songkick makes a mean mushroom risotto

just had a lovely evening with the founders of songkick. i typically delete pitches about online music sites-- i just feel there are too many and they are incrementally interesting at best. but songkick is one of the few focusing on LIVE music-- not recorded, where there is still money, value and profits-- not to mention a lot of problems the web could help. (i wrote about this from the ticketing side a few times for businessweek)

songkick has some strong US ties-- it was a Y Combinator company and was seeded by jeff clavier, and others. it has gotten a good deal of press too.

i'm anxious to get my husband geoff to use it-- i think he's the target market as someone who used to spend hours ferreting out cool new bands and going to see them play, but simply doesn't have that kind of time any more. curious if his interest would tick up, if a site did all that for him, reliably. i don't know. my musical due diligence subsists of geoff loading my ipod with cool new stuff he thinks i'd like.

but from a business standpoint there are a few things i like about the site:
- it has a clear business model that's not ad based- it's transactional. they take a cut of ticket sales-- something the market is already conditioned to accepting at far higher rates.
- it's strength is less the idea than the way they've used technology to solve it. songkick is scraping and aggregating shows, doing recommendations and updating you on your favorite bands. really existing ideas applied to a mostly untouched space. but the way they've used technology-- not people or simply UGC-- to do it is pretty cool and potentially more defensible.
- the founders are so passionate about this. they pay themselves about $30k IN LONDON and cook for the skeleton seven person company every night to save money on food. two developers were paid totally in food for a few months. it's a subtle distinction that's hard to explain because valley entrepreneurs also live on a shoestring, and live and breathe their companies. but they're also wrapped up in a scene where that is the norm. it's the "in" thing to go to stanford and launch a company. two of the songkick founders, ian and pete, went to cambridge where everyone went into banking, law or big business. we talked about the implications of this mirror-image social pressures on camera for yahoo over dinner. fascinating stuff, culturally how that ripples through the startup.
- their offices are caty-corner from the bar where jack the ripper used to stalk his victims. come on that's just bad ass!