Net::Songkick

Sometimes it’s good to just take a new idea and hack on it for a couple of hours to see what happens. That’s what I’ve done this evening.

I’ve been using Songkick for a while. Songkick is a web site that tracks users’ attendance at gigs. I’ve been tracking the gigs I’ve been going to as well as trying to fill in over thirty years of old gigs.

I’ve known for some time that Songkick has an API, but until yesterday the API has been for invited partners only. But yesterday on Get Satisfaction they announced that it was now public.

The public API doesn’t do that much yet. There are only four documented calls. But it’s already useful and I’m sure it will gain more functionality quickly.

And this evening I’ve spent some time writing a very simple Net::Songkick module. This is really just a proof of concept, but I’ve got big plans for improving it. And I can already write a useful program like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use XML::LibXML;
use Net::Songkick;

my $user = shift || 'davorg';

my $sk = Net::Songkick->new({
  api_key => $ENV{SONGKICK_API_KEY}
});

my $xml = $sk->get_upcoming_events({
  user => $user,
});

my $xp = XML::LibXML->new->parse_string($xml);
foreach ($xp->findnodes('//event/@displayName')) {
  print $_->to_literal, "\n";
}

If you have any interest in gigs then I highly recommend Songkick to you. And if you like attending gigs and hacking Perl (although not necessarily at the same time) then why not give Net::Songkick a try. All you’ll need is an API key from Songkick.

There’s a Github repository too; if you feel like hacking on it…