
Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town - slashblake
http://www.nextweeksplaylist.com
======
metakermit
Hey, I love this idea and am working on something similar (an alternative
events discovery and promotion tool for cities). I see that a lot of you folks
here are also working on similar stuff.

How about we chat more about these topics? Integration with APIs like
BandsInTown, Facebook, apps like Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, music metadata
collection from MusicBrainz, Discogs… If these topics sound interesting, join
the public group on Facebook I created just now:

[https://www.facebook.com/groups/2016318755302445/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/2016318755302445/)

or this new subreddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers](https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers)

~~~
no_gravity
Joined. I run [http://www.gnoosic.com](http://www.gnoosic.com) and
[https://www.music-map.com](https://www.music-map.com)

~~~
metakermit
Cool, thanks. Yeah, I work on
[https://twitter.com/posterbat](https://twitter.com/posterbat) (real site down
momentarily – Facebook broke my scraper :/ )

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peterburkimsher
I'm a big fan of live music, and even flew to Japan to go to the PunkSpring
festival. If you'd like data for Taiwan, please get in touch!

There's also a large, free dataset from Apple with the whole iTunes Store
database. Search "iTunes EPF" for more info. It's 55 GB uncompressed. Perhaps
you could use this to generate affiliate links and earn money if people buy
the songs in your playlist.

[https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/i...](https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/itunes-
enterprise-partner-feed/)

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avarsh
I made a similar site last August.
[http://www.hearnow.io/](http://www.hearnow.io/)

You can pick a location on a map and it will generate a playlist for pretty
much any city. I haven't done much work on it since then, but had a decent
response when I posted it to Reddit. I've been considering open sourcing it,
but not sure if there is interest.

My approach:

\- Use SeatGeek's API to find venues/artists near the user

\- Query Spotify's search API for artists with these names to get artist IDs
(which you need to do other interesting things with Spotify's API)

\- Filter results from Spotify search queries with fuzzy matching between
artist names and results

\- Use Spotify's API to get the top 5-10 most popular tracks for each artist,
and randomly select ~30 to add to a playlist

Spotify's search API cannot be queried in batch which is a pretty frustrating
bottleneck. I mainly solved this by caching artist name / ID pairs, but this
would only really be effective if I got a lot of traffic (I don't).

Also, SeatGeek's API was a lot more friendly than Songkick, which I considered
using. But SeatGeek didn't seem to have data for many venues overseas, so I
had some users outside the U.S. that were disappointed that their queries
would usually fail because the app couldn't find enough tracks.

~~~
CephalopodMD
I got a guy up in portchester who recommends me sweet nugs of music, wonder if
he's ever used your service...

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danso
Very cool. Haven't been back to NYC in awhile but good to see the Rockwood
Music Hall is still a hot venue. My main suggestion would be to populate the
page with the Spotify data before having the user commit to signing into
Spotify. Yes, have the call to action be at the top, but have the below-the-
fold content be a list view of venues and artists. The map is nice but I don't
think that's the most relevant view for NYC, since it's so easy to get around
town between any popular venue.

My perspective is based on my assumption of, at the start of the week, what
most people want to know but don't yet know. They know the venues, they just
don't know (without tedious inspection) who is playing where. Maybe it'd make
sense to have the genre of the acts more prominently shown. I'd be more
immediately interested in looking at the list of alt rock bands who are in
town that week, and then looking up the venues they'll be at. As opposed to
having a list of venues and acts, and having to scan it to see if any of those
acts are in the genres I prefer.

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mnx
Devil is in the details. There's just no place to reliably source all of the
events that are happening. Sure you can get the ones that sell tickets through
ticketmaster, or whatever, but nobody reliably aggregates all the smaller
concerts. So this will always be badly incomplete. Discovering all those shows
is on of my main use-cases for facebook right now - it's the one place
(almost) all of them show up.

~~~
jordanlev
A few years back I made a hobby project like this -- it scraped the website of
the local free weekly paper (since they have pretty much every concert
listing, large and small) and then did a youtube search on band names so you'd
see an embedded video or two for each show.

