Songkick: Nudging You Gently Out Of The Basement

I like to go to shows. It's a habit my older brother instilled in me years ago, and I have yet to kick it. Sometimes I go through periods where I'll see upwards of 4 shows in a month, sometimes on back-to-back nights if I'm feeling saucy. But even when I'm not in the mood to drag myself out of the house well after my bedtime to go stand in a loud room with a bunch of 20-somethings, I still like to know who's coming to town.

To keep myself informed, I signed up for the email lists of the 9:30 Club, the Rock and Roll Hotel, and a couple of other clubs around town (sadly the Black Cat doesn't have an email list). That's OK, but more often than not I'm inundated by emails about bands I don't care about. For me, salvation came courtesy of tourfilter, a great site where you tell it the bands you like (it has a nice auto-complete feature to help you out there - the whole site has a very "my first RoR/AJAX site" feel, but in a good way) and it emails you when they come to your town. You can also add friends through the site, which I find is a great way to learn about new bands - I just check in on what bands my hipster friends have added from time to time and then go check them out. Tourfilter has some other nice features, my favorite being the ability to get an RSS feed for your upcoming shows. Very cool.

Still, you have to type in your bands manually. And nobody likes typing, right? Oh, if only there was some solution that involved nothing more than playing music on my computer! Enter Songkick. This site offers a plugin you can download that will scan your music library, add all the artists it finds to your profile, then start automatically tracking for you when those artists are coming to your town. I was so excited to discover this that it didn't even dampen my mood to learn that it only works with winamp, iTunes, and Windows Media Player, none of which I use. So, it seems will not be a Songkick user any time soon, but I'd love to hear if you guys are using it. If not, how do you keep up with shows coming to town?

PS They also have some cool widgets you can use to tell everybody that your bands are coming to town, or for you bloggers out there, they have one that will try to automatically parse your blog posts, figure out what bands you're writing about, then display any tour info it has for that band. You'd be seeing that somewhere in my sidebar if it worked with blogger. Oh, well. Hopefully that's coming soon.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention All Crazy Style, a great mashup tool that combines your last.fm favorite artists feed and your upcoming.org locations information to deliver a list of upcoming shows (also available as an RSS feed) based on your listening data. It's great, but relies on people adding things to upcoming, which doesn't always happen. And for some reason it sometimes recommends bands I've never heard of or listened to. But it's still really cool.

Experience SXSW...Without Having to Go Anywhere or Do Anything

As you may have read in a previous post, I was fortunate enough to attend the awesome SXSW Interactive Festival this year. However, I was a little sad that the day we left, the totally amazing SXSW Music Festival was just getting started. Fortunately, thanks to the good people at the Internet, those of us who were not quite cool enough to be there in person this year can still enjoy a whole crap-ton [Editor's note: not to be confused with the British crappe-tonne] of awesome SXSW music.

My buddies over at imeem (whom I met in person at SXSW and who were both really nice to me) have a whole sub-site devoted to the bands of SXSW.

The hipsters at NPR were kind enough to webcast a whole bunch of shows live from Austin, and have now archived them on this awesome site which will take you hours to get through because there are so many great bands posted. You can also read some great personal coverage of the events on the All Songs Considered blog.

Not be outdone, the SXSW site has this master list of who played where on what day complete with links to sample tracks from almost all the artists. If that's not enough for you, hop on your favorite bittorrent client and head over to the "SXSW Showcasing Music Torrents" page, where you can download massive torrents featuring the showcase artists from the last 4 SXSW festivals, comprising tracks from nearly a bajillion bands in total.

And if all that's not enough, as soon as they post the podcasts for the cool music-related Interactive panels I attended, I'll be linking to those too. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Famous DC blogger (and friend of mine) Catherine Andrews has a great post on the Washingtonion "After Hours" blog about the "DC Does Texas" event at SXSW, where several DC bands took the stage and showed Texas how we rock significantly less south of the Mason-Dixon line. Features some great video and pics of the bands.

