Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town

Hey, I love this idea and am working on something similar (an alternative events discovery and promotion tool for cities). I see that a lot of you folks here are also working on similar stuff.

How about we chat more about these topics? Integration with APIs like BandsInTown, Facebook, apps like Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, music metadata collection from MusicBrainz, Discogs… If these topics sound interesting, join the public group on Facebook I created just now:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2016318755302445/

or this new subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers

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.

https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/i...

I made a similar site last August. http://www.hearnow.io/

You can pick a location on a map and it will generate a playlist for pretty much any city. I haven't done much work on it since then, but had a decent response when I posted it to Reddit. I've been considering open sourcing it, but not sure if there is interest.

My approach:

- Use SeatGeek's API to find venues/artists near the user

- Query Spotify's search API for artists with these names to get artist IDs (which you need to do other interesting things with Spotify's API)

- Filter results from Spotify search queries with fuzzy matching between artist names and results

- Use Spotify's API to get the top 5-10 most popular tracks for each artist, and randomly select ~30 to add to a playlist

Spotify's search API cannot be queried in batch which is a pretty frustrating bottleneck. I mainly solved this by caching artist name / ID pairs, but this would only really be effective if I got a lot of traffic (I don't).

Also, SeatGeek's API was a lot more friendly than Songkick, which I considered using. But SeatGeek didn't seem to have data for many venues overseas, so I had some users outside the U.S. that were disappointed that their queries would usually fail because the app couldn't find enough tracks.

Very cool. Haven't been back to NYC in awhile but good to see the Rockwood Music Hall is still a hot venue. My main suggestion would be to populate the page with the Spotify data before having the user commit to signing into Spotify. Yes, have the call to action be at the top, but have the below-the-fold content be a list view of venues and artists. The map is nice but I don't think that's the most relevant view for NYC, since it's so easy to get around town between any popular venue.

My perspective is based on my assumption of, at the start of the week, what most people want to know but don't yet know. They know the venues, they just don't know (without tedious inspection) who is playing where. Maybe it'd make sense to have the genre of the acts more prominently shown. I'd be more immediately interested in looking at the list of alt rock bands who are in town that week, and then looking up the venues they'll be at. As opposed to having a list of venues and acts, and having to scan it to see if any of those acts are in the genres I prefer.

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.

Awesome! Now worldwide ;)

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)

This is such a great, simple, almost obvious idea. This type of ideas is getting more and more rare, so it is great to see one popping here and there.

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?

Nice execution! I made something similar a few years ago, except it generated a playlist of previews from iTunes with an option to connect Spotify. It worked by finding all venues within a certain radius from you using the Foursquare API, and correlating that with the JamBase and Songkick APIs. It was a bit ahead of its time because not enough people had Spotify, and their catalog wasn’t big enough to cover artists coming to some of the smaller venues. I might still own the domain rockout.fm if you want something a bit more catchy.

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.

Great idea! Another idea I've wanted for awhile, setlist.fm based Spotify playlists for concerts I liked.

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..)

Brilliant! It's always surprised me that Spotify didn't add this feature since they already have the data.

Let me sign up for a mailing list for when you add in my city :)

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.

[1] https://devpost.com/software/sx-setfinder

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.

This is great, I waste a LOT of time doing playlists to figure out my festival schedule. So time consuming. Can you do google play please? I had to junk Spotify years ago because streams would constantly interrupt and jitter.

Great idea. Congrats.

I’m assuming aggregating the booking calendars is a fair amount of manual work but the value of this to audiences interested in lesser-known artists should be significant. I would love to see smaller, mix-use and under-age venues included.

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)

Jukely (https://www.jukely.com/) does another good version of this. Here's their playlist for NYC https://open.spotify.com/user/jukely/playlist/6d8T2n9ISP4ZgH... (other cities are avail too).

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 ..."

Great idea!

Some feedback though: I found the tagline "It's a pain to look up every band coming to your city. Now just follow your favorite venues and genres and get a weekly Spotify playlist of upcoming music." intuitive but the heading "Stop Typing Every Band in Town" didn't make sense to me.

I'd go with something more straightforward like the title used for this Hacker News post. I immediately understood what that meant.

That's a really good idea. Nice execution on it, too...

I created something similar, though it just creates a youtube playlist that you can listen in your browser: http://touristplaylist.com/, you can pick a date range and the location, it uses songkick api

Please add London! I'd pay for this easily

www.PlaylistHQ.com does this better!

Please add a list view of all venues by city! I don't want to have to search for all the venues.

Awesome idea, but this seems like something that could be just switched on quickly at Spotify.

This is great! Right now I use last.fm, bandsintown, and Spotify to search for live shows. However none of them actually generate a playlist. I will definitely be using this to discover new music. When will I be able to add my own city?

You should add a way to submit venues for other cities in single and batch methods.

Please please please add Toronto! This is a killer idea, i'd love to use it!

Great job! I will use this. It might be a nice discovery pipeline if nothing else.

A "select all venues" feature seems important, and the playlist probably only needs one song per artist, I see that quite a few have 2-3.

Is there some kind of filter for types of music?

When I look at the "bands" in my town (not through your app), there's everything from metal to folk to techno.

May have been suggested but would love to be able to toggle all venues in a certain city so I don't have to go searching for venues that I may be interested in.

I did this too: moreencores.com

And you can do it for any city

Please beta test it :)

Great idea but why no contact details for suggestions and no way to sign up/vote for other cities?

Possible to support any city by checking Stubhub/Ticketmaster API for events in user-entered city?

Cool, but one question: did you send a feature-request to Spotify before you decided to make this?

Can this be used to create playlists in formats with more interoperating potential, such as JSON?

Great idea. Congrats!

Would it be possible to aggregate shows from a ticket website like seatgeek or ticketmaster?

Really liked the work you put in!

And I love that everybody is so supportive of it, cheers to all you guys!

This is a very cool idea—are you familiar with the BandsInTown app as well?

Only selected cities :(

Cool too, good work. Needs more cities! Seattle especially :)

Very cool! I am eager to see my town in your app

I'd love you forever if you added San Diego.

Does no one here know about the BandsInTown app?

Fantastic idea.

Does this work the other way around?

i'm listening to a playlist for nyc and I love it. would love a playlist for SF.

Great, an empty play list. :P

Please add New Orleans.

very cool. would love this for nashville, willing to help =)

Boston Boston Boston!

Wow. A whole 4 cities in one country. Totally useful :\