Successful UK startup Songkick focuses on live music

Songkick is a successful British start up that aims to be “the home of live music on the web”, according to its co-founder Ian Hogarth. The main ingredient in striving to fulfil this mission is discovery: making available information about live music performances and making this information easy to share. The global focus is paying off: while the 23-strong team is firmly rooted in London, most of the traffic to Songkick’s site is generated by gigs outside the UK.  

On Songkick’s site, visitors are invited to build elaborate profiles for gigs, ‘gigographies’, with posters, videos, pictures etc. Most of the income comes from ticket sales, but the firm is exploring other sources, too. While Songkick does not reveal to a Guardian journalist how much is earned in what way, revenues run in the millions and are rising steeply.

According to Songkick founder Hogarth, London, thanks to the high density of cultural venues, is the perfect breeding ground for internet services that target what’s going on in the real world. “In San Francisco, maybe you'd find a developer who has 90% of his head space in code, but in Britain maybe it's more like Russ Garrett [a former LastFM developer], who spends half his time at gigs and half his time thinking about scaling. That's an asset for what we're doing here."

Silicon Valley, by contrast, is where you turn to when your plan is to grow big and attract crack coding staff and serious capital. Hogarth: “If you want to build the next Facebook or Twitter and support 20,000 people then you'd need to be there for better infrastructure, more graduates and more VC money.”

Source: The Guardian