Show HN: ShowList – Share Bands You've Seen Live, Discover New Bands | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ShowList – Share Bands You've Seen Live, Discover New Bands

showlist.io

53 pointsjnasty58 comments

Looks cool. Very similar to a service I built a few years ago: https://lanyard.fm which has setlist integration and even generated Spotify playlists of the setlist using live versions of tracks at one point. If you'd like to chat about any of the problems we faced let me know.

The site was never monetized, it was a side project between me and a couple of other guys. We struggled with data until it eventually dried up completely last year. To remedy that I've been working on a live music version of musicbrainz.org in my spare time although progress is slow. If anyone is interested in getting involved in that hit me up

Lanyard looks great, hadn't heard of it, will take a closer look though. I'm sure Jonny will be reaching out to chat with you :)

Lanyard looks impressive. I hadn't heard of it until today, but I will take a look around. I'll drop you a message through the site, would be good to talk.

Looking forward to it. I'm on twitter @slice_beans or you can find an email address on https://slicebeans.com/contact

Nice work. I've registered, though unfortunately I don't attend many concerts. Just a couple of suggestions:

- Your dataset seems fairly good (it found a bunch of concerts of a band only known in my country), but inevitably it'll miss a bunch of amateur and/or obscure bands. I know this has the danger of muddying your data and ending up with fifty versions of AC/DC, but if I need to keep track of certain concerts off-site, it loses much of its appeal.

- Please, please implement an export feature. Regardless of your intentions your site will eventually close, and it's not fair to your users if they lose all their data. A simple CSV with the band/venue/date would suffice.

Good luck!

Thanks for the suggestions, the export feature is something that wasn't on our roadmap, but is now.

Yeah, the more obscure bands is a hurdle we are working hard on, and we will solve. I am personally into more obscure bands, as you can tell from the Dead Milkmen on the landing page, so this is a priority for us.

Export feature is now on our roadmap.

Thanks for the awesome feedback.

Though this isn't a service I'd personally use, it seems useful.

One suggestion though, as hated as it might be, would be to make a mobile app. My experience with outings and shows is that you tend to forget stuff like this when you get home. You drop your bags on the floor and your body into bed.

Best of luck to you!

I'd also love another feature in a mobile app: set lists. I love to look back on the sets I've enjoyed, and a way to easily track those and associate them with my favorite concerts would be fantastic. By the time I'm home, I've forgotten most of the list.

Great idea. The plan is also all photos and vids taken at each show. Drop me any other ideas or suggestions you have.

Do you know about http://www.setlist.fm?

Didn't know of this website. So damn useful!

Thanks so much. Yes, an app is definitely on the roadmap.

another thing is to add authentication using facebook/google etc.. your target audience uses social media and it might help.

(I know a lot of people here are against this but it does help)

Not sure about fb, but I would totally use this if it had Sign in with Google.

Both I believe are equally important. I noticed that less technical people will use Facebook to sign in whereas HN crowd will use Twitter, Google, Github. Its anecdote though so don't take my word for it.

As others said, more explanation of the functionality on the home page would be nice, so you don't have to create an account to see what the site can do. In particular I'm wondering if you pulled in a catalog of past concerts the user can choose from, or if they have to enter in the date and location themselves.

Also, nitpicks:

- The registration page has an "Already have an account? Login" link, but there's not a link to the registration page on the login page.

- There's not a link back to home page from either of those pages either.

Sorry we're just finishing up the MVP and the polish isn't quite there yet, I've added the link you suggested and made the logo a link back to the homepage.

Temporary fixes until we can make something better for the long term.

Awesome, had been planning to make something like this myself to keep track of all the gigs I get to. Nice simple UI, does exactly what I want it to. Keep it up!

Edit: Ok, two minor annoyances. Firstly, if gig details aren't found or listed for an artist, I can't manually enter the date/venue myself. Secondly, I'd like to be able to click the heading on my gig list to sort it by date/artist. Also getting errors pretty much every time I add a new artist, presumably just from overload.

Thanks for giving the site a try.

As Jonny mentioned this is very much an MVP which we just finished yesterday. We do have plans to allow you manually add event details if we don't have them in the database.

Sorting of the show list is also something we have on the roadmap.

Sorry about the errors, yeah we're hitting the API limits pretty hard.

Thanks for trying it out and giving your feedback.

I agree that it can be annoying when you can't enter venues/dates manually, but we are on it.

Great experience all up (besides a few understandable timeouts fetching Date/Venue data today). Good focus and execution, I hope you reach the success you're after!

Couple of personal thoughts:

- When I've seen the same band a few times, it would be cool to choose cover photo (album art of their current album at the time? The song preview could also be their most popular song at the time?)

- Most of my concerts are in my hometown, where most of my friends are from. I'd love to feature the venue name on my showlist (In Brisbane, Australia <3: The Tivoli, Riverstage, The Triffid :D hehe)

- Integration with Songkick?

- I like the manual sorting, my natural preference seems to be oldest to newest, but with repeated bands grouped. I wonder if this is possibly a pattern of others too, and because having an awesome showlist to share is close to your product's core/focus it could be worth designing for this?

Awesome work!

https://showlist.io/@danfo

Thanks Dan.

Great feedback, and thanks for understanding about the timeouts, always fun times being on HN and PH at the same time !

We focused on making it easy to build the initial list and share it with friends, but for die hard music fans we know you'll want a lot more features that we have on a roadmap.

Oh and I've featured your show list :)

Another integration I'd like to see is with Facebook events. Really the only reason I have a Facebook account is to keep track of concerts I'm going to. All the info and tickets are in the same place and I can follow certain events / groups and get notifications when new concerts pop up. If the events I'm "going" to could automatically be added to my Showlist I'd be completely sold!

