Gigs. Standing for hours holding slowly warming glasses or plastic cups of overpriced, watered-down beer waiting for the band you’ve paid Ticketbitch £xx in booking fees just to catch a glimpse of before intermittent power failure and a deaf sound engineer send you reeling homewards only to discover that the last tube leaves early on a Wednesday.
Still, if that’s what you’re into, you may wish to consider using the social network of Songkick to record your presence at these momentous events and be all like “I WZ THR DDE!” You can go back 20 years and search for past shows or just delve into upcoming gigs by your favourite artists, stalk – sorry, track – friends and get alerts about gigs they’re attending so you can see just how frequently you are not being invited out – it’s quite something.Obviously, the more people you track, the more gigs and information appear in your recent activity feed.
If you’re an artist, you can list your gigs a la Last FM and get people to say that they’ll be attending, but beware the American date format. Gee, awesome!
Here’s what the Songkick CEO Ian Hogarth has to say: “We wanted to give these events a place to live forever, so we’ve spent a year aggregating Songkick’s database. We now provide an online home for the social documentation of these events, which we hope will serve as a testament to the history of live music.”
Ambitious ‘aint he? Well, if you decide to get your ass on Songkick, you can track me: Sheq. I don’t get out much, mind.