Ten folk with more than 500 gigs

I’m really busy with moving house, having unsociable work hours and am skint, so in the absence of a quality blogpost here about the import contacts feature or graphs and stats about the regular Top Contributor posts on the SongKick blog, here’s a list of ten SongKick users with more than five hundred gigs.

• raysgigs – 3802 gigs
• SoapCompany – 1100 gigs
• Kittenpainting – 943 gigs
• sonofhal – 838 gigs
• skif45 – 759 gigs
• bobunderexposed – 731 gigs
• Kevlets – 535 gigs
• ghbradshaw – 532 gigs
• illandancient – 531 gigs
• wyldman – 515 gigs

As always, there’s probably other folk out there that I haven’t stumbled across them yet. If you know them, let me know in comments.

Average age of Songkick users

There was a brief flood this morning of messages on my Twitter feeds about the average age of Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn users, being 33, 26, 31 and 39 respectively. Interesting stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

I thought I’d have a look at the average age of SongKick users. Using the same method of picking a random sample as I’ve used previously, I got me a sample of one hundreds users (people who’ve been to one or more gigs) who also have their age publicly listed.

The average age is 28.5 years, the median age is also 28.5 years.

There’s a bit of a twenty-something spread though. Here’s a cumulative frequency graph.

So its mostly 16 to 35 year olds who use the site. Apart from the spike of 22 year olds, its steadily more popular with folk in their late twenties and early thirties.

Is that counter-intuitive?

Like folks of all ages go to gigs, and lots of teenagers do, the bigger, more popular shows are full of ‘teeny-boppers’, but they don’t show up much on Songkick. Maybe this is a niche which the folk at SK could target. But then, maybe they have done and the kids just don’t care and its only the folk in their late twenties who can be bothered sitting behind a computer, chugging in all their shows.

Ten Promoters on Songkick

After the other day’s thrilling list of ten artists who are themselves signed up to SongKick (or in HeatherNova’s case just her agent), I thought I’d do another list of users. This time its ten gig promotery people who are members.

1. OddBox from  OddBox Records
2. So Tough, So Cute from So Tough So Cute
3. Rory So Tough also from So Tough So Cute
4. Buro9 from RPM Night
5. The Luminaire the venue The Luminaire
6. Marcio from Goonite
7. Anthony Chalmers from Moonshine Jamboree
8. natalie_shaw from Pic n Mixx
9. AlexisBrooks from Camden Calling
10. abadgeoffriendship from A Badge of Friendship

Again, there’s bound to be other promoters on the site, I just gotta find them, if you know of any, let me know in comments.

Mobile uploading on Songkick

Eeep! There’s a new feature on Songkick, you can now send in photos and gig reviews via email whilst you’re still at the gig.

It certainly looks neat, kind of the same functionality that’s been on blogging platforms for ages. Maybe it’ll boost the number of reviews been clocked on the site.

Seems straightforward enough, I gave it a spin at last night’s Pic and Mixx night at The Buffalo Bar, snapping stuff on my mighty ‘berry and firing it off to SK.

Now when I got home from the show, around midnight ( I couldn’t stay to the end, had work early the next morning), I checked online to see if the photies had gotten through, and found that they weren’t there.

But then the next day, sometime in the afternoon when I checked again, there they were, all red, dark and blurred just the way I remembered it.

My ‘berry does have an awful lot of fluff on the lens. Perhaps other folk with more fancy camera phones can do better.

Ten artists themselves (part 1)

Is it cheating to check off gigs on songkick where you were in the band? Some would say yes, and so don’t bother, some people do. Me I reckon its fair enough, if most of RaysGigs’ 3,000 gig count comes from shows where he was a roadie, then its not cheating.

Here are ten people from bands or who are artists themselves on SongKick:-

1. Heather Nova who is Heather Nova
2. Emma from the band Pocketbooks
3. Daedelus who is Daedelus
4. Paul from the band The Martial Arts
5. Ink from the band How to Swim
6. Jona from the band Wintergreen
7. LooseCardiff from the band The School
8. HayJane from the band Witness to the Beard
9. Bookarooble who is Brooke Parrott
10. Nik from the band Moustache of Insanity

I gotta say, finding ten was a struggle, but there’s bound to be more musicy people out there. If I can find another ten it’ll make another post.

