Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

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Summary/review of local arts and community events, mainly underground stuff. I don't have enough time in my day any more to look up who's playing a local show, what they sound like, when they're playing or where. Also don't have time to look up art shows or indie movies, or community-planned events and classes. There's a buttload of these things in big metropolitan areas, someone just needs to get paid to take the time to sort through it all and summarize it each week.

None of this is covered by local magazines or blogs. I can go out to record stores and coffee shops and collect flyers, search through myspace and facebook profiles for event listings and index twitter posts, but it takes all freakin day. If it was collected, summarized and publicized properly I think a lot more people would get out there and see what up and coming people are creating.

Even if it were all covered by blogs (a lot of it is on twitter), I don't want to search through blogs or twitter or whatever, I just want an e-mail telling me what's coming up and describes it. That'd be worth $10 for me.

Might as well throw my hat in the ring: My site Showhopping.com was basically invented for people like you. Only thing is it only applies to music at the moment.

Give your location, 5 or 6 bands you like, and voila, you get a listing of shows in your area that you can sort by how much you'll like them.

No email. No username. No usership requirements whatsoever. Just use and go. Oh, and I save your selected bands in a cookie so they're there for you when you come back.

I added 6 bands, got a very small number of matches (in NYC!), and most of the matches are in the <20% range.

Is there any way to feed my Pandora or Spotify data into this? Seems like that would help produce better recommendations.

Edit: I do have to say, the design is very well done-easy to add bands, search, and the integration with Google Maps is very nice. The fact that I didn't even think about it is a great sign.

Thanks for the words. This is more an MVP at this point. My short term roadmap:

Last.fm, Pandora and Spotify logins

Users/Managers/Promoters can add shows themselves; add listings for tickets

I'm a guy who likes very obscure bands and lives in Phoenix, Arizona, and with 9 or 10 selections (one for each sound I'm into), I tend to get back at least 4 or 5 shows for a month long search. It still has a ways to go, but it's more of a folly than a hardcore startup.

On an aside, a product exists for mobile called BandMate. It actually scans your phone for acts (if you keep your music in your phone) and recommends artists to you in a similar manner. Very cool app, and invaluable for me when I'm traveling.

It's a good start. If you take all the found listings within 50 miles, automate grabbing their descriptions from their artist pages and maybe a quick link to a sample song, put it in a table for each day of the week and e-mail me once a week, that would almost be worth money. It still lacks a lot of real local information but maybe there's more sites you can grep, i'm not sure. I remember all the band flyers used to be posted on myspace profiles, which might have also had descriptions of events that could be grepped too. Facebook and bandcamp and a few other sites are slowly replacing myspace for this, I think.

I don't know what the legality of this is exactly, but occasionally there are local sites which index upcoming shows that you could scrape from. For DC there's http://www.dcshows.net/, http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/dc-music-venues.html, http://www.brightestyoungthings.com/events/index.htm, http://www.washingtondc.com/nightlife/localbands.html, http://www.dclivemusic.com/, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/music/, http://www.meetup.com/indiemusic-134/ and of course the venue website calendars which are probably a nightmare to try to index individually. The twitter feed of each venue can be a lot easier to grok (for example, https://twitter.com/#!/somethingl33t/dc-music)

But if you want to make some money, you might have to spend the time/money to pull all these sources for each big metropolitan area (where you'll be making the most bank).

Created an account on HN just to say your site is wicked. Entered 4 bands and have to upcoming show's that I'm actually interested in. It may suit me better as I'm in Chicago, but I think this would be sweet for all the major cities. Excellent work.

Wow, thanks so much for the words. I want to keep improving it, but some other ventures I'm working on have been eating up a lot of time. I'd be happy to get further input.

I've been working on DeliRadio which lets you search for shows near a location (or use GPS), then buy tickets through songkick.

At least for music, jambase.com does a pretty good job. They don't cover free gigs, it seems, but even for local artists playing small venues their listings are pretty complete, at least in my area.

I tried to use twitter to aggregate this data, following relevant things related to minneapolis, but it was a complete failure.

Isn't this what independent alt-weekly newspapers are for?

The ones I'm familiar with list all of what you describe.

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