Songkick & Spotify: Seamless Concert Discovery

A year ago our friends over at Spotify invited us to be part of the launch of their app platform, and we were excited to get on board. We took everything you guys have told us about how you listen to music and discover concerts and created a brand new app, built from the ground up to take advantage of Spotify’s platform. Things like letting you browse concerts by city and making the listings actually playable, so you could sample a band playing nearby tonight.

As with any new platform, you never really know how people will react, but we were really overwhelmed when over 100,000 fans installed our app within a few months. Since then we’ve alerted fans about millions of concerts, everything from tiny coffee shop gigs to ‘Ye and Jay’s marathon Watch The Throne tour. We’ve had such fantastic feedback from fans about the app and critical recognition from people we look up to. We see our Spotify app, along with our apps for iOS and Android, as a core part of our mission to help more fans see more artists live. With the average artist making over 70% of their income from touring, this is great for fans but also makes a very meaningful difference to a band’s finances.

And the fact that Songkick has the deepest and most comprehensive database of concerts worldwide is even more powerful when combined with the huge variety of music that fans listen to on Spotify. The ever insightful Glenn Peoples over at Billboard nailed this in a recent post on the touring industry:

“It appears the types of concerts they [fans] attend are changing. Amphitheater shows have been deemphasized in favor of arenas, and smaller venues are doing healthy business. Expect this trend to continue over time as the number of superstars decline and the number of mid- and lower-tier artists increases. Look at the trend already seen in recorded music sales and fast-forward 20 years: fewer legacy artists able to fill arenas and more young bands playing clubs and theaters. “

That gets me really excited. I’ve got a whole bunch of friends in young bands, and the idea of helping them sell out their first shows is one of the things that gets me excited every morning to figure out what we build next at Songkick.

Since their platform launch Spotify have seen more and more brands, artists and start-ups build apps to the point where there are now hundreds of amazing apps. We’re really honoured to have been chosen as one of their 3 launch partners today for the next evolution of the Spotify platform.

Since we started talking with Spotify about this app, we’ve always hoped to make the connection between recorded music and live shows completely seamless. I think that’s what we’ve achieved with this integration. Now when you fire up Spotify, right on their home screen we’ll recommend you the latest concerts we think you’d like to check out. Those recommendations take you into our app where you can get caught up on all the artists you love coming through town and buy tickets and plan to go with friends.

This also coincides with Spotify rolling out their platform onto the web and mobile, so that even more people can experience how great their apps are.

It’s taking the whole experience up one more level and we’re honoured to be a part of today’s announcement. To all our friends over in Stockholm, Skål! Good luck today!

I’ve copied a sneak peek of our integration – hope you’re as excited to play with this as we have been.