodle’s classifieds site where you can see what tickets are available for this show.
If you create an account you can create widgets to add to your MySpace page or Blog to promote your band with a Band Promoter Widget. Or, if you are just a fan, you can create a My BandTracker Widget to let your friends see your calendar of shows. While the simplest of the three sites we use, this one has the widgets and far more indie shows that any of the other sites.
Songkick believes that “an amazing concert can change your life.” Songkick thrives in the past, but is pretty cool for new concerts too. They have built a database with tour dates from around the web to accumulate over 1 million concerts. Not every concert in existence, but the biggest list anywhere.
If you are like me and have a ticket stub from every show, then imagine Songkick as the online companion – a place for you to share your personal “gigography” of all the gigs you’ve ever been to. Before they started, there wasn’t a single place where you could see an artist’s entire tour history and see all the gigs a legendary venue has hosted. Social media kicks in because every concert and festival deserves a home online, where you can share your experience with posters, photos, videos, setlists, reviews, and more.
I love Songkick for the honest link on their home page (hopefully gone before you get there) which says: “Sorry it’s taking so long for stuff to show up. Our server is overloaded like a tired pack mule. We’re working on speeding things up.” With a database of over 1 million concerts I feel their pain with regards to handling the load.
Songkick also lives in the present and as they index 29 different ticket vendors across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. You can even add shows they are missing. Each concert or festival page aggregates all the ticket options, so you can compare prices, and buy the cheapest tickets.
So if you are tired of being the last to hear about a show and having to buy expensive tickets 2nd hand, try out one of these sites. From the no-frills BandTracker to the full service LiveKick – any one of this trio will keep you in the loop on upcoming concert dates.
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