Seventy percent of music lovers haven't been to a concert in the past year, says Ian Hogarth, one of the founders and the ceo of Songkick, a London-based startup, and he blames the problem on the hassle of tracking when your favorite band will be playing and then buying tickets. And since a problem signals an opportunity, Mr. Hogarth and his co-founders think Songkick has the answer. (www.songkick.com)

Users of Songkick which is still in beta,  can enter the names of their favorite performers and the site will track touring schedules and receive an when they are performing nearby. You can also look up their schedules at any time and buy tickets to their performances anywhere through the site. Songkick is tracking up to one million performers (from Hot Chip to Wanda Sykes, and has arrangements with 16 ticket vendors in the U.S. and the U.K. The company plans to expand to other European markets.

The company was started by Pete Smith, Hogarth and Michelle You, who met while studying Mandarin Chinese. Hogarth and Smith were classmates at Cambridge University. They loved live music and concluded they were unhappy with existing online tools, hence the birth of Songkick.

Songkick will do more than track your favorite artist. It will look through the music on your PC and make recommendations of similar performers. You can also track the rise and fall of the Web popularity of your favorite artist through a "Battle of the Bands" feature. The company has also provided an API to let other sites build widgets that connect to Songkick's recommendations. Sites like music search-and-play site Seeqpod have made deals with Songkick.

Songkick comes along at a time when the music industry is deconstructing and artists find themselves more and more dependent on live tours for their revenue. Backed by angel investors including tech acclerator Y Combinator and Index Ventures partner Saul Klein, Songkick could be a well-timed enterprise. Hogarth points to last.fm, the UK streaming music and recommendation site that CBS bought  last year for $280 million.