ian

if you're open to exploring other possibilities drop me a line. we are looking for talented people who share our passion for live music. [ianATsongkick]

We wanted to be based in one of the live music capitals of the world to be close to our industry and were torn between New York and London. It could have quite easily gone either way. Over the last few years Europe has become quite a strong place for online music (Last.fm of course, and now Spotify and Soundcloud), which is nice to see.

It's hard not being based in the Valley though and means a lot more travel if you want to close major distribution partnerships. You have to appear like you're based in the Valley to really compete for deals.

Last.fm's data is amazing, and definitely more valuable than ours for predicting trends in recorded music. We focus 100% on live music though, so have some interesting information of our own on the concert industry - for example which tickets are selling fastest. One interesting stat I just discovered relating to your point is that 90% of tickets are now bought online, which is up from something like 40% a few years back.

will fix that, thanks for the heads up.

I'm not really sure how Compete could be getting that from our stats. We've actually seen some nice growth over the past year. Maybe I should just get our site quantified and put it all out there via Quantcast. Alexa is usually the most accurate I've found.

Hey Ian from Songkick here, bands in town didn't plagiarise us, we launched around the same time back in 2007. They're good guys.

If any of you guys are going to shows soon and use twitter, we'd love your feedback.

Sounds good. I'm @soundboy on twitter. That was the easiest way to organise things last time.

Yeah I agree, I think any future speakers will aim for 30 mins max. The Erlang guys did an awesome job, my fault for not setting clearer guidelines...

That's exactly what the demos are for - each month about 4-5 hackers spend 5 mins each demoing something cool they've built. Would be great to check out your project at the next one.

We've got a some start-ups & hackers doing demos as usual, but no formal speaker for this one. Will be organising speakers for some of the upcoming meetups. How did you find the Erlang one? Anyone you'd particularly like to see speak?

An interesting piece on the subject here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/08/gender.weekend7

One way in which this can occur is if you raise a seed round in convertible debt which converts into preferred stock at a following Series A.

Glad to hear it!

Thanks very much guys for the kind words

Congratulations guys, get those black t-shirts on!

0:55

2 thoughts:

1. it's really cool how many locations they've funded companies in

2. Eric Marcoullier does a mean robot dance

Massive congratulations to Drew and Arash

Totally agree, I've wanted this to exist for a while. Thanks guys.

hey man i'm sorry to hear we've missed some of the stuff you go to. it's a big priority for us to go right to the very end of the tail.

we have though got pretty much every ticketed concert in the UK and US listed so would love to see examples of stuff we're missing when you come across them (ian at our domain).

Hey Omakase, if you've had trouble finding tickets check out Songkick. We've built the largest database (over 20 ticket vendors now) of ticketed concerts in the world so hopefully can help.

nice work Babul. Peter (Nixey) and Harj are the masters of US Visa stuff. Let us (Songkick) know if you've got any questions about applying to YC from the UK. Happy to chat on Skype. You can also grab me at one of our Hacker Meetups if in London at any point.

Updated! Sorry about that.

Sorry about that truebosko. We're working on extending our coverage to Canada & Australia over the next months. We focused initially on getting as comprehensive as possible in the UK and US (focusing on doing a good job in a specific niche) before adding other countries. Live music has a really long tail and we want to build a product that really hard core live music fans like ourselves will trust. Canada is coming soon though. We've got a big integration with Songbird launching next week and their community is asking for that pretty loudly as well!

we (Songkick) have already built an aggregator for concert tickets - covering 17 ticket vendors in the UK and US. If you're looking for gig tickets I'd love your feedback. Thanks

We did as well and they saved us a fair bit of cash - not to mention the hassle of figuring out what vanilla terms should look like.

Awesome you guys are going this. We should tie this up with the Hacker Meetups we've been running for the last 6 months in London.

Fresh!

congratulations!