Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there will it lie

A while back I wrote a review on a few websites to check out to track bands that you are interested in seeing in your surrounding area.

I left my review leaning towards bandsintown. The layout and interface was nice, plus they offered RSS feeds for band calendars. It was quick easy and simple to use, without needing to sign up for the site as well.

One thing that was up in the air was a particular feature that songkick offered called songkicker. Here’s how it works:

The Songkicker is a plug-in that works with your music player. After installation, open your music player so the Songkicker can scan your library.

We compare all your artists with our database of thousands of events.

After a few minutes, your user homepage will get a personalized concert calendar, updated whenever your bands go on tour. We list all ticket vendors, so you can buy the cheapest ticket.

Every time you play a track, it’s songkicked to us. Immediately, you can see whether the bands you’re listening to are on tour.

A great idea, but at the time, it was only Windows only, and I currently run the Mac OS. Well, songkick has since added a Mac version of their plug-in, and I’ve been using it for the last few weeks.

Well, they finally got it working on the Mac OS (actually, they did a while back, it’s just taken me a bit to actually finish and post this), and it’s very neat. The nice thing about the plug in is that you basically set it and forget it. Once you’ve installed it, it’s there working in the background and you don’t have to do anything to get it to work other than install it.

Once installed, when you visit the Songkick site, you will see a list of bands that it finds in your itunes library that are on tour, and coming to your area. With Songkick, you also have the ability to add a band or artist that you may not have in your itunes library (or if you don’t want to install the plug-in) or remove artists that you have no interest in their touring schedule (you know, like that You Want a Piece of Me by Britney Spears. What? Am I the only one who likes that song?)

I’m currently tracking 476 artists, of which 149 are on tour. Pretty neat to know. If you’re a concert goer, or hate that you always find out about shows after it happens, this site is definitely worth getting into.

For my original impression visit here:

Are You Kidding? Did I Miss Another Show? Solutions to Concert Tracking in Your Area

Songkick also provides widgets that you can post on your blog, and to the right in my sidebar, in purple you can see what they widgets look like.

Bands in Town has them as well, and I might use those for bands specifically coming to Tallahassee at a later date.

Check out songkick and let me know what you think about it.

I’ve recently got an email from songkick letting me know about a few shows that I am definitely interested in checking out in the coming months; Phantom Planet and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra might get a few of my dollars.