I think most larger cities (and smaller cities if they have a large
university) have such a newspaper (e.g. Village Voice in NYC, Willamette Week
in PDX, The Mercury in Seattle, etc)

~~~
mnx
Maybe it's better in the states, but where I live the papers don't come close
to being a complete listing. They will have the major stuff, and some of the
smaller shows too - but a large part is still missing. And it's not a small
city - 2 mln people, capital, and quite an active music and culture scene.

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wjnc
Awesome! Now worldwide ;)

Ideas: -Open up to the main local bookers (in my country that would be one
firm, Mojo), monetization via referrals?

-other awesomeness would include: local clubs and pubs access via API, same monetization.

-Main few hits per band and then select bands that "sound like" selected view of the most listened to bands.

-Anything that makes me discover worthwhile bands in my area that give me an unexpected nice night out without having to notice the social media multiverse (my favorite teen bands from 20 yrs ago got together last summer and I noticed last week.. guess I haven't got any of my teen surf punk friends anymore)

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heyts
This is such a great, simple, almost obvious idea. This type of ideas is
getting more and more rare, so it is great to see one popping here and there.

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anc84
Oh this is a great idea! Any chance to get a plain list of musicbrainz IDs for
the nerds with their own music collection instead of the ever so ephemeral and
privacy-infringing Cloud?

~~~
wuliwong
Hi anc84, I made [http://www.muusical.com](http://www.muusical.com) and was
imagining it being something like musicbrainz but with actual, playable music
that is streamed in from youtube or soundcloud. I haven't been actively
working on it in a little while but would love to find other kindred spirits
who share the vision. After taking a step back, possibly the best approach is
to just use the data from music brainz and use my site to attach the playable
music. My meta data editing interface is very rudimentary compared with
musicbrainz.

Let me know if you're interested or know anyone who is. You can get me on
twitter @patrickjbradley. Thanks.

~~~
anc84
I don't see how this is relevant. I asked about upcoming events, dissing
online music streaming as something I do not do.

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shanev
Nice execution! I made something similar a few years ago, except it generated
a playlist of previews from iTunes with an option to connect Spotify. It
worked by finding all venues within a certain radius from you using the
Foursquare API, and correlating that with the JamBase and Songkick APIs. It
was a bit ahead of its time because not enough people had Spotify, and their
catalog wasn’t big enough to cover artists coming to some of the smaller
venues. I might still own the domain rockout.fm if you want something a bit
more catchy.

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Kiro
Kind of OT but has anyone succeeded in creating playlists through YouTube's
API? I had a kind of similar idea to this and wanted to create automatic
playlists but failed on the integration part.

EDIT: Ok, looks like this is very easy with the v3 API. This was quite a long
time ago.

~~~
khaliqgant
I've been working on this:
[https://www.laidbackvj.com/](https://www.laidbackvj.com/) code here:
[https://github.com/khaliqgant/laid-back-
vj](https://github.com/khaliqgant/laid-back-vj). Happy to work with others!

~~~
helb
I don't know if my music profile is somehow... weird, but i get a lot of
random movies and audio books, mostly long (1-3 hours) and old (~1900-1940s).
Not what i expected, but i actually found some interesting stuff. Thanks!

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cauterize
Great idea! Another idea I've wanted for awhile, setlist.fm based Spotify
playlists for concerts I liked.

~~~
slashblake
I had a friend mention this to me too recently. I just grab the artist's top 3
tracks and add them to your playlist. Perhaps I could use setlist.fm to put
songs more likely to be heard at the upcoming shows. Thanks!

~~~
fergyfresh
I'd be willing to work with you as I have built a googleplay music version of
this a while ago. [https://github.com/fergyfresh/setlist-on-a-
playlist](https://github.com/fergyfresh/setlist-on-a-playlist)

I took it a step further to make a playlist out of the bands most recent
setlist, so its similar, but not the same. It's currently just a cli that
allows you to make a playlist on your google play music based on a band's most
recent setlist, provided it was posted on setlist.fm. Most of the bands that I
listen to have the setlist.fm posted basically the same night of the show.

Would love to help, leverage, or even refactor some of your stuff so that we
could use virtually any music playing platform to do this.

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acomjean
This is a great idea. My partner made a playlist of Boston Calling bands. It
was helpful for a festival when you don't know all of the bands (the festival
bands play concurrently too so you couldn't see all the music..)

~~~
slashblake
Yeah I think festival support should be added to my backlog. I love listening
to festival lineups even when I’m not going.

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paulgb
Brilliant! It's always surprised me that Spotify didn't add this feature since
they already have the data.

