One of the features songkick totes is its ability to look at your computer's music library (iTunes, Winamp and Windows Media Player) and build recommendations. Songkicker is a downloadable plug-in which automatically scans your entire music library and adds these artists into your Tour Tracker -- without you ever having to do anything! The Songkicker automatically runs in the background whenever you play music. Every track you play is Songkicked to us and appears in your "Recently Songkicked" section. Though it seems to free up a lot of time and lessens the amount of manual user input, I don't feel very comfortable with "tracking devices" on my PC....thats just my personal opinion though!
So How Does it Work?
Good question!! The most Ive been able to decipher is this....Any mention of music on the web is a data point for recommendations. Their recommendation engine doesnt generate suggestions from the user base like Last.fm or through careful analysis like my favorite toy, Pandora, but instead it crawls websites like Wikipedia and music blogs to pick up related artisted based on positive or negative associations between the bands. Through a combination of including anything about music on the internet coupled with using "expert" critical opinion from blogs and music publications, the technology is able to infer similarities between artists, compare this to your personal music taste and recommend concerts that you might actually enjoy. I wish I could get a better grasp of what depicts positive and negative or better details about how "similarities" between artists are identified but I'm unable to locate the specifics. It just launched on March 18, 2008 so maybe more details will be released in the future!
Supposedly the real payoff is buying tickets, allowing you to find the cheapest tickets for these shows. Songkick provides direct links to ticket inventory from 16 vendors across the U.S. and U.K.
As a closing point - for artist and band bloggers, Songkick, offers these individuals a way to make extra money with a widget that identifies bands on tour mentioned on their blogs, and inserts tour information and ticket vendor links that can be tracked for referrals.
Did I Test It Out?
Of course I did! The first three artists I input were individuals who I know are touring! I input Jay-Z and Mary J Blige (they will be in Greensboro NC on Saturday) and then Kanye West (he's coming to Charlotte on May 2). Jay-Z and Mary didnt return any results, not even the concert in Greensboro but Kanye did appear. I switched the artists and added 3 more artists: Lauryn Hill, The Roots and Pharrell Williams. Both The Roots and Pharrell are coming to Charlotte but I didn't get any results for them either. So I decided to signup (username/password: prsrecommend) and I played around a little more. I selected John Mayer, Maroon 5 and Avril Lavigne. I didn't know any of these artists were touring and actually found their dates in Charlotte so that was pretty neat. I am still extremely interested in knowing how similar artists are derived because they did seem to do a decent job of suggesting artists that I know and enjoy. Perhaps it's based on popularity and if they're scanning the web, I would bet money that's how it's determined.....maybe I'll continue investigating!!
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