I like the idea. Maybe you could leverage Songkick API to support more cities ? (I moved to Tel Aviv recently and it's really hard to spend the time to find out which concerts are worth going to)
Yeah, just wanted to ask if you use an API to get events?
I've been working on something in a similar direction for Vienna. Tried to get SongKick API access, but they declined me. I also used BandsInTown on a project, but it's a bit limited. These days I'm just using Facebook Events, which is ok, but not perfect – can't get all the events in a particular city automatically. Managed to manually overcome this though.
But great work! Tried the app out and I really like it. Followed you on Twitter if you want to keep in touch. Would be nice to have some MusicEventsHackers group to discuss these topics :)
Ben from Songkick here and we'd love to work with you on this. If you reach out to me I'd be happy to sort you out with API access. ben[at]songkick[dot]com
It's a shame you decline any apps with monetisation ideas. I think it would be better to offer a paid API service a la Google APIs than to have so many engineers reinvent the wheel. Oh well, I guess the music industry and logical business models never did go hand in hand :/
This is a great idea. My partner made a playlist of Boston Calling bands. It was helpful for a festival when you don't know all of the bands (the festival bands play concurrently too so you couldn't see all the music..)
Oh this is a great idea! Any chance to get a plain list of musicbrainz IDs for the nerds with their own music collection instead of the ever so ephemeral and privacy-infringing Cloud?
Hi anc84, I made http://www.muusical.com and was imagining it being something like musicbrainz but with actual, playable music that is streamed in from youtube or soundcloud. I haven't been actively working on it in a little while but would love to find other kindred spirits who share the vision. After taking a step back, possibly the best approach is to just use the data from music brainz and use my site to attach the playable music. My meta data editing interface is very rudimentary compared with musicbrainz.
Let me know if you're interested or know anyone who is. You can get me on twitter @patrickjbradley. Thanks.
I think this is a really interesting idea. Spotify has a feature where you can see if an artist is going to be playing near your location by going to the artist's page and going to the 'concert' tab. However, I don't think they have one to go the other way i.e "find all artists performing in one location"
Someone at the SXSW Hackathon two weeks ago worked on a similar thing [1]. The difference in their project was that it looked at the artists you listened to and then created a list of artists that you would know who would be coming to the venue.
I like your idea in that you're creating a channel for people to discover new bands.
Hey thanks for the info. And yeah, I just wanted to provide a different way to discover new music instead of some algorithm. I think a venue’s calendar is just another nice way to do this. Enjoy.
You can search by city in both the mobile app and desktop app to take a look at concerts outside of your area. Really handy. They mostly show only artists who you listen to frequently/genres you like
Ideas:
-Open up to the main local bookers (in my country that would be one firm, Mojo), monetization via referrals?
-other awesomeness would include: local clubs and pubs access via API, same monetization.
-Main few hits per band and then select bands that "sound like" selected view of the most listened to bands.
-Anything that makes me discover worthwhile bands in my area that give me an unexpected nice night out without having to notice the social media multiverse (my favorite teen bands from 20 yrs ago got together last summer and I noticed last week.. guess I haven't got any of my teen surf punk friends anymore)
Devil is in the details. There's just no place to reliably source all of the events that are happening. Sure you can get the ones that sell tickets through ticketmaster, or whatever, but nobody reliably aggregates all the smaller concerts. So this will always be badly incomplete. Discovering all those shows is on of my main use-cases for facebook right now - it's the one place (almost) all of them show up.
A few years back I made a hobby project like this -- it scraped the website of the local free weekly paper (since they have pretty much every concert listing, large and small) and then did a youtube search on band names so you'd see an embedded video or two for each show.
I think most larger cities (and smaller cities if they have a large university) have such a newspaper (e.g. Village Voice in NYC, Willamette Week in PDX, The Mercury in Seattle, etc)
Maybe it's better in the states, but where I live the papers don't come close to being a complete listing. They will have the major stuff, and some of the smaller shows too - but a large part is still missing. And it's not a small city - 2 mln people, capital, and quite an active music and culture scene.
Indeed, this sadly will not be scalable to certain cities where the data source is incomplete. The author had posted this on the Austin subreddit a few weeks ago and I asked him if the source of the data was Showlist Austin (http://showlistaustin.com/) and he/she confirmed that it was in fact at least one of the sources for the Austin data. It's great that we have that site for Austin but it's probably the only place I've ever been that has that complete of a list of good local shows.
Yes, the first website I ever made was in this space for Philadelphia. I wanted to make show listings with playable songs for every night of the week. I just manually found listings and found youtube links and built it. Every site I found always had a bunch of cruft. This was in 2011, figured it had improved by now. :)
I had a friend mention this to me too recently. I just grab the artist's top 3 tracks and add them to your playlist. Perhaps I could use setlist.fm to put songs more likely to be heard at the upcoming shows. Thanks!
