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Comment by pugworthy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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".

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