Records & Concerts, Spotify & Songkick.

A few years ago our friend Anthony from Hype Machine invited me to the Spotify private alpha. Anthony does not recommend things lightly so I started playing with it and was blown away. We’ve been using it at Songkick ever since and I’ve lost track of how much great music I’ve discovered through Spotify – I’m currently working my way through Sasha Frere Jones’ epic Spotify playlists which span everything from Appleblim to The Fall.

We’ve got to know the Spotify team well over the past years and have been trying to figure out the perfect way to marry recorded and live music. Some kind of integration between Songkick & Spotify has been one of our most requested features, and many of you have written in with suggestions for what you’d like to see.

You know that cycle you go through when you discover a great new artist, find out they’re coming to town (through Songkick hopefully!), get tickets, and then in the lead up to the gig you listen to all their back catalogue, and then finally the rush of seeing them live. Then if it was a special show I’ll find myself listening to them intensely the days after the show digging into old albums and replaying songs from the set. We believe that the connection between a great record and a great concert could be even deeper and so today we’re launching the app to do just that.

Similar to our iPhone application, our Spotify application will scan your Library on Spotify and figure out which bands you’re listening to and give you an calendar, right within Spotify that shows all the concerts for artists you love, and finds you the cheapest tickets to the show.

If you’re on the road you can add another city to track and we’ll update your calendar to include that location as well. But what’s even cooler is that the city listings are now playable. So you can see who’s playing tonight, give a new band a listen and head out to the show.

And as with any of Songkick’s apps and partnerships, this all builds on top of our huge database of upcoming listings, from Cape Town to Chicago, with hundreds of ticket vendors spanning the big guys like Ticketmaster, to fast growing new vendors like Eventbrite, Front Gate Tickets and Ticketfly to artist ticket allocations on Crowdsurge & Topspin to tiny cash on the door shows in coffee shops & record stores. That’s a great marriage with Spotify’s epic catalogue of music.

If you’re a band this is great news – with your music on Spotify and your concerts on Songkick, we’ll connect the two and get more fans out to your shows, creating more memorable experiences, all over the world, wherever you’re touring. Keep adding your tour dates to Songkick and we’ll keep moving them all over the web for you.

So check it out! I’d love to hear any and all feedback you have on our app. We can’t wait to hear what you think.

The app is available through a special preview download of Spotify over the next week (http://www.spotify.com/uk/download/previews/) and then launches globally later in December. Help us kick the tyres on it over the next 7 days!

Bigup all of the Songkickers who have been pulling late nights and weekends to get this launched. Here’s a photo of our war room & a couple of shots of the app to check out.

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