I enjoy going to shows, but I have trouble keeping up with who’s playing where and when. I hardly ever pick up an L.A. Weekly to find out who’s playing, and even when I do it usually only gives a heads up to shows only a week or two in advance. I keep abreast of the schedules of pretty much only three venues – Spaceland, The Echo, and The Echoplex. That’s because Spaceland is my favorite venue in the entire city and I’m on their mailing list. But other than that, there’s just way too many clubs in this city and way too many bands that I like to keep tabs on every event.
Bands in Town to the rescue! The site searches show listings from all over and aggregates that info into one convenient locale. When you sign up, you list your favorite bands. You also have the option to connect to your last.fm account (which, if you don’t know, tracks what music you listen to and forms music recommendations based on listeners with similar tastes).
Once the site knows what bands you are in to and what KIND of bands you are in to, it puts together a tag cloud on your homepage composed of a bunch of band names. The size of a tag increases depending on how much you like the band AND how soon they are having a show, so the results are doubly relevant and easy to recognize at a glance. Through the mighty powers of AJAX, there is also on the fly adjustment of search parameters based on date, distance, and ticket price.
As you find shows that interest you, you can bookmark them by adding them to your calendar. You can even export that information to iCal or set up an RSS feed. And of course, you can take your concert list and turn it into a little widget, because everybody loves little widgets.
Bands in Town is definitely going on my list of web sites I can’t live with out.
