Songkick Makes Sure You Never Miss Another Concert

Songkick is a service that makes it easy to track live shows from your favorite bands and artists. You can search for upcoming shows in your area and buy tickets. Songkick also has a social component that lets you connect with other users, artists, and venues. Their database of over 1 million future and past shows allows you to go back in time and say you were there on your profile.

To get started, you can either create a Songkick account, or just login with Facebook. It’s often difficult to think of all the artists you’d like to track off the top of your head. Songkick solves this problem by letting you import your top 50 artists from Last.fm. This will automatically track these artists for you and import any media related to them. Even if you don’t currently use last.fm, you can go ahead and get the plug-in for iTunes. This will make sure your plays from your iPod and iTunes show up in last.fm and Songkick.

Another useful feature is Similar Artists. Once you’ve found one artist you like, you’re given a list of other artists you probably like. This also helps in making sure you find all the live shows you’re interested in. For instance, a hardcore Bone Thugs-n-Harmony fan will probably also be interested in shows by Twista, Tech N9ne, and Three 6 Mafia.

Another simply way to locate live shows is to search by venue. My tastes vary, but I know that Bone Thugs and Five Finger Death Punch usually play The Masquerade when they come through Atlanta. That probably means there are other artists I might want to check out there. I can simply track the venue itself it save myself a little time. You can choose to receive email alerts for upcoming events and even integrate your Songkick events calendar right into your Google Calendar, Outlook, or iCal.

The most interesting features of Songkick come with the social aspects. Sure, you can find and track all the live shows you want to attend. You can buy tickets through the site, but a concert is a powerful experience. One that you probably want to share with friends. Songkick makes it easy to share and document your concert experience with your friends on Songkick and elsewhere. Integrate your Twitter account so that your followers know when you might be attending a concert.

While you’re at the concert, you can easily send photos, comments, and reviews from your mobile phone to your unique Songkick email address. Songkick figures out which event you’re talking about based on your events calendar. The content you send in will be integrated into the concert page for that event. You can also search for past concerts and add them to your gigography, letting people know you were there.

Songkick is not just a place to find live concerts and connect with others. It’s also a comprehensive database of all the concerts every performed ever by anyone. It’s like the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) of live concerts on steroids. Definitely a must if you’re into live music.