Songkick Combines Twitter And Wikipedia For Concert Listings

Music site Songkick is looking to create a one-stop destination for information on live performances. It combines tickets for purchase, provides listings and community discussions. The site now has over one million concert listings, the largest in the world, and allows fans to upload their own content, like Wikipedia.

It’s possible to add photos, videos, set lists, images of ticket stubs, posters, and your own concert reviews for each show listing. You can also follow people, bands, venues or festivals in the same way as you would on Twitter.

“There’s a big silo [of information] around specific artists”, explained Songkick co-founder and CEO Ian Hogarth. “What we’ve done is crawl and cull this information from thousands of sites all across the web, and stitched it together enough to make a giant database of live musical history.”

Songkick has encyclopedic information on shows dating back to the ’80s, and since you can upload ticket stubs, the site creates competition between users who want to show off how many concerts they’ve been to. The site can also crawl your iTunes or Windows Media Player collection to add more artists to their database.

This method of “crowdsourcing” information and commentary provides a larger database for users, and the site makes money off of ticket sales commissions, making it not only sustainable, but also a useful tool for keeping tabs on your favorite artists’ upcoming gigs, or even the activities of your friends and popular industry figures.

The live performance market hasn’t suffered the same ways as recorded music, and while it’s possible to find concert listings on other sites, Songkick is the most complete worldwide reference I’ve seen so far.

How do you get informed about concerts? Is Songkick more useful?

[Wired]