Livekick’s City Guides Brings You Local Concert Listings

It’s been a while since we’ve posted on the Livekick blog, but we wanted to let you know that our team has been busy working on new features, landing accolades for our existing ones (check out Livekick in Filter Magazine’s Good Music Guide) and catching as many live music performances as we can.

 

You may have noticed some new features on the Livekick site recently. We’d like to formally introduce you to our newest feature:

City Guides comprehensive local live concert listings that give you the ability to find concerts by city.  In addition to City Guides, we’ve also introduced Price Alerts and Genre search, all features that make it even easier for you to find concerts and buy tickets at the lowest available price.

City Guides are available for every major city in the United States, giving you a local view of the live concerts taking place nearby.  The search options available on each City Guide page, including search by venue, music genre, and calendar view, make it easy for you to discover concerts of interest, even those taking place tonight.

 

Price Alerts notify you via email when tickets to a specific concert become available at a set price or quantity.  On any concert listing page, you can click the “alert me” button to enter ticket price and/or ticket quantity and set up an email notification. When the ticket price drops below the level you set or when the quantity of tickets you’re looking for are found, Livekick will send an email notification with the information.

 

Genre search allows you to search and discover concerts by music genres such as rock, electronic, pop, folk, DJ, or others. Registered Livekick users can also receive recommendations on additional genres and specific artists they may appreciate based on their existing list of favorite artists.

 

Be sure to check out the City Guide for your area and let us know what you think via email at support@livekick.com or Twitter: http://twitter.com/livekick

What media and users are saying about Livekick

Since our official launch a few weeks ago, it has been thrilling to hear from our users and press about their experiences using Livekick. Our team has been working hard to optimize the user experience, and when we hear comments like these, it’s hard not to share them. We’re especially proud that so many journalists have declared Livekick their personal favorite live concerts and tickets site.

“For keeping track of old favorites on tour, Livekick beats any other site I’ve seen so far.” – CNET

“Browsing through various concerts, it seems as though Livekick has more options at a cheaper rate [than a similarly named concert-finding site].” – Paste Magazine

“Livekick makes concert-going easier. The site’s design makes it easy to understand and a pleasure to look at.” – The Rundown

“Livekick has realized that most of us already have too many social networks.  So instead of trying to get you to make Livekick the center of your universe, they are trying to make Livekick a part of your existing online experience. Livekick truly integrates with all the other sites and tools that you already use.” – MusicPlayer.me

We welcome your comments about what we’re doing right, and how we can improve. Keep ‘em coming!

CNET – Livekick is our new favorite web site for finding concerts

CNET.com music and tech blog recently reviewed http://livekick.com and they liked the fact that you can easily add all artists and composers from your desktop iTunes library and other music web services:

“Livekick lets you import them directly from iTunes, as well as online music services such as iLike, Pandora, and Last.fm. (Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.) This not only saves hours of time–the import took about 10 seconds for more than 600 artists–but it also helps you remember artists you wouldn’t have thought to follow.”

We’ve built these features so you don’t have to enter your favorite artists manually. We provide another way to automatically track your favorite artists tours – We have free low-touch desktop widgets for both Mac OS X and Windows that allow you to automatically add all the artists you listen to on your desktop to your livekick account. Once your artists are in your account, you’ll get personalized concert alerts when these artists announce a concert near you and you’ll also get recommendations for similar artists on local tour. For the Mac OS X, the widget is a dashboard widget that also gives you concert recommendations in your dashboard. For windows, the widget is a tray-icon app that works in the background and uploads artist names to livekick as you listen to new music in Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes or add new music to your Windows music folder. If you are fanatic about finding out when your fave artist is in town next, download and install these widgets.

More info on the Livekick desktop software. Here’s the CNET.com blog post about Livekick.