Also I've noticed that this is geared toward there being 1 artist/band at each show. This might be different for different genres, but here in NL the Drum & Bass scene has like 5-6 names playing at each event so it is a bit tedious to have to enter each one manually. Again I think Facebook event integration would be a great solution to this issue because the official events have all the information about the concert if you can manage to recognize the relevant information in each post.

I think Facebook probably has the most complete summary of events across all genres if you can find a way to parse out the non-concert related events. This is probably pretty hard to implement well, but might work out with a smart enough spider crawling Facebook.

https://showlist.io/@JeeCeeBees :)

Facebook Events is a damn good idea. I am going to be looking into this and see if it is at all possible to do. Thanks for the feedback.

https://showlist.io/@jonny ;-)

Thanks for understanding.

Choosing the artwork is a great idea, adding it to the list. As for the song, we are currently playing the artists top song on Spotify. This may change in the future, but is the best we could come up with to start.

Venue featuring is something we are thinking about. I'm from a small Canadian city, so I know understand your situation.

We will be looking into any integrations in the future. Not sure at this point.

Sorting is a big feature we are tackling. I agree that sharing your awesome show list is the main feature, so you need to be able to to that in different ways. Thanks for the suggestions.

Thank you!

https://showlist.io/@jonny

Made this "top 100" album chart generator last December and it took off on 4chan earlier this year:

https://www.neverendingchartrendering.org/

That deserves its own Show HN post. I'd upvote it!

I would too!

Good times remembering every concert I've attended (or trying)! Hope you'll get the UX smoother with time.

I wonder where the shows database come from?

Good luck!

We will definitely improve the UX -- just went live yesterday, so bear with us.

Couple of points/ideas (some mentioned by others)

* Social auth * Export * Sorting shows by date, location, acts * "I was there" - finding other users by what shows they were at (exact shows or nearby via geo or date, which are usually near each other) * Larger data mgt via something like handsontable

Nice idea - good job so far!

Thanks for the points/ideas.

The 'I was there' idea is one that I really like. And yes, discoverability by what shows other users were at is a feature we are working towards.

Thanks again.

Neat. I currently use setlist.fm's "I was there" feature for this; an import feature could be cool.

This is a great idea. We will get on this.

I just registered as @darkvibration and put in all the concerts I have been to. Is this a purely personal journal kind of thing or have you been thinking of adding some social feature to it as well?

I would love to know your vision/plan with the site.

Thanks for registering and adding your list -- I'm kind of jealous that you've seen David Gilmour!

Since we just launched 24 hours ago, it is currently a personal journal that you can organize and share with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

The vision is social and discoverability. We will enable you to follow other users that like similar bands to you, and see everyone that has been to the same shows as you. This will help you discover new bands and find shows in your geo area.

I am a big fan of Floyd and his solo stuff. He is not very difficult to see these days, he has been touring non stop for an year now. Maybe you can still catch him.

I was wondering if the show discovery space is crowded because of Songkick (which I already use), Bandsintown etc. What is your thought on that? On the other hand, Songkick at least has little to no social aspect, which kinda sucks.

I really like this. My wife keeps a list of shows we've been to in a Google Sheet and I try to post a picture from each show on Facebook, so I think we would definitely use this. Right off the bat, I'd like to be able to add multiple shows for a single artist at the same time. I'd also like to add multiple artists for a single show. You might already have these things in your roadmap, but it's making data entry take longer than it should for me. I'll keep my eye on the site to see where it goes.

I don't get why this isn't part of MusicBrainz bootlegs, or is this just a view on it?

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases...

Bootlegs are specifically "releases" that fans record, whereas this site is just for marking your attendance, not providing your recording of it. The more relevant MusicBrainz entity would be an Event: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Event – which even has a setlist attribute (a feature that was suggested elsewhere in this thread).

Nice, good idea, this has potential.

Some feedback:

I like the logo.

Would get rid of the dull grey background, make it closer to white. And change the bands of the first screenshot to something a bit more accessible then the Dead Milkmen, so it doesn't look too niche for a broader audience. As that first screenshot is their first impression.

Please show something useful: screenshots, a list of features, something. I have no idea what your web site does. The only actionable thing for me to do is register and give you my email address. Yeah right.

You can give critical feedback without being so dismissive. For example:

> Please show something useful; maybe screenshots or a list of features. Right now I'm not sure what your web site does. The only actionable thing for me to do is register and give you my email address, but I'm not likely to do that without more information.

Do you see the difference in tone, empathy, and guidance here? If I were to show off my work to this community, I would hope for a little bit of that kind of consideration.

Thanks, Josh. I appreciate you saying this.

Why do you say it like you giving him your credit card ?

there is at least a screenshot, and a list of publicly visible user profiles to look at?

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad to elicit such emotion with our landing page. ;-)

Yes, we are working to show as much useful info as possible to a visitor before they need to sign up. We went live yesterday, and we are working make it better every day.

Laravel, nice. :)

We think so too. ;-)

I'm in Australia, does it include a local Aussie dataset or is it possible to add bands ourselves?

I'm in Australia too, seems to have an awesome dataset. Back to the first The Living End concert my brother took me to when I was in primary school.

A few obscure bands were missing (especially if they no longer exist: Rookie, Fatis Valour, Holland, ...), but I'm honestly not surprised. Not possible to add bands ourselves yet

Finally! I've waited for something like this forever! Thank you!

Awesome, I hope you dig it.

Nice. Just a heads-up, Bandsinstown[0] are probably not going to like your logo.

[0]http://news.bandsintown.com/home

Any option to delete your account?

No facebook login, seriously?

Implementing it should take about 2h using modern libraries and frameworks.

Seriously. Everything takes about 2h, so choices have to be made in order to launch. It's coming. ;-)

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