The site is anticipated to go live by the summer concert season at GrouponLive.

It’s becoming common for group-buying sites, like Groupon and LivingSocial, to enter new niches. This, however, marks one of the most high-profile launches for Groupon, which has been fairly discreet about entering new markets. Additionally, getting access to Live Nation’s calendar of events and its marketing machine will be a huge boost to the company’s two-and-a-half-year-old brand.

The companies explained in a press release that GrouponLive will serve as “a local resource” for Live Nation events and Ticketmaster. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. “With unprecedented access to Live Nation’s expansive roster of performers and events, GrouponLive will be the destination for exclusive live event deals,” said Groupon’s founder and CEO Andrew Mason.

Groupon’s closest competitor, LivingSocial, has been a little more methodical about new specialties. It has already launched a travel vertical and an adventures vertical, which sells one-off experiences, such as cocktail mixing classes or trips to a shooting range.

In an interview, Doug Miller, who heads up new business initiatives for LivingSocial, said next on the agenda was something in the live entertainment space, leveraging his time with none other than Ticketmaster.com. “You can only imagine what we can do when we are the producer, and we have a massive marketing channel of 26 million people,” he said.

Besides LivingSocial, Gilt Groupe, which announced this morning that it raised $138 million, has also been testing the market for live events through its Gilt City daily deals brand, which is live in only six markets.

The concerts can be seen by checking out the “Live Rising” tab on T-Mobile’s Facebook fan page or via mobile phone. Cold War Kids will play April 1 and Rye Rye on April 9.

Here’s the story of Tapulous, relayed from the Midem music conference in Cannes by Robert Andrews of MocoNews:

Rhythm game Tap Tap Revenge saw 2.5 million downloads in its first two months–but a million of those were pirate downloads, Tapulous business development head Tim O’Brien told delegates.

But that’s okay. “We know who they are,” O’Brien said, adding that many of the pirates are now buying virtual goods and legal music downloads within the app.

“We’ve started running ads to the pirate users more aggressively.  Some of those users, because we sell virtual goods, have become high-volume users.” Now Tapulous has 25 million unique users and has been profitable since June.

Had the music labels tried this approach, would the industry be in better shape today? I’m not sure. The labels do make periodic attempts to steer “file-sharers” to legal purchases, either via marketing or threats.

But the big problem there is that people who are looking for free music are looking for free music, and there’s no equivalent “virtual good” the labels can sell to enhance the music they’re not selling.

The labels have started branching out again into revenue streams beyond music sales–concerts, T-shirts, headphones, etc.–so in theory, there could be an opportunity to do a variant: Hey we noticed you’re “sharing” a Madonna song. Would you like to buy a concert DVD? Etc. But if they’re doing it–and if it’s working–that’s news to me.

Many songs are missing the correct album titles and cover art—or just show up in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iTunes with mysterious names like “Track04.” Over the years I’ve used several programs to import and buy music, resulting in wild inconsistencies in my collection. I’ve got songs by Beyoncé (with accent), Beyonce (without accent), Beyoncé Knowles (with accent) and Beyonce Knowles (without accent).

Several companies have developed programs that tap into vast databases of songs to tame music collections. I’ve been testing one by San Francisco startup TuneUp Media that’s available to download online and buy in Apple’s stores. While I was reluctant to pay $19.95 for a year’s subscription to a service I reckon should be in iTunes for free, TuneUp has largely delivered on its promise to scrub my music collection with minimal effort, making sure tracks were properly titled and adding extras like album cover art.

TuneUp’s greatest asset is that it works seamlessly with iTunes (for Mac and PC). With TuneUp hooked on to the right side of the iTunes program, you drag “dirty,” or mislabeled, songs into a box identified by a spray bottle of cleaner. The software identifies songs by taking clues from information you’ve embedded in your music, as well as sampling the song’s digital fingerprint. TuneUp looks for a match to those clues in a database of songs maintained by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Gracenote.

Some matches are a slam dunk, but almost half of my collection proved to be problematic. Of the 500 most-played songs in my pop-oriented collection, TuneUp found “matches” for songs across 79 albums and “likely matches” for songs across 209 albums. It couldn’t identify 10 songs. The company says it counts matches as a 90% or higher chance of a match, and “likely” as at least 75% chance of a match. Songs with a likelihood under 75% are labeled “not found.”

TuneUp gives you the chance to review each of the matches before it adjusts your catalog. (It comes with an undo button.) Accepting all of the sure matches is easy enough, but slogging through the likely matches is troublesome. TuneUp gives you only the option to accept or reject its one recommendation after listening to the file, if you want.I worried that I might be inadvertently mislabeling a song, but haven’t yet found evidence of errors in my collection. The company says it cut out alternative matches to simplify the cleaning process, but is working on adding them to future releases of the software.

