Have you ever missed out on a concert in your area because you had not heard of it beforehand? Or heard about a concert months after its announcement only to find that the tickets are all sold out? I have found myself in those situations all to often until a friend told me about SongKick.
SongKick keeps you in the concert loop and notifies you when your favorite musical artists are preforming at a venue near you. Songkick doubles as a website and a mobile application for smart phones. In order to utilize the online version of SongKick, all you have to do is create a free online account and list all of your favorite artists. Once you have a thorough list of artists all you have to do is sit back and wait and let SongKick work its magic. The system tracks Ticketmaster, LiveNation and other online sources in order to get the most up to date news and concert information. The user is then emailed notifications when artists that they are tracking are playing a show near their home town. The site allows its users to sync their iTunes, Last.fm and Pandora Radio accounts in order to more easily compile the artists that the user desires to follow. The site also allows its users to follow local venues and it alerts them via email once concerts have been announced at these particular venues.
While the online site is the more conventional path, SongKick also offers a free mobile app for its users. The mobile app operates the same way as the site, however instead of emails, the users is alerted of new concerts via push notifications. The mobile app has been very popular since its release on May 25 of this year. The mobile app took off with a grand total of 100,000 downloads in its first 2 weeks on the market (prompting Apple to make SongKick the app of the week in its UK store). All in all, SongKick is a great way to keep in touch with the local concert scene and it requires very little effort and no financial investment whatsoever.