Since Songbird appears (I haven’t played with it yet) to do pretty much what I requested on this blog a year ago it would appear prudent to put in another request.
I like going to gigs. There are a large number of musicians and bands whose gigs I’d be interested in attending, too many for me to track individually so I’m very likely to miss them unless I religiously scan the gig listings every week, which I don’t because there are far too many of them.
What I need is a way of filtering the listings according to my preferences. I could do this by manually entering my favourite artists into a list and cross referencing that with upcoming gigs, but that’s far too much effort.
However, it occurred to me today that I already have a list of my favourite artists – my iTunes library. It’s safe to assume if I have an album’s worth of tracks by someone that I’d be interested in seeing them play live and this information is stored in a handy XML file.
What I want is to be able to upload that file to a service that will produce a list of my “favourites”, cross reference it with gig listings for my area and alert me, via email or RSS, when a gig is scheduled.
Can’t be that hard, surely?
Update: Tom points me to Upcomingscrobbler which pretty much does this except it uses Last FM data for which bands you listen to and compares it with the Upcoming.org listings. It’s pretty keen and I’ll be subscribing to my listing but a couple of problems spring to mind. Firstly it misses out on the bands that I like but don’t listen to that often, the “long tail” of my music library if you like (an example would be Asobi Seksu who I recently “rediscovered” having not listened to them for a year or so) and secondly Upcoming isn’t that comprehensive, at least for the UK. But it’s a tremendous leap down the right track. Go check it out.
Sounds like a good suggestion — hope it works out.
As for the Songbird thing (I can’t try it yet cos it’s Windows-only still) — I can’t quite get whether it does what I’d like — a sort of ABE-books search for music, searching across a number of different legal download sites, allowing you to choose the cheapest option. It doesn’t look like it quite does that…
* what I’d like and what you initially wanted, I should have said…
I’m going to email you something.
Jenni: I think Songbird has the potential to do what I was asking. It’s still just a proof of concept thing but at the very least you can search for an artist and it should bring up all the online stores that stock them. Price comparison shouldn’t be too hard to add. But we’ll have to wait and see.
Songbirds price comparison/searching is based on the web APIs that these stores provide, over time they and songbird will evolve.
The long tail stuff could be built in, just a matter of selecting the right feed to use.
I would also say that the last.fm metadata is going to be better than anything iTunes/Songbird could create. I’m thinking here about searching your artists, seeing how they are tagged and then doing a repeat search for related bands.
And of course the trouble with these ticketing sites is that are all owned or syndicated with Mr Big Ticket Company. I have lots of ideas, but not enough time to build.
My problem with LastFM is more to do with how I listen to music. Basically I have over 3000 artists in my library which I usually listen to on random shuffle. Occasionally I’ll listen to a single artist/band but not that often and from a much smaller selection. Therefore my LastFM stats are classic Long Tail. There are plenty of bands that I’ve only listened to 10 or so times that I’d love to see live and I suspect Upcomingscrobbler isn’t going to pick up on them.
That said, for normal people with manageable music libraries who don’t use shuffle all the time this is absolutely perfect. ;)
Also, I don’t do anything with LastFM other than let it collect the data. No tags, hardly any contacts. My metadata on there is sparse. On the other hand iTunes has Play Counts as well as quantities of tracks by each artist.
You’re right, the biggest problem is the ticketing sites not opening up their data, but I can’t see that changing in a hurry…
Re the long tail, the problem is that the Last.fm webservices only report the top 50 artists. It’s tempting to pull additional artists from the weekly charts, but you’re only allowed to send one request to Last.fm’s webservices per second, so it would slow things down quite a bit.
As for iTunes, if the library is already stored as XML, it should be straightforward to add iTunes support to Upcomingscrobbler. However, since I’m not an iTunes user, I can’t promise I’ll ever get around to adding it myself.
Hi Peter. I’ve put 2+2 together (you’re mavit, right?)and finally figured out why you’ve been so good at putting gig on Upcoming. I was wondering what the motivation was there!
The top 50 is a bit of an issue. It’s a shame they won’t let you grab the whole Artists list even if it’s just once a week or so (it’s not going to change that often surely) but them’s the breaks.
Like I said, this is still a wonderful thing and plugs a whole load of gaps, so well done.
Well, actually I wrote a program that goes of to a bunch of ticketing websites and scrapes off a list of gigs. Upcoming.org seemed as good a place to stuff the results as any.
The downside in this ‘process’ will be upcoming.org. It’s a little ‘tricky’ to use I find… with at least four different ‘Glasgow’ venues, one of which I created, and none of which know the other exist.
A little more control and cross checking on the db side would’ve been nice to stop that kind of thing happening.
What would be really great would be, rather than opening their lists per se, the ticketing offices could publish to upcoming. Like what Peter has done but… you know… proper and whatnot (I’m sure the scraping thing will be against their silly rules).
Still, a good idea, and the more exposure it gets, the better it will become.
Peter, I thought you put a lot of hard work in adding all those gigs, I think I might need to borrow that scraper.
That’s genius! I was just about to suggest doing something like that myself. But I hadn’t realised someone had already done it… fantastic!
Pete, Any chance of using the same scraper script for Manchester gigs?
US only at the moment but http://podbop.org/ looks interesting.
Here’s a problem your iTunes idea. With any half decent music collection the XML file will be many megabytes in size. Uploading it all is impractical. You’d need something on the client side to parse the library and only upload the top n artists.
Solved: http://www.bebopular.com/