Show HN: Discover and listen to artists performing in your city this week | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Discover and listen to artists performing in your city this week

discoverlocal.fm

88 pointsalexyaseen33 comments

I am learning to ignore any kind of application that has the "in your city" message. Basically it is, "in your city if it happens to be a major metropolis" - which is not where some of us live.

I don't really get why you are being downvoted. Honestly I kind of expected a US only app, which is by far more common.

But I have to say this is actually even worse. It's not just discover "music" in "your city".

Looking a it, it actually means, discover "mainstream music, in super mainstream venues" in "your city". 9-NINE-9 Venues for Paris?

GO take a gander a New York, with this app you can "discover", ZZ-Top, Madona & The Who for instance. Wow, what I have I been missing.

Thanks for the honest feedback. We've been discussing this in the office, and we agree!

If I can convince the team, next week we'll implement some new logic in the Parabola flow so that we select more from the middle of the popularity graph of concerts rather than the top.

Wouldn't it be better to try and select artists (or at least genres) the Spotify user "likes"?

Songkick, and spotify for that matter, already do that

This is where crowd sourcing has value over curation. Let me tell you about this awesome little regional jazz ensemble playing down the street that others don’t know about.

You certainly can offer crowdsourced vs curated content, but if all you ever offer is curated then you can only scale so much.

Thanks for taking a look! We decided to limit the initial launch and plan to add more cities next week, but that doesn't mean you can't have a playlist for your city now.

If you're interested, you can use the link below to clone the Parabola flow I used to create the playlists. You'll be able to create arbitrarily many playlists for cities of your choosing.

The only potentially sticky parts are that you'll need to apply for the Songkick API, and set up OAuth for your Spotify account, but otherwise it should just work out of the box.

https://parabola.io/api/clipboard/5feb0423aa594b08828aa04165...

Seems totally reasonable. An alternate way they could have given you feedback is: Seems like a <cool|bad> idea, <would|would not> be interested if it was in my area.

What's wrong with honest feedback against clearly outrageous marketing? Serious question. Not trying to troll.

Nothing is wrong with honest feedback of course, but I think it's a bit harsh to disregard a product based on its infancy and inability to serve your market. Companies grow, markets expand, etc. How would you suggest they market differently?

Why is it the app's fault you live in the middle of nowhere?

It's the marketing of "in your city" when they only support (by my estimate) ~6% of the US population, which is at fault.

I assume your "middle of nowhere" comment is just trolling.

I live in a 58k population US town with a large facility for a Fortune 50 company and a decent research university. We are surrounded by green space and I can be at the beach or in the mountains in an hour. I can bike to work and it’s about 5-10 more minutes to my commute.

I’m exactly where I want to be.

It ain't. And likewise, it ain't the app's fault that it's currently useless to the overwhelmingly-vast majority of people in the US. But that's how things go, of course: start in the big cities, then branch out to more and more as the idea catches on.

Also, I'd hardly call Sacramento "the middle of nowhere", what with the million+ people in and around it. Nor would I call any other 1m+ population metropolitan area such.

But what do I know? I'm just some hick who grew up in "the middle of nowhere".

The underlying source I believe they are using seems to have other cities. For example I checked out Cambridge UK as an example of a small city: https://www.songkick.com/metro_areas/24571-uk-cambridge

Hi HN!

I'm Trevor from Parabola.io. We're excited to show off Discover Local.

Music is really important to our team, and we look forward to helping others discover new artists and see more shows.

If you want to know a bit more about how we built this, I linked a post that goes into more detail down below. In short, we pull in concert data from Songkick, then compile song data and create playlists with Spotify before sending it all on to Webflow for display.

The best part is that Discover Local was built with absolutely no code over the course of a few afternoons!

Feel free to ask us any questions you might have!

https://medium.com/parabola-labs/discover-local-playlists-5f...

This looks pretty nice! But I’m curious how you match the artist up to Spotify; for instance, Whitney (https://open.spotify.com/artist/32aUoW94mJ7xTJI7fG0V1G) is playing in Austin this week but you link to Whitney Houston (https://open.spotify.com/artist/6XpaIBNiVzIetEPCWDvAFP).

That being said I like it and could see myself using this!

This appears to be limited to well-known musicians. IMO those musicians don't need the help-- people are already finding their shows just fine.

There's a ton of great musicians out there that want to be discovered by wider audiences, but are regularly ignored by various music directories like this. Seems like a lost opportunity, considering that they're probably more willing to pay for inclusion than already well-known artists.

right, songkick and bandsintown doing just fine and work in any city

Oh man this is exactly what I've been looking for. Spotify has the "Browse > Concerts" tab which shows upcoming concerts in your zip code for bands you've listened to on Spotify, but I've always wished I could just hit "Play."

Requested Nashville (c'mon, no Music City, USA??), look forward to giving this a spin!

https://www.nextweeksplaylist.com/nashville

Hmm, it only works with a Spotify account which I don't have neither want..

Neat design! I tried this a few years ago by making http://bandsoftheweek.com/, but I haven't kept up with fixing bug or improving it. Perhaps I can finally take it down.

I made an app like this a long time ago called "Showhopping". Its intention was to get people out to more music events by helping them discover artists similar to the ones they liked. I really just earnestly felt like people weren't going to enough music events, and missing out on a great activity to engage in!

I eventually ran out of steam on it when BandsInTown and others joined the scene, but it was great fun for a while, and I even ended up on lifehacker at some point. Good luck with your venture!

The design of this site seems identical to the graphic design that Adafruit used for their I2C address compilation advertisement art[0]. I don't want to jump to the conclusion that this is a ripoff - is this a standard design template that someone offers?

[0] https://learn.adafruit.com/i2c-addresses/overview

Probable source in question:

https://photofunia.com/effects/retro-wave

Hi! I really like your site's design! Thanks for providing the Medium link too. Very surprised that no code was needed to build this; I inspected the page and saw over 5,000 lines of JQuery code in there. Well done.

As someone that struggles to find good music events, this is awesome.

Where do you source the event data?

EDIT: Due to Festivals my playlist (Chicago) is filled with mostly stuff from Riot Fest (this weekend)

This is just a thinly-veiled ad for Parabola

FYI Site Blocked by our corp network admin for some reason..

This exists:

https://www.nextweeksplaylist.com/

Hi! Thanks for the shout out!

along with many many many others, e,g jukely.com that actually has a ton of cities but catered towards people who like to discover artists more so go to giant popular shows (has subscription fee)

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