Songkick helps you discover new bands and their upcoming shows
To compliment the band mentions on blog posts there's a really great service the team has built called battle of the bands. Like Alexa and Compete, battle of the bands lets you compare up to three bands together to see which one's been the most "hot" in the past five weeks based on various interactions on MySpace as well as mentions in blog posts, and the Amazon.com sales rank. The system is built to accept other streams of data, so if and when Facebook begins to make the data on artist pages a little more transparent, those numbers could be integrated into the stats too.This third leg of the service, called "BandSense" is a very novel concept. Bloggers who want to opt into the service can embed a line of Javascript into a single post or their entire blog template and get links to bands at the bottom of a post if they're mentioned. It's not just any a link spamming option, the service will only create links for bands only that are on tour. Clicking the band link in the blog goes straight to the tour dates and ticket pricing information, and if a user buys a ticket, the blog owner gets a cut. To compliment the system and keep bands you don't like (but mentioned) off your blog, you can create a blacklist. These blacklisted artists will get no such link love.In the future Hogarth tells me there will be music integration on the Songkick band pages as well as the recommendations so you can listen to some tracks without having to navigate offsite. The only delay has been finding a way to do it democratically with all of the music hosting services out there. Songkick already has integration on partnered sites like Qloud and Seeqpod, and in the future intends to spread its tour date and recommendation engine even further.
