Songkick, a website that lists music gigs old and new and which lets attendees share their experiences, has struck an arrangement to syndicate concert listings to YouTube and Vevo.
YouTube is using Songkick’s API to show upcoming nearby gigs to users of its music section and its Vevo music videos off-shoot.
Links point to gigs’ corresponding full page on Songkick, which aims to make money from affiliate income by directing users to listed ticketing agencies, so this could help grow the startup’s business.
Songkick raised a seed round from Y Combinator in 2007, $1.1 million from investors including Saul Klein in 2008 and a further $4 million later that year from Last.fm backer Index Ventures.
With so many ways now for people to express their musical tastes, we’ve always thought the service, founded by Ian Hogarth, Peter Smith and Michelle You, had at least as much potential in licensing out its gig listings as in trying to be a destination site in its own right…
Hogarth blogs that its business “started with songkick.com, but has since expanded through our API to include a network of partners” including Hype Machine, Songbird, We Are Hunted, Grooveshark, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Philips.
Hogarth tells paidContent:UK: “Our long-term goal is to increase the volume of people who discover concerts through Songkick every month, either on our own site (currently 1.3 million monthly uniques) or on our partner network (now many tens of millions of uniques).
“The business model for Songkick is e-commerce – driving sales of tickets, and in the future live recordings, concert merchandise and memorabilia.”
One grumble: listings on YouTube are only showing me a tiny percentage of the gigs Songkick.com itself actually holds.