Combining Forces with the Wikipedia Universe

Songkick
Songkick
Published in
2 min readApr 27, 2017

Songkick is teaming up with the online encyclopedia’s fact-gathering engine to share concert information

With the largest concert database in the world — more than 5.4 million events, and 12,000 more added each week — we take pride in the depth of our live music data. It’s been used to tell stories about how artists’ careers grow, and to recognize the artists who travel the most on tour. Not to mention the fact that 15 million people are visiting us each month find out when their favorite artists are playing nearby.

And now, we’re excited to share that Songkick’s concert data is now partnering with the largest reference website in the world, sharing touring artist information to Wikidata. Wikidata is the back-end database for Wikipedia, storing and connecting the online facts, identifiers and classifications of any given entity you’d find on Wikipedia (in our case, this means artist Wikipedia profiles).

So what does this all mean? By sharing data between Songkick and Wikidata, we’re able to:

  • Ensure that in all 290 languages of the world’s largest online encyclopedia, artist profiles connect with accurate, up-to-date touring information.
  • Verify the accuracy of Songkick’s artist data and source even more details about the artists you see on our platform.
  • Link touring details with demographic information and other profiles including Spotify, SoundCloud, and social channels.
  • Integrate Songkick touring data more easily with additional partners, by combining Wikidata identifiers.
  • Make Songkick data more accessible via Wikidata’s API — for example, you could pull the Songkick IDs (i.e. touring data) for all bands from New York, or whose debut album was released in 1973.

Links to Songkick artist pages will be available from each Wikidata entry and across the Wikipedia universe. So if you’re searching for Wikipedia information on, say, Future Islands, you can access their Songkick artist page with tour information in just one click.

We want to thank Andy Mabbett, who has been a Wikipedia editor and Wikimedia volunteer for more than a decade, and partnered with us to ensure Songkick identifiers are reflected across hundreds of thousands of artists on Wikidata.

Entries have been verified by Wikipedia’s team of editors and are currently live. If you’re interested in exploring various ways of working with Songkick’s data, feel free to reach out at press@songkick.com.

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