Songkick Devblog

First of all, the reasons artists are signing to labels are because of several reasons. For instance, if you (an artist) want to work with a well-known producer then you need to pay them immediately for their work which can range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars – which is before often generally taking a cut from sales of records too. Additionally, they also have to pay for the use of recording studios (even if the producer owns it), backing singers, special amp/FX required during the recording as well as, paying for the entourage of the producer to get to the recording studio etc. Most artists don’t have tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to immediately for this hence, they sign to a record label that can ‘front’ the money for doing so.

Even if startups were disrupting this space - and there are some - the fact that artists have to pay producers up front etc is a challenge for them to overcome and record labels at the moment are a very good solution for this.

I mean even Jamal Edwards (the founder of SB:TV – http://www.sbtv.com – he's used as part of Google Chrome advertising in the UK - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cKpvwlSGOI and even he has launched a Record Label albeit with Sony - http://www.rwdmag.com/2011/02/sb-tv-founder-jamal-edwards-signs-label-deal-with-sony-rca/ and he was kind of disrupting the music industry by promoting artists that you may previously never of heard of.
(For instance, I first heard about Ed Sheeran -…

Songkick (YC'07, London) is hiring again. We're a
small company (about 20 people) that's working to improve the live music
scene for everyone involved. We help fans track their favourite artists so
they never miss them live, and we help artists get the word out about
upcoming shows.

In the last year we've seen tremendous growth in our user base and with our
commercial partnerships, including integrations with YouTube and Yahoo!
Search. We just launched our first major label integration with EMI and are
working on plenty more. There's a lot of work to do scaling our team and our
technology stack, making it a really exciting time to join us.

If you, or someone you know, is an experienced and fast-learning developer
into TDD and scalable web services we'd love to hear from you. We have a
great team that's a joy to work with (you may have met a few of us at
Ruby events), and we have a lot of challenging projects on our roadmap.

If you're interested, check out our jobs page at
http://www.songkick.com/info/jobs and get in touch with our COO Pete Smith
at pete@songkick.com

I have just quit a PhD after three and a half years of work. In the UK PhD courses generally last between 3 and 4 years so it was a large proportion of that time completed.

But I decided that it was more important to be doing work that I enjoyed rather than slaving away on a PhD that was not interesting to me and irrelevant to my future career anyway.

I've now got a good job in an exciting startup (http://www.songkick.com/) doing the work I wanted to be doing. What more could I want?

Whether this is relevant to you I don't know. But I have strongly come to feel that unless you are going to be an academic, or work in a field for which it is specifically useful, like finance or pharmaceuticals, a Phd is not useful.

But I have a vested interest in that being true so perhaps you shouldn't listen to me :-)

Songkick is hiring.

We're based in London, Ruby on Rails (but if you're good, we'll help you make the switch), great team, growing rapidly.

Currently looking for: Junior Dev, Application Dev, QA Lead.

Due to need to get these roles filled we're favouring EU-based candidates, but if you're elsewhere we will be hiring throughout the year so get in touch regardless. We do sponsor visas, and already have a very international team. No remote working, however.

See http://www.songkick.com/info/jobs

Proof is in the pudding. Here are your showcase NOLOH sites:

http://www.noloh.com

http://www.ecrimetools.com/

http://www.theprotectornetwork.com/

http://evolve108.com/#/section=home

For comparison, here are some websites put together by companies that ycombinator has funded, and which, I believe, are html/javascript without the middleman.

http://heroku.com/

https://posterous.com/

http://dailybooth.com/

http://www.justin.tv/

http://www.songkick.com/

http://www.scribd.com/

http://www.highergroundmusic.com/calendar/view/

vs

http://www.songkick.com/venues/921-higher-ground/calendar

(I reported via your "Flag a problem" as well)

Edit: Looks like part of the issue is that the venue moved and you now have a dupe venue with different listings.

http://www.songkick.com/venues/532296-higher-ground/calendar
Higher Ground is no longer in Winooski, it is now in South Burlington (Burlington) like the 921 venue states.