
Show HN: Listen to a playlist of bands coming to your town - ninetax
http://bandsoftheweek.com/
======
aembleton
This is an appealing looking website but sadly it doesn't work for me. I'm
running Firefox on OS X.

I entered Manchester, UK from 09/09/2015 to 10/01/2015\. When I clicked `Show
me concerts` it displays `Loading...` then that disappears. No error message
or information on why nothing has been shown.

At this point I hazarded a guess that your data sources are US only, so I
tried New York City. Again, this did not work.

I then looked at what was going on, and your server is returning a 500 when
making the GET request to [http://bandsoftheweek.com/location-then-
events?location-quer...](http://bandsoftheweek.com/location-then-
events?location-query=New+York+City,+NY,+United+States&start-
date=2015-09-09T00:00:00%2B01:00)

I think you should handle 500 responses better.

~~~
ninetax
Thanks for the feedback. It went down during the night. It's back up now
though!

------
leoedin
It doesn't work for me! When I put any city in (US or UK) the JS console shows
"GET [http://bandsoftheweek.com/location-then-events?location-
quer...](http://bandsoftheweek.com/location-then-events?location-
query=Pittsburgh,+PA,+United+States) 500 (Server Error)"

I'm curious where you get your data from? I played around with a website for
finding club nights a few years ago - the best source of data I could find was
scraping Facebook. Unfortunately it was a bit unreliable.

The biggest problem with trying to do this in an automated fashion is sorting
out the crap from the actual gigs and events. It's easy to miss smaller things
if you just use a single major API. Bandsintown seem fairly good at it, but
have a pretty horrible interface.

~~~
ninetax
Sorry, my host crashed. It should be working now!

------
Gladdyu
I can imagine that it would not work for EU for some reason, but it even
returns that there are no concerts in NYC for the entire month of September.

This leaves me wondering, where did you get the quotes from that this service
is the best way to find bands when it isn't working? Or is it just that HN has
DDoS'ed your backend? :)

EDIT: it also appears that you are lacking a #contact named anchor tag - the
"contact us" button is not working.

~~~
ninetax
Also the quotes are from my roommates :)

------
irremediable
I really like the idea of this. It's a shame that it doesn't seem to work at
the minute -- I'm guessing we gave it the HN hug of death.

What data sources does it use?

~~~
ninetax
HN hug of death indeed. Should be back up. It uses SongKick for the events.

------
hellbanner
[https://magnifi.fm/](https://magnifi.fm/) has been doing this for a few
years.

~~~
ninetax
Nice! I didn't do a whole lot of "product research" before I built this thing.

------
Petefine
this worked fantastically for me.

I didn't actually expect to use the site - I thought I'd just glance at it and
close. But it was so slick that before I really noticed what was happening,
Spotify was playing a list of lots of small bands playing around Brighton (UK)
in the next week. Cheers for building it!

Would be great if you could filter by genre somehow.

~~~
ninetax
Thanks mate! So glad to hear it! I really want to filter by genre, but it
would be tough to do that real-time. Maybe if people could subscribe to a
weekly playlist?

------
api
This is pretty awesome! Plus I see from the pictures of the co-founders that
it comes with beard.

------
werber
I'm getting : Connection refused

Description: Connection refused

\- But it sounds like a really awesome idea!

~~~
ninetax
Still? It should be working now.

------
ninetax
I would love some feedback on this thing I've made.

~~~
frobozz
It could do with providing some useful information when no results are found,
and why it might not have returned any results (available regions, what is a
"band", what is a "venue"). At the moment, when there are no results, the
first thing you see is "How it works". This immediately prompts the thought
"It doesn't".

I entered a date range of 1st August to 30th November. In the town, there was
a major music festival at the end of August, and a currently popular band will
be playing in the town's biggest theatre at the end of November.

I then tried London. apparently, for those four months, there are no bands
playing in any venue in London, I even tried Wembley Arena.

The city box autocompleted both of my attempts, which led me to assume that
they were valid places in your database. You might consider restricting that
autocomplete to only allow places that have events you know about.

~~~
ninetax
sorry, error messages are completely lacking at the moment. FWIW you
"shouldn't" see any more error messages. The host was down and now it's not.

