A comparison of concert tracking websites

Published on 25^th June 2009 in Usability, Websites, tagged Bandsintown, Last.fm, music, Songkick.

I love music, but I’ve hardly seen any bands live. Why? Because I never have any idea when artists are playing. Concert information has traditionally been very fragmented, with no central, dedicated service providing a single overview of what’s going on. Few artist websites provide an RSS feed and Last.fm’s events section does a poor job of recommending suitable concerts. However, a number of websites have emerged over the last year which seek to solve this problem and I thought I’d share my thoughts on two of them.

Songkick

I first heard about Songkick on a Guardian podcast last year and signed up immediately. However, their website was initially very confusing and didn’t work well at all. You downloaded a bit of software which scanned your iTunes library for music and then added artists to your profile. The problem was that it didn’t take account of how many times you listened to any particular band, so you ended up with everyone. I only want to see a few bands in my library live, not all 492!

Songkick’s upcoming events page gives you a clear overview of who’s playing when.

Fast forward to this year and Songkick has dramatically improved. The visual design has been overhauled and you can now add bands by importing your favourite artists from Last.fm. It provides a single, clear view of upcoming events, which is exactly what I want.

There are also a number of other features, such as the ability to add past concerts to your ‘Gigography’, similar to Last.fm. You can track more than one location, so for instance I’d be mainly interested in Nottingham, but would also consider going to London if it was an artist I really want to see. Songkick also allows provides links to one or more ticket vendors where available, which is presumably where they make their money on referral fees.

I do have a couple of reservations though. When I tried to import my favourites from Last.fm, it didn’t work and I had to email support. I did get it to work eventually, but even now it says “Import failed”. There’s also still too much visual emphases on adding events. Surely this is Songkick’s job, not the user’s? Maybe you’d want to add a little publicised event occasionally, but it’s not a main action I’d associate with this kind of website.

Bandsintown

Bandsintown offers a similar service and also allows you to import your Last.fm favourites, but feels less polished than Songkick. Instead of providing you with a list of all the events that your artists are playing at, it has a couple of views to choose from.

Bandsintown’s cloud view requires you to hover over each artist to view dates.

The first, which you always see when you log in, is a cloud of band names and the second is a more traditional calendar. I can understand the reasoning behind these two; the former answers the question “who is playing in town during this period?” and the latter “I’m free on this date, who’s paying then?”. However, both of these views require you to hover over either the band’s name or date to view basic event information and this makes it difficult to plan what you’re going to see.

For me, Bandsintown’s lack of a single list is its key flaw. The cloud view is an interesting idea and it has the added benefit of introducing you to bands not in your favourites, but it can’t replicate the usefulness of a straightforward list. If they provided something similar to Songkick’s default view, then I think it would make planning which concerts you want to see a great deal easier.

It does trump Songkick on a couple of things though. First of all, it has RSS and iCal feeds for your upcoming events; a seemingly obvious feature which only Bandsintown has. It also tends to show more ticket vendors than Songkick and lists the actual prices more frequently.

Conclusion

At the moment, Songkick provides the best experience and most useful service of the two websites. Its design has greatly improved since it was first launched and its single list view allows you to see when your favourite artists are playing at a glance. However, Bandsintown only requires a modest number of changes to be as valuable a service. Given the speed at which Songkick has gone from being confusing and unworkable to its current state, it would be very naïve to write off Bandsintown just yet.