Writing
Saturday 10 September 2005
UK gig ticket alert service wanted
This morning I realised I missed Stars playing at the Garage last night, which reminded me to write this idea up for the Lazyweb.
It’s not complicated. I want a site where I can set up an account, and create a list of bands I like, and the cities in which I might want to see them. Then it will send me an email, or dribble into an RSS feed, when a band I want to see is playing there. Ticketmaster have a system like this, but it appears to be no use to me: I tried five of my favourite acts — The Arcade Fire, The Weakerthans, Stars, The Mountain Goats and Final Fantasy (playing at The Spitz next month) — and it would only let me add Stars to my list. Fat lot of good.
Aloud have a genre-based email alert system and other sites (eg, Bigmouth, Stargreen, Seetickets) can only send you ALL their new gigs. I guess that even if one of these sites provided such a service, they wouldn’t be able to cover every gig that’s happening, as I found out with Ticketmaster, but it’d be a start. A comprehensive service would be far better of course.
This seems so obvious and simple a way to generate more revenue. I’d knock something up myself but one ignored (by me), clunky, scraping, notifcation site is enough for me.
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Gigs revisited …
A while back I talked about wanting an RSS feed for gigs in my area. Using the ones I found from gigs.co.uk seems to be working OK but they’re not perfect. There’s a lot of events there that I don’t care about, the feeds themselves do...
At 'UnorthodoxY' on Friday 24 February 2006, 3:23 PM
Comments
pollstar.com isn't perfect... but without it I would have missed Laura Cantrell's current tour.
Of course, it could get bands and artists from last.fm...
There is also seetickets.com, though I suppose it just has the same stuff as everyone else
Hi Phil,
I'm working on website you might be interested in. You can make a list of bands and the site tells you when any of them have an album coming out or a concert in your area (using GPS). I'm also going to be adding email alerts and RSS feeds very soon.
The site is only a month old but I think it has great potential. I'm from Canada but I've been adding some tour dates and venues from the UK, Europe and US. I even have Google Maps.
The site works like a collaborative weblog: where other users submit information that you can read.
The site is called FanConcert: http://www.fanconcert.com
It's limited to what people put on it, but upcoming.org offers feeds for locations etc so maybe you could filter the RSS.
just been reminded by a notification, bloglines lets you create unique email addresses that appear as feeds in bloglines. I've got these set up for several bands I follow. Does depend on the band releasing the information of course.
Pollstar.com would be good, but it only covers US tour dates, according to an email from their support line.
Fanconcert.com would be good if enough people used it... that old chicken and egg problem!
I'm adding some UK venues and concert dates to FanConcert.com myself, even though I don't even live in the UK. :)
I'm hoping that with enough major acts in any given area people will find it useful.
Hey, a day late and a dollar short as usual but I had the very same thought.
I dug around and I'm using the RSS feeds from http://www.gigs.co.uk/ it works by area so it's not too bad. No real band filtering and the feeds aren't all that great but it's a start.
I agree that there's a gap here though, which is strange since there should be an easy money making aspect if you provide affiliate links to the ticket vendors.
This site is great. You have to sign up, but if tickets have sold out, they alert you via SMS when more tickets go onsale
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