Support your local artists, venues and festivals

February 22, 2009 by El Presidente for Life


Organizers cancel 2009 San Francisco Blues Festival

By Jim Harrington
Bay Area News Group

The San Francisco Blues Festival, long championed as the nation’s oldest continuously run event of its kind, has been canceled for 2009. And organizers said Tuesday it might not return.

“We may well have seen the last San Francisco Blues Festival,” says founder Tom Mazzolini.

Mazzolini, who founded the annual event in 1973 and has been its sole producer since, points to rising production costs and declining sponsorship support as the main reasons behind the cancellation. Also factoring into the mix is that attendance has been on a sharp decline for years.

“That’s sad. That’s very tragic,” Mazzolini says of the decision to pull the plug on the festival in 2009. “An event like this, with so much history and so much legacy, needed to continue.”

Sad news when a 35 year run of a great festival shuts down due to sponsorship and declining ticket sales. SF blues fest has brought us shows for pretty much our whole lives with artists like Stevie Ray Vaughn, Albert Collins, Willie Dixon, BB King. It’s almost a criminal act to let our cultural heritage slip.

I know these are hardened times but we all have to do our part to keep music alive. Go see a show at your local club this weekend. That’s an order. And plan to go to at least one festival or concert a month this summer. if you don’t, you may wake up some day and find no options other than turning on a Clear Channel Musak station and ordering “Woodstock” from Netflix to remember what a concert looks like.

Okay, that’s a stretch but in some ways not all that far off. If shows and festivals cancel, artists can’t make a living and go back to college to become accountants, like all our parents hectored us to do. And we all lose out.

I went out to see a local greasy rock band at a local club last night. –> paid my $12 to get in the door and did my manly duty by buying 4 beers, a CD and a pizza. I helped in some small way to keep the music alive. It’s a simple formula; club makes money, they book bands. bands make money they keep making music. Please do the same on whatever level you can afford. We’ll all be winners.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_11725777 <– read the whole story about the SF Blues fest canceling.

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Livkick concerts on Facebook

February 5, 2009 by El Presidente for Life

Of course you’re on Facebook. All 300 gazillion humans with a CPU and a monitor are on Facebook along with all their pals throwing sheep, biting zombies and posting pictures of each other drunk. So we thought, what better way to tell all your friends that you’ve just bought tickets to a hot show next week or share info about your favorite band(s)? It’s as easy as pie now that Livekick has made it as simple as a click away to add Livekick info to your Facebook profile.

Underneath the Artist’s page photo or on a concert date page you’ll find a handy share with your friends “on Facebook” button. I suggest you click it.
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log in of course. This is a one-off form and we don’t look at, save or store this info. Oh yeah, personalize a message if you are of an artistic bent.
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…and shazam, the concert or artist info is placed on your Facebook superboard for all your friends to see and comment on. If it was any easier, well, it just couldn’t get any simpler than that.
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Check it out and help make Facebook have actual useful information beyond your vampire progress or mafia war scores.

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Livekick Community forums

January 28, 2009 by El Presidente for Life

We launched the Livekick community forums yesterday. Come on by for tech support, ticket swaps, ride boards, concert tales and reviews, to give us product feedback or pimp your own show(s).

Be the first one on your block to join up.

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Better Concert Alerts

January 20, 2009 by avive

We’ve just updated Livekick.com with better concert alerts functionality based on user feedback.

Here are some of the improvements:

Daily Email Alerts
You can now choose to receive a daily email when a concert by one of your favorite artist or by an artist similar to one of your favorite artists when is announced (but not more frequently than once a day).

This helps knowing about a concert as soon as it is announced and helps you find great cheap tickets before they sell out or become more pricey. Before this change, Livekick email alerts went out only up to once a week. To change your email settings to daily alerts go to your livekick.com settings page.

Email alerts for your favorite artists
You can now choose to receive email alerts only when a concert by one of one of favorite artists is announced and exclude recommendations for concerts by similar artists from the email alerts. To change your email settings go to your livekick.com settings page.

Twitter Alerts
Yep, Livekick caught the Twitter bug. You can now subscribe to receive weekly or daily concert recommendations based on the artists you like from Livekick directly on Twitter.

To subscribe to Livekick on Twitter, go to http://livekick.com/myconerts/ and click on the Twitter link at the bottom of the page.

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Announcing the Livekick API

January 20, 2009 by avive

We are happy to announce today the availability of the Livekick API.

Web sites can use the API to add live music concerts dates and ticketing information from Livekick.

