4 ms·

Hi, ian here from Songkick (YC summer '07 batch). We're based in East London. If you're UK based get in touch - can introduce you to other hackers in the UK doi

by ian 19y ago

Hi, ian here from Songkick (YC summer '07 batch). We're based in East London. If you're UK based get in touch - can introduce you to other hackers in the UK doing/interested in start-ups. We'll organise some drinks soon. You can reach us at founders at songkick dot com.

dood 19y ago
Huh, I hadn't seen Songkick before, it looks great! I had the same frustration with finding shows from bands I like, and wanted to make something similar. I'm sure it'll be a hit if you get the data and some half-decent recommendations.
- ian 19y ago
  Thanks man! Hope to meet you in person soon. What do you think of our recommendations right now? We're taking a different approach to the 2 most popular paradigms: collaborative filtering on your userbase (e.g. Last.fm) or expert hand labeling (e.g. Pandora). Instead we consider any implicit or explicit relationship between two artists expressed on the web as a data point for our recommendation engine to analyse. This could for example be that Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem were mentioned in the same review. We also incorporate data from our users' listening histories. You can see the recommendations at work on artist pages and on our Band Manager. Our goal is to generate recommendations that harness the wisdom of the biggest crowd possible: all music lovers anywhere on the web. We're not there yet but would love to hear what you think of the first results.
  - dood 19y ago
    I had a look around the artists pages; the recommendations are good, each set seems fairly solid with mostly nothing too irrelevant, the main associations I would expect are generally there, the results seem fairly consistent across genres, and pretty good for niche/non-mainstream bands too. If this is all hand-rolled from web crawling and that sort of thing, rather impressive! A couple of thoughts/ideas: It'd be good to have more recommendations for bands who have dates coming up. As someone wanting to see shows, I'd generally like to see at least a couple of recommendations for specific tours, as long as they're fairly relevant. Though I imagine the main issue with this is tour data, rather than recommending. Also, If I'm looking for touring bands, it doesn't seem quite right to get several recommendations for bands I know I'll never see, like Nirvana and Biggie Smalls, so maybe you could provide separate result sets for bands that are touring and bands that aren't. Another suggestion is to have a little more randomness, or a little more tolerance for less-close matches, or different types of closeness. The results tend toward big names/popular bands, but it may be good to throw in more that are more closely related by genre/style, and less by prominence. You may even consider randomly removing some of the biggest bands from results, otherwise you end with e.g. Metallica recommended for every band when browsing around any vaguely rocky bands. There are a couple of cases where it seems maybe you've sucked in some related but irrelevant data, and end up giving word-concept recommendations, e.g. for Underworld I got [Gods, Hades, Orpheus, Doom, Demon, Witch, Terror, Curse, Warrior, Dawn] Of course all this depends on the user and context. A disclaimer then: I'm a huge music fan, but my comments are probably coloured by my (generally, somewhat) less mainstream tastes. Sorry to go on so much, but I'm very interested in both music and recommendations, so I'm finding it hard to stop myself. But good job, it looks to be a very useful site that I would use. I'd very much like to hear more about it, and what you plan on doing with it when this meetup happens.
    - ian 19y ago
      Thanks very much for your feedback man. We're aware of the issue that occurs with a few bands (e.g. Underworld) and are fixing that. Imagine my horror when I was listening to one of my favourite London producers Burial and got recommended bands like Grave, Funeral, Resurrection. That'll be fixed soon. We're also going to make the recommendations much more tour focused as you suggest. The goal is to really separate the signal out from the noise so you know which of the hundreds of small gigs going on are most likely to interest you. We're also going to have user preferences for the recommendations (particularly how obscure you want them to be and whether you only want to see artists on tour. RIP B.I.G.) Really interested to talk more at the hacker meetup. I've got a ton of emails so should be a good group.
      - neil_cauldwell 19y ago
        Hey Ian You'll like this; I've been in talks with a London-based investor. At the end of one of our meetings, the investor was checking his emails and pulled-up the Songkick powerpoint via an angel network they'd signed-up to! Then the following week you guys hit TechCrunch! That was pretty exciting and inspirational for me! I'm eager to meet some fellow founders & hackers - so I've got to make OCC London and these hacker meetups...
        ian 19y ago
        Thanks for letting me know! Look forward to meeting you soon.
gordonguthrie 19y ago
Ian Gordon from Project Playfair (now hypernumbers.com) - we met at Seedcamp... We have an alpha SDK out at the moment - we should show it to you before I head back to Scotland in a couple of weeks... Just used Songkick - stuck in an obscure artiste and it turns out he's playing in Edinburgh 2 weeks after I get home - you seem to be serving some tasty dogfood there son... Drop us a line at gordon blah-blah hypernumbers.com Gordon

by ian 19y ago

dood 19y ago

Huh, I hadn't seen Songkick before, it looks great! I had the same frustration with finding shows from bands I like, and wanted to make something similar. I'm sure it'll be a hit if you get the data and some half-decent recommendations.

