My Bands In Your Town: Automatic, personalized gig recommendations

My Bands In Your Town is a widget for bloggers that allows them to display a list of upcoming gigs. Each visitor is shown local gigs in their city, featuring bands that the blogger likes.

Features

• Gigs sourced from the global Bands In Town database
• Each visitor gets a unique experience
• Completely automatic – Just enter your Last.fm username to customize the results
• Potential to earn commission from ticket purchases

The Back Story

The internet has no geographic barriers, especially when it comes to music. People in London are reading about the latest bands coming out of New York. Glasgow bands are gathering huge followings in Sydney. The fact that they’re half a world away means nothing when you have the web to deliver instant access to music, video and news. This appetite for global music content is being fueled by music bloggers, who are championing new and exciting bands, irregardless of where they’re from. But things unravel when they want talk about concerts. Suddenly location becomes a very important factor. They can’t exactly give concert recommendations for the whole world. Or can they?

This is the problem ‘My Bands In Your Town’ aims to solve. It does so by considering two factors: the bands that the blogger likes and the visitor’s location. Taking in this information, it can recommend gigs, on behalf of the blogger, that are happening near the visitor. Each visitor gets a personalized experience and it all happens automatically. Too easy!

Of course, this will never compare to a blogger hand-picking gigs, and offering editorial about each, but it allows a blog with global audiences to offer relevant content that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

Future

The application was built as part of the San Francisco Music Hack Day and sadly hasn’t gotten much attention since then. I have plenty I want to do with it, but haven’t found the time. If you want to see the project improved, make some noise! Here’s what I have in mind:

• Import top bands from iTunes
• Interface to manually edit the bands that are used in recommendations
• Ability to easily skin it to suit your website
• Plugins for WordPress, Blogger, Myspace, etc.
• Actually get people to start using it!