The latest launch from the mighty Y Combinator start-up school, Songkick has ambitious plans to become the central, authoritative home for live music online. The team of seven started in April last year and, after nearly a year of research, technical work and no small amount of live gigs, launched the site just after the SXSW festival.
Songkick has had two funding rounds, receiving $15,000 from Y Combinator and an undisclosed amount from Saul Klein and Jeff Clavier, and now employs seven staff. Based in east London, Songkick has very big plans.
Chief executive Ian Hogarth explains more.
Songkick founders Pete Smith, Ian Hogarth and Michelle You. Photo: Copyright Cecile Mella
• Explain your business to my Mum.
"Right now it's a lot more hassle to go to a gig on a Friday night than it is to go to the cinema. Songkick wants to change that, by helping more people go to see great live music. We do that, first of all, by putting all the listings and all the concert tickets in one place so you can see everything happening. Then, we have a plug-in for your music player that learns what bands you like and lets you know if they come to your city. Finally, we recommend concerts in your area you might like, but don't know about, based on your personal taste."
• How do you make money?
"Songkick is a live music discovery service. Ticket vendors pay us for helping people find out about shows. We never charge our users for this. It costs the same as if you'd found the tickets yourself in the first place. We save you the hassle."
• What's your background?
"I have a master's in machine learning from Cambridge University and spent the last couple of years studying and working in Asia and DJing. Pete is my best friend from Cambridge where he studied law. He then worked for a small enterprise software firm. Michelle studied English and philosophy at Columbia before getting a master's in English at Cambridge. She worked in book and magazine publishing for several years. We're all huge live music fans and go to concerts about 3-4 times a month."
• Name your competitors.
"There are some similar services, such as Sonic Living, Jambase, and Tourfilter, but we're the first site to do live music recommendations, which we're really excited about. We want to do everything we can to increase your chances of finding a gig to go to this weekend. We also differentiate ourselves by making sure that when you do find a concert you're only one click away from buying a ticket. We do this by aggregating ticket inventory from 16 different ticket vendors in the UK and US."
• What's your biggest challenge?
"Getting the most comprehensive listings out there. We work really really hard on this."
• How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
"We relaunched the site with our new recommendation engine after SXSW and have seen over 1000 sign ups since then. Our main target for the next 12 months is to improve our listings to the point where they are as exhaustive as possible, making sure every last small band's gig is on our site, for as many countries as possible. We hope that leads to many millions of live music fans finding us an indispensable resource.
"It's also been really exciting that our relaunch has generated a lot of interest from some of our favourite music sites. They're looking to use our live music API to add tour information to their sites, and to contribute their data to Battle of the Bands. We'll be announcing some exciting partnerships soon."
• What's the weirdest business experience you've had so far?
"When we first launched the site back in October 2007, we had an interesting acquisition offer from an extramarital affair dating site. Maybe they thought concerts would be a good place to arrange a first date?"
• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
"We weren't involved in the web during the last one, so it's a hard question to answer. It sounds like egregious investments and careless spending on the companys' part were some of the things that categorised the first bubble.
"All the investors we've met have been very exacting in examining our potential longevity. Most of our friends in the start-up world (many from Y Combinator) are running their companies on very little money, and everyone is really bootstrapping for as long as possible. I think it is true that we are seeing a lot of web investments, but I think the flourishing is well-founded (it's relatively cheap to create a web start-up, so great ideas are proliferating), not because we're in a bubble."
• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
"We want to change the way people think about live music - to make it a really popular option for most people's Friday night. Seventy percent of adults didn't go to a gig last year. We're sure it's not because 70% of adults don't like live music, but because it's too difficult find out about and plan to go a concert. We want to help change that statistic."
• Are you the next big thing?
"Hopefully! We'd love to make live music more popular by taking the hassle out of the process."
It sounds exciting, but can it really work? Does live music really need a home online? And would you use it?
