The online gig-listing service is a stuffy market, problem is, none of them work particularly well and reek of unreliability. Well, maybe for music snobs like myself.

Well as gig guides go, it’s hard to top TimeOut, who is king of the castle, but they rarely add links to purchase tickets, which is frustrating.

In fact, just this week I was scouring the internet for tickets to a small, scarcely advertised gig coming up in a few days. The main guides (needtickets, nme, gigwise, gig-guide, etc.) failed to deliver. I began to panic.

So when an email arrived in my inbox for GigJunkie, the first thing I did was look up my snobby gig, and two minutes later I found the tickets and I was indeed a confirmed attendant. It was a snap.

On that account alone, GigJunkie gets my seal of approval.

Upon closer inspection however, there is more. The website aggregates listings from all ticket agencies in the UK, which is what every other site supposedly does. But they also allow a community of fans, bands, venues and promoters to listings to create a true definitive listing. Which is excellent, likely how I found my ticket.

GigJunkie tells me they are also in the process of building a crawler module to collate listings from other web sources, which should step up the guide even more.

You can register to the site and Gig Junkie will automatically alert you when your own snobby bands come to town, whether through email or SMS, they also let you know who is playing in the venues you frequent.

Once you have bought your tickets you can notify your mates and attempt to organise them to arrive at the same gig by using the built in messaging services.