You’ve got iTunes, you’ve got Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Mp3, some music apps for you iPhone or Android device, and you’ve been discovering new music like gangbusters–now you want to find some live concerts in your area featuring some of your newly discovered artists. Where do you turn? You could search your favorite venues or ticket outlets online, but what if the concert you’re looking for isn’t at one of your usual venues, or the tickets aren’t being sold through Ticketmaster, Live Nation, or Stub Hub? It could be a long tedious search.
Enter Songkick. One place to get notifications in advance for concerts by (only) your favorite artists in or near the cities you specify, along with links to ticket sales for each concert–and it’s free. And it has versions for iPhone, Android, MS Outlook, an add-in for Spotify, syncs with Facebook, Last.fm, Pandora, Google Play, and other popular apps and media.
Here’s how it works–and there are so many options–so this is just the tip of the iceberg. First you go to the Songkick homepage.
First you go to the Songkick homepage.
Next click the “Sign Up” button at the top of the page. There’s nothing to it. You enter an email address and password, prove your human, then click the “Sign Up Free” button. Don’t worry if it’s showing your location already and it’s not quite right. You’ll have a chance to enter that when you choose your locations.
At this point, if you have Spotify, I would recommend clicking on the “Get App on Spotify” button. It will walk you through a very simple process in which Spotify gets launched, the Songkick Spotify screen opens, the app searches your playlists, creates a list of artists which you can then edit by checking or unchecking them individually, and deleting the ones you don’t want to track for concert dates.
Spotify gets launched and the Songkick App screen opens.
Notice that the Songkick App is now listed with any other apps you’ve added to Spotify (over on the left, just above your playlists). You can return to Songkick anytime by just clicking on the app in your Spotify Apps. The list of artists you just created and edited as described above, will be the basis or starting point for your customized concert and tour date tracking and notifications. This is a lot easier than building your list from scratch and entering all your artists manually. You may want to consider it a rough draft which you can fine tune any time you want. But there is one other important thing you need to do before Songkick will work perfectly for you.
The final thing you need to do–if your Songkick account is going to work properly–is click on “Your Locations” to enter the cities closest to you, depending on how far you’re willing to travel for a concert. Just enter the main ones, or if you live in a major metropolitan area just enter that. Songkick will search from a fairly wide radius–something like 50-75 miles–of the locations you enter.
Enter the cities closest to you, depending on how far you’re willing to travel for a concert. Or, if you live in a major metropolitan area, just enter that.
That is it, my friend! That’s all you need to do to begin receiving notifications of where and when your favorite artists will be playing. By using the MS Outlook Calendar add-in, or Google Calendar, or other options, you can customize the way you want to receive and view your notifications. There are many more things you can do with Songkick and I encourage you to explore them at will, but what I’ve listed here is all you need know to get started. You will be amazed at how cool and how easy it is to use Songkick.
madjamison 