Once a song has been cleaned by TuneUp, it is given a consistent name, track number, album cover and other helpful information, such as the year it was released. Now I’ve got songs by just Beyoncé (with accent) and almost all of my songs feature the album cover art that looks so nifty on iPhone screens. The software assigns your songs genre identifications, which can be handy for matching music to your mood. Most of the classifications aren’t terms I would have come up with: Beyoncé is dubbed “urban crossover,” while Michael Jackson is either “disco” or “other pop” depending on the era—but at least they’re consistent. You also can tell TuneUp not to change any specific part of a song’s existing catalog listing, including genre.

TuneUp takes a few seconds, depending on your computer and Internet speed, to identify and re-classify each song. Attempting to scrub a whole collection—mine has more than 10,000 songs—can be a lengthy affair. The company suggests cleaning 500 songs at a time, but you can do many more than that if you leave it running over night.

I tried out a free competitor to TuneUp called MusicBrainz Picard, which matches songs based on a database collected by a swarm of Internet users, rather than one particular company. TuneUp and MusicBrainz, which is run by a nonprofit, are as different as Britannica and Wikipedia in their approaches to cataloging information.

The MusicBrainz approach to building a user-generated database is powerful and has been tapped by companies such as the BBC and Amazon.com (AMZN) to improve the way they keep track of music on their sites. Some of my songs that TuneUp couldn’t identify, such as the song “This Way” by hip hop group Dilated Peoples, were a breeze for MusicBrainz. To date, MusicBrainz has about 700,000 “releases” (such as whole albums) and 8,000,000 individual “tracks” in its database.

But MusicBrainz’s database has limitations, such as the inability to catalog album-cover images or song lyrics, both of which are copyrighted material. The free Picard program lets you tap the MusicBrainz database from your own computer. Serious music fans will be attracted to Picard because it is more precise than TuneUp; Picard guides you to choose from a variety of options when it isn’t certain of a match. But the software is rudimentary and requires concentration and time to use. Picard also doesn’t connect directly into iTunes’ catalog. To use it with iTunes, you have to first clean up all of your music files with Picard and then re-import your songs into iTunes.

I recommend TuneUp for the average music fan who might view cleaning up a music collection as the sort of task that shouldn’t take much longer than one rainy Sunday afternoon. Picard is better for people for whom maintaining an orderly music collection is a never-ending project.

TuneUp comes with a feature called “Tuniverse,” which fills the right side of the screen with information related to whatever song iTunes is playing at the time. That information includes YouTube videos, biographical details from Wikipedia, Google (GOOG) News, music recommendations from Amazon and tickets from StubHub to coming concerts in your area. While I initially worried Tuniverse would feel like added advertising on the screen, I’ve come to enjoy the extra information. And once again, I was left wondering why Apple hasn’t built these capabilities directly into iTunes. I, for one, learned from Tuniverse that Beyoncé has a concert in San Francisco next week, and I just might buy a ticket.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at Geoffrey.Fowler@wsj.com

That’s the possibility floated, albeit in an offhand way, via Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay in a note published this morning: “We would likely expect further divestments of non-core businesses, possibly including StubHub.”

I understand why the auction site dropped StumbleUpon, a Web 2.0 publishing business with a novel and unproven revenue model. And it makes sense to stop carrying Skype, a telecom business that requires a lot of time, money and maintenance.

But Stubhub, which eBay bought for $307 million a little more than two years ago, seemed like a bona fide fit: The ticket resale business mirrors eBay’s (EBAY) core auction in pretty obvious ways. I’ve asked Lindsay to tease out his thinking for us, and will update if he does.

UPDATE: Here’s Lindsay, via email: “It seems that eBay is going right back to basics, and is dispensing with the ‘we are an auction company’ ethos that got them into so much trouble. We see StubHub as coming out of that era. We think the market in tickets is changing rapidly and there is a chance to sell StubHub at the very top. They might well take it and pursue a much more pure play retail/second hand portfolio and go back to geographic expansion of the marketplaces/PayPal core.”

Meanwhile, if eBay does decide to jettison StubHub, now would be a very interesting time to do so. TicketsNow, its primary competitor, is likely to go on the block in the near future: Parent company Ticketmaster (TKTM), which acquired the business for $265 million a year ago, has said it would dump the business in order to mollify antitrust critics (and Bruce Springsteen fans) who want to stop the company’s proposed merger with Live Nation (LYV).

Anyone want to corner the market on the ticket-scalping industry?

[Image credit: Hyrck]