PC Magazine: Track your favorite bands on tour

PC Magazine just published a review of online web sites that help you track your favorite bands on tour. We like it that they found Livekick to be easy, simple and handy and that they put us on top of the list of the reviewed web sites. We hope this article will bring more people to try out Livekick and to go out and check out some great live music this summer.

For the full article see: Track your favorite bands on tour.

New search feature live on livekick.com

We’ve just upgraded the concerts search on http://livekick.com and we would like to share with you why we feel good about it. Google is the king of general purpose web search and Yahoo! and Microsoft are trying to catch up, partly by having better vertical search results in some domains. The new Microsoft Bing search engine is about to introduce several targeted vertical search results options. We, at Livekick are trying to provide the best search in just one area – US Live music concerts, so we’ve optimized the experience based on how people search for live concerts on the web. We believe we have a pretty good solution. Read on and judge for yourself. Let us know how you like our new search.

Results are fetched from our daily updated database of all US upcoming concerts, performing artists and venues. Our current index includes about 80,000 concerts, 20,000 artists on tour and 40,000 live venues and includes both small and large concerts and venues.

Search results are now displayed in 3 tabs – Artists, Concerts and Venues. Most people search for concerts by entering an artist name. For these searches, we made it easy and fast to disambiguate between artists with the same name or with similar names to the search query to catch common misspellings, so users can quickly get to the relevant artist tour page and check out local and nationwide concert for this artist. Here are few examples: Fleetwood Mac concerts near NY , Beastie Boys concerts near San Francisco . The results include the number of local concerts based on where you search from, so it is easy to see if the band you are searching about plays near you.

Some people search by festival or concert name and in some cases these names do not match a performing artist name. For example try: All Points West Festival and just click on the ‘Concerts’ tab. These users will like the results in the new Concerts tab. The tab will list all concerts with similar names to the search query and will group local and nationwide concerts separately.

Some people search by venue name to see a list of upcoming concerts in a venue. Venue results are displayed in the new Venues tab. All results are local based on where users search from, so searching for Fillmore in San Francisco will show the local famous venue first in the Venues results tab. For example. Try one of these links and click on the ‘Venue’ tab in the results: search results for Fillmore when searching from the Bay Area. Search results for Fillmore when searching from NY.

Getting live concert alerts on Twitter

Did you know you can get live concert alerts on twitter from Livekick when one of your favorite artists is playing near you? Here’s how to set it up:

1. Go to http://livekick.com and create an account or sign-in to your account.

2.Go to your artists and add your favorite artists.

3. Go to your concerts, click on the Twitter icon on the top-right side of the page and follow the instructions.

That’s it. You’ll get a direct Tweet from Livekick when we have a tour to alert you about based on your favorite artists. Just follow the link in the Tweet to find out about tour dates, tickets availability and pricing.

Livekick in OnHollywood 100 winners list

OnHollywood 100 winner

Livekick is happy to have been chosen by AlwaysOn editors and a panel of industry experts to be among this year’s AlwaysOn Hollywood 100 winners list for the consumer services category.  Every year the AlwaysOn media network honors the best up-and-coming companies in digital media and entertainment that demonstrate innovation, market traction, and significant technological advancements.  More information on the announcement is available here.  Livekick is also participating in the Hollywood 100 event this week in LA.

Livekick API Updates

We have been working hard on our local concerts API and we are delighted that several major apps and media web sites have started to successfully use our API to display local concert listings. We hope to be able to announce this exciting new partnerships soon. We have also updated the API documentation, improved performance and added functionality. For more info, see: Livekick API.

New Livekick feedback forums

Vote on your fave missing livekick feature, give us feedback and see what other Livekick users want to have.

http://livekick.uservoice.com

Improvements to the Livekick API

The Livekick API allows web developers to add rich and up-to-date live concerts and tour information to their web applications.

We’ve just added a new method that makes it easy to get a complete up-to-date listing of all US touring artists.

For more information about our API and this method see: http://code.google.com/p/livekick/wiki/ApiDocs