The number of music recommendation services appears to be multiplying exponentially and the same might be said of concert recommendation websites. I encountered a reference to SonicLiving in the comments of a brief post about iConcert on Joshspear.com and decided to follow it up. They make the following claim on their homepage:
SonicLiving is a huge database of concerts that you can browse through by artist, venue, date, popularity, etc. But we’re sooo much more than that. You can find out about upcoming events, add them to your calendar, and invite your friends to them… Subscribe to all sorts of RSS feeds and iCals, add artists to your wishlist, and get notified when they’re in town… You can even add them from iTunes.
Who could resist? After providing a user name, email address and password, the next screen asks you to specify your region (all American cities with the one honourable exception of London, UK) and then provides a number of alternative ways to inform them of your musical tastes:
- Adding artists from iTunes…
- Adding artists manually by typing them in seemed like too much work for these weary fingers, so…
- I jumped at the opportunity to allow Last.fm to supply SonicLiving with its vast fund of knowledge about my listening habits merely by providing my user name.
After submitting a few more (optional) personal details I was ready to be chaffeured to my user page. On arrival, however, it seemed that supplying my Last.fm details hadn’t resulted in any personalised recommendations. After an email to support, that was fixed. Unfortunately, I still wasn’t presented with an overwhelming number of suggestions. Just four in fact: Gotan Project, Al Green (twice) and Joanna Newsom between now and the end of September. This doesn’t compare at all favourably with the plethora of frequently highly accurate concerts supplied by Last.fm’s own Events section. And this is despite the large number of events claimed by SonicLiving and the long list of artists grabbed from my Last.fm account and displayed on my page.
Also listed on the default personal homepage The five popular artists listed are not my cup of tea at all (Nine Inch Nails, Bright Eyes, etc), nor are the recently noticed events (Apples In Stereo or Chicago The Musical? No thanks). Perhaps none of the 9,571 London events listed on SonicLiving’s homepage are relevant to my listening habits… The other section on my page helpfully informs me of ‘Popular Artists you don’t have’. They are radiohead, beck, the shins, death cab for cutie. Thank you, but no thank you.
Recommendation: you might have better luck trying this service out if you’re based in one of the major American cities listed on SonicLiving’s homepage. However, if you’ve already had a Last.fm account for a while (enabling them to get a good idea of your listening habits), you’ll probably be better off looking at their service.
Link: SonicLiving
Related: iConcert, Last.fm Events service