I took it a step further to make a playlist out of the bands most recent setlist, so its similar, but not the same. It's currently just a cli that allows you to make a playlist on your google play music based on a band's most recent setlist, provided it was posted on setlist.fm. Most of the bands that I listen to have the setlist.fm posted basically the same night of the show.
Would love to help, leverage, or even refactor some of your stuff so that we could use virtually any music playing platform to do this.
I'll work on this tonight to make it better at handling errors where it will force to find the most recent one that isn't blank, because if there are no songs in the most recent entry it will return a blank list.
Very cool. I have had a suspicion that Google/Spotify has been sort of tracking these things for a while. The features that Google music and Spotify have for discovery seem to correlate with artists touring with other artists I like pretty consistently.
I'm a big fan of live music, and even flew to Japan to go to the PunkSpring festival. If you'd like data for Taiwan, please get in touch!
There's also a large, free dataset from Apple with the whole iTunes Store database. Search "iTunes EPF" for more info. It's 55 GB uncompressed. Perhaps you could use this to generate affiliate links and earn money if people buy the songs in your playlist.
Depends on the motivation mix: a Spotify implementation would not undo any learning that happened along the way, and a showcase/attention goal might even benefit from being the independent original to a corporate clone.
I've made a similar app at a local hackathon sponsored by Sabre: it would search your playlists on Spotify in order to identify your favorite artists. Then it would match the artist presentation schedule and find the best place in the world to watch the artist's concert based on ticket price + travel expenses. Something like: "the best city to watch U2 is Buenos Aires in August - while there you can also visit the Recoleta neighborhood and ..."
Kind of OT but has anyone succeeded in creating playlists through YouTube's API? I had a kind of similar idea to this and wanted to create automatic playlists but failed on the integration part.
EDIT: Ok, looks like this is very easy with the v3 API. This was quite a long time ago.
I haven't done that but I've worked with the youtube api in the past. In general I am really really interested in making sites connected with music. My site muusical.com was my last legit attempt. If you have any interest in connecting, please message me on twitter @patrickjbradley. I'm dying to find partners who share a common passion and hopefully similar vision.
I don't know if my music profile is somehow... weird, but i get a lot of random movies and audio books, mostly long (1-3 hours) and old (~1900-1940s). Not what i expected, but i actually found some interesting stuff. Thanks!
112 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadI've been working on something in a similar direction for Vienna. Tried to get SongKick API access, but they declined me. I also used BandsInTown on a project, but it's a bit limited. These days I'm just using Facebook Events, which is ok, but not perfect – can't get all the events in a particular city automatically. Managed to manually overcome this though.
But great work! Tried the app out and I really like it. Followed you on Twitter if you want to keep in touch. Would be nice to have some MusicEventsHackers group to discuss these topics :)
- on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2016318755302445
- and on Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers
Next time try something like:
"I was disappointed to only see 4 cities, I'd love if you could support X,Y,Z cities next."
He got feedback and now knows his idea is interesting for a bunch of people.
Let me know if you're interested or know anyone who is. You can get me on twitter @patrickjbradley. Thanks.
Someone at the SXSW Hackathon two weeks ago worked on a similar thing [1]. The difference in their project was that it looked at the artists you listened to and then created a list of artists that you would know who would be coming to the venue.
I like your idea in that you're creating a channel for people to discover new bands.
[1] https://devpost.com/software/sx-setfinder
You can't change the location though, it's based off device location.
Ideas: -Open up to the main local bookers (in my country that would be one firm, Mojo), monetization via referrals?
-other awesomeness would include: local clubs and pubs access via API, same monetization.
-Main few hits per band and then select bands that "sound like" selected view of the most listened to bands.
-Anything that makes me discover worthwhile bands in my area that give me an unexpected nice night out without having to notice the social media multiverse (my favorite teen bands from 20 yrs ago got together last summer and I noticed last week.. guess I haven't got any of my teen surf punk friends anymore)
I think most larger cities (and smaller cities if they have a large university) have such a newspaper (e.g. Village Voice in NYC, Willamette Week in PDX, The Mercury in Seattle, etc)
https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers/comments/87ui5l/...
I took it a step further to make a playlist out of the bands most recent setlist, so its similar, but not the same. It's currently just a cli that allows you to make a playlist on your google play music based on a band's most recent setlist, provided it was posted on setlist.fm. Most of the bands that I listen to have the setlist.fm posted basically the same night of the show.
Would love to help, leverage, or even refactor some of your stuff so that we could use virtually any music playing platform to do this.
I'll work on this tonight to make it better at handling errors where it will force to find the most recent one that isn't blank, because if there are no songs in the most recent entry it will return a blank list.
Saves me a lot of time every summer.
There's also a large, free dataset from Apple with the whole iTunes Store database. Search "iTunes EPF" for more info. It's 55 GB uncompressed. Perhaps you could use this to generate affiliate links and earn money if people buy the songs in your playlist.
https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/i...
EDIT: Ok, looks like this is very easy with the v3 API. This was quite a long time ago.