ian 19y ago
Thanks man! Hope to meet you in person soon. What do you think of our recommendations right now? We're taking a different approach to the 2 most popular paradigms: collaborative filtering on your userbase (e.g. Last.fm) or expert hand labeling (e.g. Pandora). Instead we consider any implicit or explicit relationship between two artists expressed on the web as a data point for our recommendation engine to analyse. This could for example be that Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem were mentioned in the same review. We also incorporate data from our users' listening histories. You can see the recommendations at work on artist pages and on our Band Manager. Our goal is to generate recommendations that harness the wisdom of the biggest crowd possible: all music lovers anywhere on the web. We're not there yet but would love to hear what you think of the first results.
- dood 19y ago
  I had a look around the artists pages; the recommendations are good, each set seems fairly solid with mostly nothing too irrelevant, the main associations I would expect are generally there, the results seem fairly consistent across genres, and pretty good for niche/non-mainstream bands too. If this is all hand-rolled from web crawling and that sort of thing, rather impressive! A couple of thoughts/ideas: It'd be good to have more recommendations for bands who have dates coming up. As someone wanting to see shows, I'd generally like to see at least a couple of recommendations for specific tours, as long as they're fairly relevant. Though I imagine the main issue with this is tour data, rather than recommending. Also, If I'm looking for touring bands, it doesn't seem quite right to get several recommendations for bands I know I'll never see, like Nirvana and Biggie Smalls, so maybe you could provide separate result sets for bands that are touring and bands that aren't. Another suggestion is to have a little more randomness, or a little more tolerance for less-close matches, or different types of closeness. The results tend toward big names/popular bands, but it may be good to throw in more that are more closely related by genre/style, and less by prominence. You may even consider randomly removing some of the biggest bands from results, otherwise you end with e.g. Metallica recommended for every band when browsing around any vaguely rocky bands. There are a couple of cases where it seems maybe you've sucked in some related but irrelevant data, and end up giving word-concept recommendations, e.g. for Underworld I got [Gods, Hades, Orpheus, Doom, Demon, Witch, Terror, Curse, Warrior, Dawn] Of course all this depends on the user and context. A disclaimer then: I'm a huge music fan, but my comments are probably coloured by my (generally, somewhat) less mainstream tastes. Sorry to go on so much, but I'm very interested in both music and recommendations, so I'm finding it hard to stop myself. But good job, it looks to be a very useful site that I would use. I'd very much like to hear more about it, and what you plan on doing with it when this meetup happens.
  - ian 19y ago
    Thanks very much for your feedback man. We're aware of the issue that occurs with a few bands (e.g. Underworld) and are fixing that. Imagine my horror when I was listening to one of my favourite London producers Burial and got recommended bands like Grave, Funeral, Resurrection. That'll be fixed soon. We're also going to make the recommendations much more tour focused as you suggest. The goal is to really separate the signal out from the noise so you know which of the hundreds of small gigs going on are most likely to interest you. We're also going to have user preferences for the recommendations (particularly how obscure you want them to be and whether you only want to see artists on tour. RIP B.I.G.) Really interested to talk more at the hacker meetup. I've got a ton of emails so should be a good group.
    - neil_cauldwell 19y ago
      Hey Ian You'll like this; I've been in talks with a London-based investor. At the end of one of our meetings, the investor was checking his emails and pulled-up the Songkick powerpoint via an angel network they'd signed-up to! Then the following week you guys hit TechCrunch! That was pretty exciting and inspirational for me! I'm eager to meet some fellow founders & hackers - so I've got to make OCC London and these hacker meetups...
      - ian 19y ago
        Thanks for letting me know! Look forward to meeting you soon.

gordonguthrie 19y ago

Ian Gordon from Project Playfair (now hypernumbers.com) - we met at Seedcamp... We have an alpha SDK out at the moment - we should show it to you before I head back to Scotland in a couple of weeks... Just used Songkick - stuck in an obscure artiste and it turns out he's playing in Edinburgh 2 weeks after I get home - you seem to be serving some tasty dogfood there son... Drop us a line at gordon blah-blah hypernumbers.com Gordon