i love live music. i've made sort of a commitment to myself to see a lot more of it. but, here's the thing: i want the internet to tell me when and where the concerts i want to see are.
i think i'm not alone... there are a bunch of "getting close" options. first, is this mashup of two of my favourite sites/services, upcoming and last.fm. this is a good start (apart from the "rough" interface), last.fm knows a whole lot about my listening habits. however, the results are less than satisfactory since upcoming only contains the concerts that people have posted - and, while it's great for tech conferences, upcoming just hasn't attracted bands, labels, etc.
next, i stumbled upon ontour. this is nice - there is actually a dashboard widget that scans your itunes library and matches against upcoming concerts in its impressive (albeit apparently closed / proprietary) list of concert information. my beef here? my music collection isn't actually in my local itunes library. my music collection doesn't fit on my powerbook. truth is, last.fm knows best what i'm listening to these days.
the most complete concert listings still seem to be in local weekly magazines. problem is - at least here in toronto, the two main weeklies: now and eye don't actually export or syndicate their concert listings in a usable format (for a last.fm mashup). hell, i can't even get a feed of new concert announcements. consider that a call out.
apparently, last.fm has had some of the same ideas - their latest beta includes events! the cool thing here is last.fm is pretty good with recommendations - they might actually be able to tell me something *new* to see. time will tell how complete the listings will end up being. i am hopeful, though, since last.fm does actively recruit music labels.
am i missing something? where else are people watching online for local concert listings?
Netherlands aren't even listed, grr
I am very much interested in this too. Especially because the (un-)quality of the agenda's made by the venues themselves. Flash stuff, silly imagemaps and mouseovers, and fancy-pancy-designed agenda's make it nearly impossible to keep track of "whats playing where".
I guess a social site based around concerts would be a great start. I am very interested in any alternatives for this too, because upcomingscrobbler doesn't even list the netherlands :)
Have you seen Podbop?
http://podbop.org/
It's a mashup of Eventful and user uploaded MP3s. It doesn't know your tastes, but let's you listen to samples of the bands coming to your town.
Hope yer well - Rob
last.fm to teh rescue
I just bumped into http://www.sebruiz.net/177, where he shows some screesnhots of a lmast.fm beta with gig-features!
yup, it's launched
last.fm launched their latest round of updates with event features - i love that they've got the data to do solid recommendations for shows, but right now they just hardly have anything listed. worth keeping an eye on. now the events just need feeds (RSS/Atom and iCal). ;)
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