What’s the spread of gig counts like?

Whilst its hard to know exactly how many members SongKick has, finding out the spread of how many gigs each member has been to can easily be done from sampling.

I plug in random first names and letters into the searchbox and click on the people tab and note how many past concerts the first hundred people have attended.

To get a sample of a thousand members the search terms I used were “the”, “dave”, “Jam”, “wil”, “chris”, “phil”, “M”, “Be”, “Tom” and “ian”. The results come up broadly in alphabetical order.

I plug it all into Excel and get this wonderful pie chart:-

Hmm, I’m in the 501+ category myself, I think its just the way my brain works, but why on earth would you sign up to a site like SongKick without actually checking off any gigs that you’ve been to?

Why would you enter a username, your name, your location, and your email address, and then not even click on the last gig you were at. What sort of process leads to that eventuality?

Don’t most people find the gig first, and then sign up when you click on the green “I was there” button?

How fast is SongKick’s membership growing?

To figure out how fast SongKick’s memberbase is growing I track the number of people who’ve are listed as seeing one or two popular bands and the music festival Glastonbury. My theory being that lots of people go to Glasto, and lots of people have seen Radiohead, so if the number of people listed as having been to Glasto increases by 1%, then maybe the whole of  SongKick has grown by 1%.

Yeah, I know, real life ain’t quite like that, but its all I’ve got to go on at the mo.

Over the last fortnight the number of people who’ve checked off Radiohead has gone from 875 people to 903 people, that’s an increase of 28 people or just over 3%.

Fro tracking a handful of different bands and festivals I reckon over the last fortnight the number of people actually signing up and checking off gigs has increased by 5.3%.

Thats not to say SongKick’s entire memberlist has increased by 5.3%, as there are a lot more people who’ve signed up and not checked off any gigs than people who have.

How much traffic does SongKick get?

To answer that immortal question “How much traffic does X website get?” we turn to Alexa, the web information site.

A funky graph of their traffic rank:-

They show steadyish growth up until the start of the year, then spikes and declinishness.

But what does that mean? Is it good? How does it compare? What to compare it to?

Well, when I first heard about SongKick, it was explained me as last.fm but for gigs. Last.fm is a well established site, its been around for years now, and how does SongKick compare?

Bah, they’re a couple of orders of magnitude out.

So what can we compare the site to? Well, its a music website, based in the UK, as it Drowned In Sound. Alexa brings forth this graph:-

They match up quite well, SongKick as the challenger leaping ahead occasionally before slinking back. But broadly they have the same traffic rank according to Alexa.

There are of course other webtrafficy websites out there. WebTrafficAgents for example. They have actual pageview and hits figures:-

Daily Unique Visitors: 12,655
Daily Page Impressions: 137,562

Indeed, and how do Web Traffic Agents reckon that compares to DiS? Well their figures are:-

Daily Unique Visitors: 17,866
Daily Page Impressions: 66,697

Hmm, I know, DiS gets more different people, but SongKick viewers click around the site a lot more.

What’s it all about

I used to go to lots of gigs, hundreds of them, four or five a month, just any live music really, friends’ bands, bands people talked about, regular promoter’s nights. But I have a job, and my hours are grim, I need to be up at 4:30am in the morning sometimes, and I’m too old to be able to handle going out the night before.

So instead of going out, I stay online, scanning SongKick, and have SongKick Dreams.

This blog is a running commentry about SongKick, answering questions like:-

• How much traffic does SK get?
• How many members do they have?
• How many users?
• How fast is SK’s membership growing?
• What’s the spread of gig counts like?
• What’s the spread of band tracking?
• What sort of messages to people leave each other?
• Why sign up to the site without clicking on any gigs you’ve been to?

That sort of thing.

A blog about SongKick instead of a blog by SongKick, like you get blogs about Facebook or about Twitter, but this one is mine, I made this.

But can I really be bothered?
Would it get much traffic?
After answering those initial questions would there be any ‘news’ to report or interesting ‘mash-ups’ that people have created?
Is writing about the posts on SK blog acceptable?

Is there more to life than this?