You would love to see your artist's tour dates appear in Google's Knowledge Graph, like in these examples? The concert data already is present on Songkick? Then this web service is for you: it retrieves the event data of your artist from Songkick and returns JSON-LD data ready for you to include in the website of your artist. Google will find this data and eventually display it in their Knowledge Graph.

Background: JSON-LD became an official web standard in January 2014. In March 2014, Google announced support for displaying concert information in their Knowledge Graph for certain artists, supporting the new JSON-LD linked data format. In order to communicate this data to Google, a special JSON-LD data structure needs to be crafted and put it into the artist website, as described here. Eventually, the artist website needs to contain this markup:

<script type="application/ld+json">
[ ... JSON-LD event data ... ]
</script>

My service provides the [ ... JSON-LD event data ... ] part. Putting this part into the artist website does not change its visual appearance. Eventually Google discovers this meta data and lists the upcoming events in the Knowledge Graph (I have observed this to take about 2 days). All you need is a specialized service URL to retrieve JSON-LD data for your artist, and then manually or dynamically include this data into your website. Pretty simple.

Generate your service URL

With the form below, you can generate a service URL for your artist of choice. Using this URL you can at any given time retrieve the JSON-LD data representing the upcoming events.

All form fields are required. The artist website and artist name fields end up in the resulting JSON-LD output, without change. That is, these fields override whatever information is present in Songkick's database. That way, you can precisely control which artist name and website URL are about to appear in the Knowledge Graph.

Songkick artist ID

You can find this number in the Songkick artist URL.

Artist website

Must be a valid URL, i.e. start with http(s)://. Appears in JSON-LD output.

Artist name

Appears in JSON-LD output.

Generate URL

Advanced usage

This web service makes use of aggressive caching and is hosted on a reliable platform. Hence, you could include this data dynamically, from within your web application. In that case, I would recommend performing some caching on your end, too, and query this service only once per day or so, for two reasons: i) event data is unlikely to change more frequently and ii) you surely do not want to increase the load time of all of your page requests.

Some technology details

• This web service enforces transport encryption (HTTPS).
• Songkick back-end is queried via HTTPS only.
• Songkick back-end is queried concurrently whenever possible.
• Songkick responses are cached for several hours in order to reduce load on their service.
• Responses of this web service are cached for several hours. These are served within milliseconds.

Further resources

• Songkick events for Google’s Knowledge Graph -- blog post on gehrcke.de
• JSON-LD, the Google Knowledge Graph and schema.org SEO -- a blog post by Aaron Bradley
• Google's JSON-LD event markup validation service
• Musical artists: your official tour dates in the Knowledge Graph -- official announcement
• Google help section and JSON-LD event data format specification
• Discussion about the Songkick API specification
• JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web -- a blog post by Manu Sporny
• Can JSON-LD event data be included from a remote resource via the src argument?

This web service is built on top of the following great entities

• Songkick JSON API
• Google App Engine
• Python
• webapp2