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CGamesPlay
Let me sign up for a mailing list for when you add in my city :)

~~~
squantto
Check mine out, moreencores.com

Specify your nearest major city for best results

~~~
SCdF
This is cool! One suggestion: 7 days ahead is pretty grim, at in London
tickets sell out fast.

I presume it's to keep the queries low? Maybe it could be a date range with a
max of 7 days instead? Defaulting to a month from now + 7 days?

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coldsauce
I think this is a really interesting idea. Spotify has a feature where you can
see if an artist is going to be playing near your location by going to the
artist's page and going to the 'concert' tab. However, I don't think they have
one to go the other way i.e "find all artists performing in one location"

Someone at the SXSW Hackathon two weeks ago worked on a similar thing [1]. The
difference in their project was that it looked at the artists you listened to
and then created a list of artists that you would know who would be coming to
the venue.

I like your idea in that you're creating a channel for people to discover new
bands.

[1] [https://devpost.com/software/sx-
setfinder](https://devpost.com/software/sx-setfinder)

~~~
toomanybeersies
Spotify does give you gigs in your area. You go to browse, and then the
"concerts" tab.

You can't change the location though, it's based off device location.

~~~
zeus_hammer
You can search by city in both the mobile app and desktop app to take a look
at concerts outside of your area. Really handy. They mostly show only artists
who you listen to frequently/genres you like

~~~
toomanybeersies
You're right. There's a great big button you can click to change your
location. I guess I've just never clicked it so I forgot about it.

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beefalo
Very cool. I have had a suspicion that Google/Spotify has been sort of
tracking these things for a while. The features that Google music and Spotify
have for discovery seem to correlate with artists touring with other artists I
like pretty consistently.

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magwa101
This is great, I waste a LOT of time doing playlists to figure out my festival
schedule. So time consuming. Can you do google play please? I had to junk
Spotify years ago because streams would constantly interrupt and jitter.

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extralego
Great idea. Congrats.

I’m assuming aggregating the booking calendars is a fair amount of manual work
but the value of this to audiences interested in lesser-known artists should
be significant. I would love to see smaller, mix-use and under-age venues
included.

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ebellity
I like the idea. Maybe you could leverage Songkick API to support more cities
? (I moved to Tel Aviv recently and it's really hard to spend the time to find
out which concerts are worth going to)

~~~
slashblake
Looked into this. SongKicks licensing is really restrictive once I start using
their API. Do you have a site you use for upcoming shows in Tel Aviv?

~~~
metakermit
Yeah, just wanted to ask if you use an API to get events?

I've been working on something in a similar direction for Vienna. Tried to get
SongKick API access, but they declined me. I also used BandsInTown on a
project, but it's a bit limited. These days I'm just using Facebook Events,
which is ok, but not perfect – can't get all the events in a particular city
automatically. Managed to manually overcome this though.

But great work! Tried the app out and I really like it. Followed you on
Twitter if you want to keep in touch. Would be nice to have some
MusicEventsHackers group to discuss these topics :)

~~~
metakermit
OK, I just create that group :)

\- on Facebook

[https://www.facebook.com/groups/2016318755302445](https://www.facebook.com/groups/2016318755302445)

\- and on Reddit

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers](https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers)

------
fascinated
Jukely ([https://www.jukely.com/](https://www.jukely.com/)) does another good
version of this. Here's their playlist for NYC
[https://open.spotify.com/user/jukely/playlist/6d8T2n9ISP4ZgH...](https://open.spotify.com/user/jukely/playlist/6d8T2n9ISP4ZgHKP6UOBtj?si=2kT3fuTHSPmvBG6iVZNxeA)
(other cities are avail too).

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scardine
I've made a similar app at a local hackathon sponsored by Sabre: it would
search your playlists on Spotify in order to identify your favorite artists.
Then it would match the artist presentation schedule and find the best place
in the world to watch the artist's concert based on ticket price + travel
expenses. Something like: "the best city to watch U2 is Buenos Aires in August
- while there you can also visit the Recoleta neighborhood and ..."

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seanwilson
Great idea!

Some feedback though: I found the tagline "It's a pain to look up every band
coming to your city. Now just follow your favorite venues and genres and get a
weekly Spotify playlist of upcoming music." intuitive but the heading "Stop
Typing Every Band in Town" didn't make sense to me.

I'd go with something more straightforward like the title used for this Hacker
News post. I immediately understood what that meant.