To get more information and to start using the API visit http://livekick.com/api/

Here are few ways you can use the API in your web site:

  • If you have a music oriented web site that includes information about a performing artist or a band, you can use the API to add upcoming concert listings for that artist or band.
  • If you have a music oriented web site that is focused one one or more music genres in a US location then you can use the API to add upcoming concerts listings in your US location and in the music genres of your site.
  • If you have a site that provides local information in one or more US cities, you can use the API to add upcoming concert listing in each of these US locations.
  • If you have a site that provides local information about one or more US live venues, you can add complete concert listings using the API for these venues.
  • Be creative and surprise us. We’ll list you here….

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G4 TV gives us a tumble

January 17, 2009 by El Presidente for Life

Lovely produced segment on Attack of the Show on G4TV.  Rarely does a review so perfectly capture feature set, vibe and mission. But boy howdy they did. Nice job and thanks, fellas.  We owe you a pint or 12 next time you’re in NYC.

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Thrillist.com

January 7, 2009 by El Presidente for Life

What  a thrill.  Our new pals at Thrillist were kind enough to write up  a lovely article about us today,  spiking our traffic and sending our IT guys into a brief hair on fire moment.

I’d never been to the Thrillist before but it’s rapidly becoming a fav of mine for its crisp writing, relevent and interesting info and downright coolio-ness. Check em out today and tell em Livekick sent you. We owe them the favor – bigtime.

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The Dead do rise again

January 5, 2009 by El Presidente for Life

The Grateful Dead, the quintessential road band who’ve been rarely on the road since Jerry passed and haven’t toured at all for the last 4 years announced they are going to do a short tour (nearly 20 shows in a month) this coming April.  This is big news rocking the Dead world and it couldn’t come at a better time.  We could all use a bit of the Dead spirit of live shows, long jams and pure joy in making music.

Tickets aren’t on sale yet but you can be sure to get them on the day they become available, right here at Livekick.  Go ahead and add the Dead to your “My Artists” list and you’ll get an update the second tickets  are available.  Livekick will make sure you don’t miss out on the chance to see the show.

Here’s a list of the show dates, thanks to Dead.net, my favorite place for all news that is Dead.

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See ya in the parking lot!

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Artists and concert reviews/comments

December 16, 2008 by El Presidente for Life

Who hasn’t wanted at some point in their life to be a concert reviewer.? Yeah, baby, write for the Village Voice and opine on the cool or uncool shows you went to see last weekend. Here’s your chance. You can add a comment/review to each Artist page in the Users Tour Reviews, Rating and Comments area. In this, the age of Twitter, most reviews we’ve seen so far are short tags but we’re watching closely to see how much people have to say and we’ll make the limits match the needs.

Write a review today and let the world know what you think about the artist’s last show or tell us about the time you saw them when you were back in college and you snuck onto the tour bus. We want to know all the dirt.

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Read a concert review of El Presidente’s favorite show of all time

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Concert Alerts

December 15, 2008 by El Presidente for Life

The life blood and foundation of Livekick is the alerts and notifications of when your favorite artists are performing near you. Having nearly instantaneous info on when concerts are happening can keep you from A) missing the show and B) can help you save money and get good seats by being the early bird when buying your tickets.

There are a few different ways you can get alerts (I signed up for all three just to be sure I never am out of the loop). Here’ a few samples of how Livekick keeps you abreast of musical happenings in your universe.

Email alerts:

Hi Big Fella

Just announced live concerts from your artists in New York:

EPMD
http://livekick.com/EPMD-tickets

Wu-Tang Clan
http://livekick.com/Wu-Tang-Clan-tickets

Recommended concerts based on your artists in New York:

McCoy Tyner
http://livekick.com/McCoy-Tyner-tickets

Yo La Tengo
http://livekick.com/Yo-La-Tengo-tickets

For a complete list of recommended upcoming local concerts visit http://livekick.com/myconcerts/
To change your favorite artists visit: http://livekick.com/myartists

Thanks for using Livekick!
The Livekick team.

Twitter feeds:

Livekick via Twitter

to me

Check this out: Buckcherry is performing near you. http://tinyurl.com/6cywk8

–
follow me at http://twitter.com/livekick
reply on the web at http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/livekick
send me a direct message from your phone or IM: D LIVEKICK your message here.
turn off these email notifications at: http://twitter.com/account/notifications


If you download our desktop widget you will get a brief sys-tray pop-up update at boot up after the widget scans your digital music library for changes and matches it against our concert recommendation engine.

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