Finding live music with Songkick

I made a recent resolution to myself that I should listen to more music, and go and see more live gigs. The last gig I went to was probably over...

I made a recent resolution to myself that I should listen to more music, and go and see more live gigs. The last gig I went to was probably over 10 years ago – I don’t count the folk music at the Farnham Beer Festival as a proper gig

So I was very interested when a friend of mine introduced me to a new free iPhone app called Songkick.

Songkick is a massive location-aware calendar of gigs, tailored for the tastes of the user.

It’s an app that runs on the iPhone and there’s an accompanying website.

Songkick uses location services on the iPhone and finds gigs nearby. Multiple additional locations can also be manually selected. I’ve told Songkick I’m interested in events near where I work, and near home. But if I’m away from home it can find events local to me, which is pretty awesome if I’m in at a loose end in a new town.

The best part though is that Songkick analyses your music tastes and can produce a customised list of events shown in the “Your artists” part of the app. So rather than just show me a massive list of gigs in the area it has some intelligence to show me bands I’m likely to want to go and see, as well as new bands I may be interested in.

Songkick can scan a users Pandora, last.fm and iTunes library. Artists can also be added manually, or by following recommendations on the site.

It’s really easy for songkick to figure out what music I like because I use last.fm. I simply signed up for a new Songkick account and gave them my last.fm account name (but no password) and they grabbed the list of recently played tracks from there.

Once that’s done (which took just a minute or two for me) the ‘Artists’ view on the phone is now populated with artists I like, and highlights those currently on tour with a little ribbon.

I’m hoping this is going to help me fulfil my resolution, and maybe I’ll discover some new music along the way.