In a big city like Chicago, there are literally dozens of music concerts on any given day. Its often easy to miss performances by your favorite bands unless you continually keep on top of the listings in local media. If you live in a small town, only the truly diligent fan may realize a band is playing only a few miles away. Luckily there are a crop of Music 2.0 services out there that will ensure you will never miss your favorite acts again.
iConcertCal
A free iTunes plugin 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 and supports worldwide searches. Listings link directly to the venue web site for more information and ticket purchases. Users and venus can register with the service to submit shows. You can also manually add artists that may not be in your library, extend your search radius and export concert listings to iCal.
Last.FM Events
Last.fm recommends upcoming events based on your listening habits. Unlike iConcertCal, which takes your entire library into account, its seems Last.fm’s recommendations are limited to only artists you have listened to (scrobbled). Hence, the number of listings are dramatically less that those provided by iConcertCal. Last.fm lets you declare if you will be attending an event and see others who are attending. You can refine the results by events you are attending, events based on your taste, and events your friends are attending. You can further expand your search by city and venue. You can also subscribe to RSS and iCal feeds.
Upcomingscrobbler
This service is a mashup that matches artists you have scrobbled in Last.fm and matches them with events listed in Upcoming.org. You can subscribe to RSS and icAl feeds. However, the service unfortunately returns limited results.
All Crazy Style
This service is another mashup that matches artists you have scrobbled in Last.fm and matches them with events listed in Upcoming.org (though this one requires a usernames for both sites). Again, the results were pretty scant - this can be due to using a limited set of Last.fm data being used or the absence of enough listings in Upcoming.
iLike
iLike presents you with a list of upcoming concerts in your city based on artists you have marked “I Like”. Basing recommendations on your rated artists is a good thing because you are not limited to artists you have listened to or ones in your library. On the flip side, you need to rate lots of artists within iLike to get a comprehensive list of shows. Ideally, iLike should consider using the recently played history in addition to ratings to provide recommendations. It would also be nice to expand the results to include related artists. The presentation of the information can use some help as well. Instead of displaying show information directly on the On Tour page in chronological order, you need to click the artist and then click the tour date link on the resulting artist page to get the details. They do provide direct links to Ticketmaster for purchasing tickets.
Tourb.us
Tourb.us is a personalized concert tracker with a variety of cool features. You can import bands via iTunes and Last.fm or manually add bands to track. Unfortunately they don’t allow you to import XML files with more that 1000 songs. You can get concert alerts via email, RSS, iCal, and SMS. The service provides you with a profile page and allows you view profiles of other users who are attending upcoming shows. Users have the ability to add/edit shows, upload their own concert photos, and add comments. Overall, a very promising service.
OnTour
This is a Mac/PC widget that displays upcoming shows based on music in your library and location. Selecting a concert from your results shows dates for the entire tour and provides links to ticket info and the artist page on iTunes. For some reason, artist matches from my library were not displaying. The widget is fairly slick looking but lacking some essential UI elements like a back button.
Podbop
Podbop is an community-powered MP3 concert calendar that helps you discover bands playing in your town. Events can have associated mp3s which allows you to hear a band before you go and see them. Unfortunately, many of the events listed are missing mp3 files (Chicago only had one event with an associated mp3). What is really cool about Podbop is you can subscribe to a podcast for an entire city. When you view the song in your media player, the event info is listed as part of the metadata.
Tourfilter
Tourfilter is another Web 2.0 style service that allows you to track bands coming to your city. You need to manually add bands though they provide a list of related artists to help expedite the process. In addition to show information, they have integrated Hype Machine to provide links to mp3s by the artists found on various blogs. You can view other users who are tracking the same show as you, invite friends to the show, and leave comments. Shows link directly to the venue for purchasing tickets. You can also choose to receive weekly or monthly emails with show recommendations and releases for the bands you track.
Track50
Another service that allows you to track your favorite bands and see upcoming shows. Unfortunately, adding bands is a major pain since you need to add them manually on at a time. Their snoop feature which lists bands that are coming to your city allows you to quickly add bands. You can receive alerts email and subscribe to an RSS feed for your shows. Track50 also allows users to write band reviews and search reviews others have written.
Jambase
Jambase allows members to get email alerts, track your favorite bands, access customized news, create personal show calendars and and participate in exclusive contests. Jambase allows you to upload your iTunes music library, top 50 Last.fm artists, and manually add artists to track. Jambase provides you with a personalized dashboard that displays recommended shows and personalized news based on your favorite bands, You can set up a public profile page to share with other Jambase users. Your friends can view your personal calendar and subscribe to it using iCal. You can also set up private groups to help arrange seeing concerts together.
Bebop
Bebop is a slick looking application for Mac/PC that monitors your iTunes library and displays upcoming shows. Currently the service only provides information for concerts in the UK and Ireland. You also have the ability to search for artists that are not within your iTunes library.