I went to SXSW! No, the other one. No, the other other one.

No, not the super-hip music festival, not the crazy cool film festival, but the ultra-into-itself-anyone-can-be-internet-famous-for-5-seconds-but-you're-not interactive festival. And it's awesome. Yesterday I took a break from not attending panels to hit up the PBS "Weirdly Wired Party" inside the amazingly cool Austin City Limits studio. It was the best party we've been to yet. Great free food and booze, no lines, free shuttle service, fantastic location... and live music!

Lighstpeed Champion and The Spinto Band both gave killer performances in a setting that was truly built to deliver incredible sound. I had never heard Lighstpeed Champion before, but they really blew me away. And The Spinto Band played both of my favorite songs of theirs, plus several others that kind of sounded like those songs, so that was great, too.

I took some shaky Blair Witch-style footage of the event. Enjoy!

Lightspeed Champion - not sure of what song this is, sorry.


The Spinto Band - "Brown Boxes"

Washington, DC: Ridiculous Taxi Fares, Great Music

As an excuse to use imeem's new playlist creation tool (see my review of it here), I decided to create a playlist of my favorite songs from DC-based artists. Inspired by this post on Creative DC, I recently started listening to some more local bands, such as Le Loup, Georgie James, and Jukebox the Ghost (I was bummed to miss them in concert recently - anyone know where I can buy their CD online?).

The results were fantastic. I'm hearing new music, and supporting the local economy at the same time. And I'm getting inspiration to finally get my band up and running. More on that later, if we ever get around to really doing it. Which we will.

Here's the playlist:



What are your favorite local bands from anywhere you've lived?

imeem: Inching Towards Usability

I don't mean to hate on imeem. I really, really want to use it on my site and I want it to work. When an imeem employee posted to my comments telling me about a new playlist creation tool, I was excited. So excited, I decided to try it out. (Playlist itself coming in another post).

At first, I was really happy with the new playlist creation interface. Much simpler than having to go through all those clicks just to add a song to my playlist. I was stymied a bit by not being able to find the "new" button - but there it was, hiding at the bottom. Once I found it, things proceeded quite smoothly. I even uploaded files without a problem! Woohoo! And I love the "upload image" box for a song - not sure if that was there before, but it's a nice touch. (I do have to say that it's really annoying that the upload tool defaults to "upload a photo" - the site is about music playlists. The time I forgot to change that, my MP3 upload was lost forever, tagged as a photo somewhere on my account.)

Unfortunately, my uploads never made it into the "create a playlist" search box. I had to go to my newly uploaded file's page and add it from there. Boo. Not being able to easily get to my recently uploaded songs (from the create playlist page) became more and more annoying as I would upload a song in a new tab, come back to the original tab, click on "upload," click on "recent," click on my song, hastily hit "pause" since the autoplay option is always set to yes, then click "playlist," then select my playlist from the list. Not as much fun as the nice search feature they built.

(Had my songs shown up in the search results, I wouldn't have known they were mine - when searching for a song, I can't tell what's mine and what's somebody else's. Not a huge deal, but it would be cool to have that option.)

Still, the process wasn't too painful. Much better than last time. However, that feeling of joy was undercut by the fact that many people (myself included) still have troube playing the tracks - for some people it simply skips through each song one by one as though it was some problem with that track, but it will play tracks individually. For others, it will play tracks one at a time but will not advance through the playlist. For others, some tracks work and some don't. Close, but no cigar.

I didn't try to upload multiple files at once, so I don't know if the "hanging forever" issue is still an issue. I'll keep you posted. But overall, I think imeem's getting better. The playlists play for me on Firefox 2 at least 85% of the time.

PS I did see a really cool feature - I clicked onto the page for a Jukebox the Ghost song and saw this little "On Tour" badge, which took me to a page of tour dates for the band. That's hot.