How do I get alerted when my favorite bands come to town?

April 3, 2009 8:01 AM

How do I follow all my favorite musicians on tour and find out when they'll be coming to my town?

I'm currently in Denver, and I want a way to list my favorite artists and be alerted when one of them is coming to town, say, within 60 miles. I know that pandora allows you to search based off your music seeds, but I want either an RSS feed or alerts when a new show pops up. Any ideas, hive mind?

posted by pennstatephil to Media & Arts (16 answers total)

iConcertCal
posted by Methylviolet at 8:06 AM on April 3, 2009

You can do something like this with last.fm based on your location and the artists in your library, and I think they have rss feeds too. Can't comment much more on it cause I've never looked in to using this feature of the site.
posted by mannequito at 8:06 AM on April 3, 2009

You might also want to check out Pollstar if you haven't already. Another decent concert listing site.
posted by mannequito at 8:08 AM on April 3, 2009

Sonic Living has also expanded their city list enough to be useful. (I uploaded my entire artist list first and then noticed they only had New York and San Francisco last year). The website is clunky as hell, but I enjoy their email updates.
posted by politikitty at 8:11 AM on April 3, 2009

Last.fm (as suggested by mannequito) can be either quite good, or depressingly bad, depending on your location and musical taste. The reason for this is quite simple: the only 'events' (to use their terminology) are ones added by other users. I've often seen major gigs not show up on Last.fm, festivals with half the bands arbitrarily left off, and gigs advertised on several dates (where most of them turn out to be erroneous). Around a major US city, this may be better, but don't expect much luck with bands that aren't popular with the core of Last.fm's userbase.
posted by Dysk at 8:18 AM on April 3, 2009

I use Tourfilter for this. The page defaults to Boston but I think that it does about 30 cities total.
posted by iknowizbirfmark at 8:21 AM on April 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

Seconding tourfilter. It can also suggest other bands you might like, based on your tracking list, and will play you their music.
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:51 AM on April 3, 2009

One of my coworkers -- the guy who runs scourlist, also does a Facebook app called ConcertShout which does just that. Link is blocked at work, but I think it lives here. If you have your favorite artists added as friends, it'll alert you when they come to town.
posted by ph00dz at 9:08 AM on April 3, 2009

"Bandloop is simple and powerful - Add bands to your loop, then we alert you to their local shows and new messages."
posted by amb at 9:20 AM on April 3, 2009

Best answer: You can set this up on JamBase (not limited to "jam bands", despite the name), to get e-mail alerts, and possibly an RSS feed of the Denver scene, but I didn't have any luck integrating that with Google Reader when I tried it just now.
posted by knile at 9:46 AM on April 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

Seconding Sonic Living - hearing about & getting tickets to shows I want to see has never been so easy.
posted by soleiluna at 10:03 AM on April 3, 2009

Best answer: Crap I missed it! Good for concerts, TV shows, new albums, books, etc. Emails you ahead of time.
posted by kidsleepy at 10:15 AM on April 3, 2009

Are there any services like these, aside from last.fm which I already use, that report shows by RSS instead of email? Alternatively are there any good email to RSS services out there?
posted by valadil at 10:32 AM on April 3, 2009

Yeah, Sonic Living is great, if you are in an area they cover. It's super fast.
posted by librarina at 10:56 AM on April 3, 2009

Best answer: Seconding Jambase as well. I find it very helpful. I don't live in a large city like Denver that gets a lot of concerts but it's nice that I can specify how many miles away I want the search to cover.

And if you enjoy festivals, they keep track of all of those as well.
posted by ourroute at 3:38 PM on April 3, 2009

Response by poster: Crap I missed it uses JamBase as a source, but I like the fact that I can get email alerts when they put out new albums, too! A nice added feature.
posted by pennstatephil at 5:26 PM on April 7, 2009