Songkick.com Inc. CEO Ian Hogarth isn't quite ready to confirm the size of his company's
reported $1.1 million first round of funding, but he tells me that it has formally closed its Series A round. The company, which provides a calendaring service and ticket-buying hub for live music fans, has received capital from Accelerator Group founder and
Index Ventures partner Saul Klein,
SoftTechVC's
Jeff Clavier, Ticketweb co-founder Dan Porter, Music Nation's Peter
Read, New York-based seed investment partnership Betaworks and other unnamed investors for
additional capital. The funding arrived over several installments, and rolls up seed money from incubator
Y Combinator as well.
Founded last year and launched in March, Songkick competes most directly with Bay Area-based
SonicLiving Inc., although JamBase Inc., iLike Inc. and Last.fm Ltd. (
acquired last year by CBS Broadcasting Inc.) all provide live-music tracking tools in addition to other content and services. SonicLiving, which includes more extensive social networking features than the others and launched more than two years ago, is said to be in the process of raising its first institutional round. Another site, ConcertAttack.com, which allows users to post reviews and photos after attending live shows, was
launched by New York-based Pegworks Inc. earlier this month, and also plans to raise a Series A round.
According to Hogarth, Songkick has taken a few key steps to differentiate itself from its peers, which typically deploy tools that search a user's preferred music-playing applications to create "wishlists" of favorite artists, then notify the user when the artists are coming to town. Songkick has designed a live-music recommendation engine that mines text from music blogs and other Web sources, thereby garnering information about local bands that play often but haven't been recorded yet.
What's more, Hogarth says key music search engines
Seeqpod Inc.,
Hype Machine Inc. and
Qloud, (acquired, at least
partially, by Buzznet Inc.), are also using Songkick's API to notify users about live shows when they search for songs. And it's also introduced
Songkick Labs, which he describes as a sort of "Alexa for bands" that gauges the rising and falling popularity of artists based on blog mentions, MySpace presence and Amazon.com sales. Ultimately, Hogarth says his goal is to simplify the experience of finding out about upcoming music events, even in the hopes of rekindling enthusiasm for live music in music fans who have lapsed from their old show-going habits.
While the new funding will be used primarily to attract top engineering talent, Hogarth says a second round is possible later this year. The original investor syndicate was "deliberately balanced" among California, East Coast and European investors, and a future round is likely to be similar, he says.
-- Paul BonanosSee previous posts from Tech Confidential concerning
Songkick and
ConcertAttackFor more, see
VentureBeat
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