Songkick Startup Gets Healthy Funding

Songkick, a website set in motion last year featuring comprehensive concert listings and recommendations, has moved past the humble startup phase. Though the site’s chief executive Ian Hogath refused to confirm an exact amount, rumors circulated last week of a cash infusion of an estimated $1.1 million – a round of funding that began in January and recently closed.

Songkick, a website set in motion last year featuring comprehensive concert listings and recommendations, has moved past the humble startup phase. Though the site’s chief executive Ian Hogath refused to confirm an exact amount, rumors circulated last week of a cash infusion of an estimated $1.1 million – a round of funding that began in January and recently closed. Personal investor Saul Klein, a founding partner of The Accelerator Group, and SoftTech VC were reported backers in the venture’s future. That’s compared to the site’s initial funding of $1.02 million in June, 2007, from Y Combinator.

Seeking to be as comprehensive as possible in its concert listings, even by dipping regularly into bands’ MySpace pages that boast at least 50 friends, Songkick hopes to include, according to the site, “every single concert in existence – no matter how obscure the band or tiny the venue.” Users can even create a profile page of their favorite bands to receive updates on shows in their area, and the site has also created a downloadable plug-in for iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp applications that scans the user’s music library, and adds those found artists into a Tour Tracker to send the user regular updates on those artist’s itineraries. Yet another popular feature that sets Songkick apart from similar listing sites such as Pollstar.com is its Alexa look-alike engine, “Battle of the Bands,” that keeps up-to-date tabs on blog buzz surrounding bands to rank them against one another. For instance, one band’s MySpace profile views and Amazon.com sales ranks pit them against similar gathered data on the user’s other favorite bands, which is drawn into graphs that can be imbedded on blogs and other websites. For now, about 1 million bands are constantly being tracked by Songkick.