SongKick Dreams

Songkick finally on Wikipedia

illman — Wed, 18 May 2011 21:34:48 +0000

Cos clicking refresh every day pays off

Crikey, time has passed, but at long last Songkick has its own entry on Wikipedia.

The page has been up since the start of May, with a bit of a flurry of activity over the following few days, adding citations from various New York Times and Guardian writeups, and now its kind of settled down.

Despite it taking a few years to get written on wikipedia, it seems to be getting a pretty constant stream of folk reading the page.

people read it every day?

Unless, of course its just the guys at the Songkick offices clicking refresh…

Ten more folk with more than 500 gigs

illman — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 23:48:17 +0000

Good lord, has it really been so long since I posted on this blog? I guess so.

By the looks of things the over 500 gigs club has doubled in size and new people join up and and put in all their gigs and people in the 400 gig club just keep on gigging, so here’s another list of ten SongKick users with more than five hundred gigs.

swimmingbadger – 1110 gigs
Gash65 – 781 gigs
craggsy – 779 gigs
garypulse – 686 gigs
Pandalucia – 655 gigs
Tad – 646 gigs
CitizenMeh – 641 gigs
daveo – 592 gigs
craigfryatt – 523 gigs
Anikainlondon – 523 gigs

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

Ten folk with more than 500 gigs

illman — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:26:07 +0000

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

illman — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:52:18 +0000

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

illman — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:26:15 +0000

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.

OddBox from OddBox Records
So Tough, So Cute from So Tough So Cute
Rory So Tough also from So Tough So Cute
Buro9 from RPM Night
The Luminaire the venue The Luminaire
Marcio from Goonite
Anthony Chalmers from Moonshine Jamboree
natalie_shaw from Pic n Mixx
AlexisBrooks from Camden Calling
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

illman — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:37:04 +0000

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)

illman — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:56:58 +0000

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:-

Heather Nova who is Heather Nova
Emma from the band Pocketbooks
Daedelus who is Daedelus
Paul from the band The Martial Arts
Ink from the band How to Swim
Jona from the band Wintergreen
LooseCardiff from the band The School
HayJane from the band Witness to the Beard
Bookarooble who is Brooke Parrott
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?

illman — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:23:02 +0000

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?

illman — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:59:53 +0000

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?

illman — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:48:29 +0000

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.