But I promise to look again and give Songkick the opportunity.

So in order to make concert recommendations, we have to get our set of similar/related artists in a different way. Last.fm does collaborative filtering (person A has Interpol and the Killers mp3s; person B has Interpol and Joy Division mp3; therefore recommend person A Joy Division) and Pandora has experts hand-labelling music to determine similarities. We do something different. We take the entire web as a data set from which to determine whether two artists are similar. So we scan everything we can get our grubby hands on, from blogs, to Wikipedia articles, to Amazon and MySpace, etc. to see when artists are mentioned, and based on how they’re mentioned alongside other artists, we infer a similarity. This allows us to get right down into the long tail of live music, having data on every last tiny band out there.

The first pass at this was just to make sure our machine learning algorithms are “reading” the pages right, identifying artist names correctly, making sure we can tell the difference between a music blog vs. a Wikipedia page (so we can weigh their contribution differently), etc. The next stage will be to refine the recommendations, so we can dial up or dial down the obscurity levels. Right now, it’s pretty broad brush, so if you search for a mainstream artist (like Avril Lavigne), you’ll usually get recommended mainstream artists.

The more we learn about your taste, the better we can fine-tune the type of recommendations we give you. If you download the Songkicker (the plug-in that scans your music library) and give us access to a better representation of your music taste, the recommendations will be much better.

I hope that sheds a little light on the technology behind the recommendations. I’m sorry your visit didn’t convince you to dig deeper, but I hope you’ll keep an eye on us as we improve and give us another chance to convince you!

The potential of one site streamlining this process for me was very interesting. I’ve only played with the search function on Songkick but can’t help but wonder how far and wide the net is cast for returning events. For the first couple of searches, it seemed like Mary J. Blige, Avril Livigne, and The Cure showed up regardless of my search string. It’s possible the bands I entered were too similar in nature but I wasn’t paying close enough attention until the results felt too static. How are these recommendations made? Are there rather flat connections hardwired into the logic of the application (i.e. people who like A, might also like B, C, or D) or is the logic more dynamic (something along the lines of Pandora’s music genome projec)t?

Two concerns….with a city as diverse as NY, the results never included bands I didn’t already know or who don’t already get plenty of mainstream radio play. I’m suspicious that this will be a tool for discovering new music. Honestly, this is the reason I didn’t dig any deeper into the site.

And, second, when searching for a favorite local musician (Bob Schneider), results seemed to include any solo singer/songwriter with any modicum of success in Austin. It isn’t that the sound is similar. I really couldn’t figure out how the connection was any more robust than, “hey, here’s this other guy with a guitar who plays music in Austin.” It often seemed like one characteristic dominated the results. For example, when including Spoon in my search, Songkick returned the news that they were touring in NY but then only offered My Chemical Romance in the rest of the results. What about the rest of the search (Killers + Interpol)? Nothing for them? Again, the results seemed really flat.

Those are my concerns but I have to give a big kudos too. When searching for Bob Schneider + The Hives + Black Rebel Motorcyle Club another local favorite showed up in the results, Ghostland Observatory. They’re hard to categorize (as is Bob) and they’re rarely heard anywhere other than college radio stations. This was one result seeming to point somewhere other than the usual headliners. I was excited to see Songkick provide an opportunity for others to discover Ghostland.

I’m still interested in the concept but I’m walking away from my first “test drive” thinking there’s not much there for me just yet.