I recently posted about iConcertCal, a free iTunes plug-in that sought to provide notification of concerts based upon the iTunes library. Last night, I was clicking around my Last.fm account and stumbled upon its own concert notification system. Very nice it is too.

It’s very Web 2.0 as all of the concert listings are user-generated. Users can enter concert details and indicate whether they’re attending or on visiting other users’ pages and spotting an already listed gig can join to be displayed as attending. Gigs are displayed in the left sidebar under ‘Events’ of users’ chart pages. Last.fm makes concert recommendations based upon your - and your musical neighbours’ - listening habits. Tick boxes allow users to choose from one or more of the following choices: ‘Events I’m attending’, ‘Friends’ Events’, ‘Recommended Events (based on my profile + location)’ and ‘All Events Near Me’. With all but the last criteria selected, I’m shown an impressive selection of concerts, many of which I wasn’t aware of, but would consider attending (John Cale, Lee Scratch Perry, 4hero, Theatre of Hate, Adrian Sherwood and Manu Dibango to name but a few). There are a few misses - the prospect of seeing The Killers or The Arcade Fire doesn’t interest me at all, but I suspect would a few of my Last.fm registered friends.

I’m also glad to see that since this functionality was first iterated in a very limited fashion, it’s now possible to see past events that you’ve attended and if they’ve been covered in users’ blogs, links are dynamically generated to those reviews.

I’m very happy to note that all of this information is available via RSS feed so I don’t have to keep checking back on the Events page, but can instead see it in my preferred newsreader. Unfortunately, I can’t link to my page for you to look at as you have to be logged in to see it, otherwise the URL defaults to the Last.fm homepage. I do think this is a brilliant addition to Last.fm and really deserves to be promoted much more widely than it currently appears to be. It could really drive traffic to the service. If you don’t already have a Last.fm account - now’s the time!

Link: Last.fm

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