Rdio taps Songkick to display live tour date information for artists

Music-streaming service Rdio made a handful of announcements at the SXSW festival today, including Songkick integration that will surface live concert information on artists directly within the Rdio app.

London-based Songkick has made a big name for itself in the music realm since it was founded in 2007, scanning a user’s local or cloud-based music library to reveal which of the artists are touring nearby. Through its API, Songkick also lets third-party services tap its live-concert listings. (Rdio competitor Spotify has offered this integration for a while already.) To see the tour information, a user simply has to click through to an artist’s profile page, where they can also buy tickets.

Launched in 2010 by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Rdio has been facing increasingly stiff competition in the on-demand music-streaming realm, with Spotify and Beats arriving on the scene in the U.S. Rdio has been exploring more ways to monetize — last month, the company revealed a partnership with AEG’s ticket-selling subsidiary AXS, one designed to shoehorn live-music fans onto a paid Rdio subscription via a 30-day free trial period. Now, by reeling in live concert details, Rdio will presumably be taking a cut on any ticket sales too.

Rdio is also rolling out curated stations direct from record labels. Labels such as Def Jam, Mute, Sub Pop, Domino, and Warner Nashville will use this channel to market their signed artists.

Additionally, Rdio will also now automatically populate an artist’s Twitter handle when you share a song on Twitter — just so they know how popular their songs are on Rdio.