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runnr_az
That's a really good idea. Nice execution on it, too...

~~~
slashblake
Thanks, it's been a lot of iterations. I'm thinking of doing a blog post
showing the UI/UX iterations I've gone through.

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merongivian
I created something similar, though it just creates a youtube playlist that
you can listen in your browser:
[http://touristplaylist.com/](http://touristplaylist.com/), you can pick a
date range and the location, it uses songkick api

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sslash
Please add London! I'd pay for this easily

~~~
slashblake
I actually have been working on adding the UK. Shoot me a message on twitter
and I'll keep you posted for when it is released!

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Q4trader
www.PlaylistHQ.com does this better!

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foroak
Please add a list view of all venues by city! I don't want to have to search
for all the venues.

~~~
slashblake
In the backlog...stay tuned.

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overcast
Awesome idea, but this seems like something that could be just switched on
quickly at Spotify.

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functioningCog
This is great! Right now I use last.fm, bandsintown, and Spotify to search for
live shows. However none of them actually generate a playlist. I will
definitely be using this to discover new music. When will I be able to add my
own city?

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lgregg
You should add a way to submit venues for other cities in single and batch
methods.

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verelo
Please please please add Toronto! This is a killer idea, i'd love to use it!

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o_____________o
Great job! I will use this. It might be a nice discovery pipeline if nothing
else.

A "select all venues" feature seems important, and the playlist probably only
needs one song per artist, I see that quite a few have 2-3.

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stef25
Is there some kind of filter for types of music?

When I look at the "bands" in my town (not through your app), there's
everything from metal to folk to techno.

~~~
slashblake
Absolutely, you can pick genres instead of just your favorite venues.

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natestemen
May have been suggested but would love to be able to toggle all venues in a
certain city so I don't have to go searching for venues that I may be
interested in.

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squantto
I did this too: moreencores.com

And you can do it for any city

Please beta test it :)

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rguldener
Great idea but why no contact details for suggestions and no way to sign
up/vote for other cities?

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nwsm
Possible to support any city by checking Stubhub/Ticketmaster API for events
in user-entered city?

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amelius
Cool, but one question: did you send a feature-request to Spotify before you
decided to make this?

~~~
ratsimihah
That sounds time-consuming

~~~
amelius
Yeah, but if you make this and Spotify decides to do the same, then it's time-
wasting.

~~~
usrusr
Depends on the motivation mix: a Spotify implementation would not undo any
learning that happened along the way, and a showcase/attention goal might even
benefit from being the independent original to a corporate clone.

------
nukeop
Can this be used to create playlists in formats with more interoperating
potential, such as JSON?

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smprod
Great idea. Congrats!

Would it be possible to aggregate shows from a ticket website like seatgeek or
ticketmaster?

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sebastienparis
Really liked the work you put in!

And I love that everybody is so supportive of it, cheers to all you guys!

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ikeyany
This is a very cool idea—are you familiar with the BandsInTown app as well?

~~~
slashblake
Yeah I've used it. It looks like they are trying to do something like this,
just buggy/not well executed, so I took a stab at it.

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ibdf
Only selected cities :(

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c54
Cool too, good work. Needs more cities! Seattle especially :)

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kalkut
Very cool! I am eager to see my town in your app

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hart_russell
I'd love you forever if you added San Diego.

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staplers
Does no one here know about the BandsInTown app?

~~~
nailer
Seems like a different thing:
[https://news.bandsintown.com/home](https://news.bandsintown.com/home) BIT is
cool if you want to know who's in town and you know who they are, this for
people who'd rather just hear tracks and if they like them go 'cool, I like
whoever this is, I'll get tickets'

~~~
staplers
Oh I see. Thanks for the clarification.

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codemati
Fantastic idea.

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k__
Does this work the other way around?

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kbar13
i'm listening to a playlist for nyc and I love it. would love a playlist for
SF.

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briankwest
Great, an empty play list. :P

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sixothree
Please add New Orleans.

~~~
slashblake
I can look into it. Do you have a site you browse to find upcoming shows in
NO?

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pdswanii
very cool. would love this for nashville, willing to help =)

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osazuwa
Boston Boston Boston!

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benbristow
Wow. A whole 4 cities in one country. Totally useful :\

~~~
ada1981
Certainly more useful than your comment.

Next time try something like:

"I was disappointed to only see 4 cities, I'd love if you could support X,Y,Z
cities next."

