How many times have you learnt too late that a favourite musician played in town the previous night and you knew nothing about it? I’ve had that experience one too many times. Services promising to help music lovers avoid this sort of frustration are sadly relatively few and far between. However, that’s not to say they don’t exist. I’ve found three so far, if you know of any others please do let me know!

iConcertCal
Last.fm Events
Ontour
SonicLiving
Tourfilter

iConcertCal

iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

iConcertCal is a bit of a clumsy name, but the implementation is anything but. The ‘about’ page of the application’s website reveals that the two people behind the plugin “are not a company and this is not a commercial venture. We are just two grad students in electrical engineering. We wrote this plug-in in our spare time because we were tired of missing concerts for our favorite bands and we figured other people probably are too”. My hat’s off to them, they’ve taken an attractively different approach by integrating their interface into iTunes and using iTunes’ library as a basis on which to search the web for relevant listings. Very nice.

Update: A MacWorld review of iConcertCal reveals that for listings outside the US, it’s necessary to type in your hometown into the City box and your country into the State box. Doing this results in some listings for London, UK, though it’s not anywhere near as comprehensive as Last.fm’s Events.

Recommendation: Well worth a try, though results will probably be limited if you live outside the US.

Link: iConcertCal website

Last.fm Events

Last.fm’s ‘Event’ service is very Web 2.0 - all of the concert listings are user-generated and the aggregated information is redistributed via RSS and iCal updates. Each subscriber’s homepage displays events in the sidebar - if another user spots an interesting gig s/he can sign up as also attending. What’s really attractive is that 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 these probably relate to the tastes of some of my Last.fm-registered friends.

It’s also possible to see past events that you’ve attended and if the gig has been reviewed in an attendee’s Last.fm blog, the link is dynamically generated to those reviews. As I said before, all of this information is available via RSS feed so it can be viewed in the user’s preferred newsreader. Unfortunately, I can’t link to my own Events page for you to look at as you have to be logged in to see it.

For certain listings, there’s a little icon beside the date of the concert which indicates whether it’s possible to purchase a ticket for the event via a Last.fm affiliate. This is the last link in the chain - users can be notified of a gig and purchase tickets relatively seamlessly without having to search for a ticket agency. I say relatively seamlessly because the purchasing process isn’t integrated directly into the page (a little Ajax magic wouldn’t have gone amiss here), rather the user has to select a link on the concert details page which pops open another window for the ticket vendor’s website - in the case of the Keane link I clicked, I was taken to a ‘See’ page that listed all of Keane’s concerts rather than the exact one that I’d chosen via Last.fm. Also, at the top left of the See page is a ‘return to last.fm’ box, but this returned me to my dashboard page, not the event page I’d departed from. Not a big deal, but not quite 100% flow either. I’d expect that such details will be sorted out in time though. Also, at this early stage, there aren’t many listings for which tickets are available. Again, as Last.fm acquires partners, this is bound to improve.

Events on the Event Recommendation page are subtly colour-coded into five categories: ‘gig you’re attending’, ‘recommended gig’, ‘festival you’re attending’, ‘recommended festival’ and ‘friends’ event’. Under a friend’s event, the friend is named along with the number of other Last.fm-registered attendees (the event page shows who these people are). Also available are iCal (Apple’s built-in calendar application) notifications for friends’ and recommended events.

Now if they could just supply a recording of the gig as a memento and a wirelessly-conveyed hangover cure, we’d all be very happy…

Recommendation: One disadvantage of Last.fm is that lack of instantaneous feedback on signup - it’s necessary to play at least 100 songs before receiving recommendations. This doesn’t appear to have deterred the 15 million unique monthly users so far though… The Events information (why not call it gigs or concerts?) would benefit from greater emphasis in the site as a whole, but the service as it stands is a very good first step. If you’re already a Last.fm subscriber and are not aware of this service - what are you waiting for?

Visit: Last.fm

Ontour

OnTour is a Mac™ and PC compatible widget that retrieves concert listings for your town and highlights those that match the artists in your digital music library. Search results also includes links for tickets, maps, directions, artist discography and a link to your prefered online music store where you can listen to and download tracks. OnTour works great as a music discovery tool.

Another entrant on the concert recommendation scene comes in the form of Ontour which provides a freely downloadable widget that supplies targeted information. By the looks of things it doesn’t also provide targeted ads (I swear I’ve never played an Avril Lavigne track in my life - though, come to think of it, my 9 year old daughter did talk enthusiastically about her the other day - is web 2.0 stretching its tendrils into the offline space??) Of the My Artists visible in the above screenshot, Mika, Ash and Captain (I’ve never heard of the latter) are artists entirely absent from my music library, but I have already bought myself tickets to Young Gods and would count myself as a fan of Van the Man and John Martyn so the service gets a provisional thumbs up. Time will tell if it continues to be of use.

If this service operates in the background it would be good to see a way for it to catch a user’s attention outside of the widget environment - I only very rarely use widgets on OSX. Usefully, Ontour allows users to add artists absent from their music library:

Visit: Ontour

SonicLiving

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.

Visit: SonicLiving

Tourfilter

We used to miss too many shows — we’d hear about them after tickets they sold out, or worse, read about them in the Globe the day after. Maybe even in the Metro (oh, the shame!)

So we wrote a program to download all the area club listings daily, search for bands we liked, then send out email. That’s Tourfilter. And it’s not just for us, it’s for everyone (chances are, we’re in your city or coming soon).

In short, Tourfilter has tools to:

• Track as many bands as you can think of and send you an email when a show is announced.
• Combine your friends’ calendars into one place.
• Listen to tens of thousands of MP3 and RealAudio tracks by bands with upcoming shows.
• Browse recent music blog listings, organized by band.
• Get show updates via RSS and iCal.

You’ll never get spam from Tourfilter. And humans keep an eye on things to make sure the shows Tourfilter finds are the ones you’re looking for.

Visit: Tourfilter

Share this post: