Concert Tracking Websites: Which is Best for You?

Each night in New York City there are literally hundreds of concerts; big international stars at Madison Square Garden, regional darlings at the Bowery Ballroom, and someone's-sister's-guitar-playing-cousin at a coffeehouse-slash-lounge in Brooklyn. Few cities in the United States have the plethora of live music that New Yorkers can enjoy, but even a medium sized mid western city likely has a music scene that many local residents are completely unaware of.

How do music lovers keep track? Sure, you may have a 'top picks' playlist on your iPod, or a mental note of music artists that you would love to see in concert, but even with the internet, local newspapers, and flyers at music shops, how do you know when some of your favorite artists visit your town?

Many websites in the past few years have struggled to help audiophiles with that issue. Pollstar.com was an early leader with bands adding their own concert tour information, but has failed to keep up with the explosion of bands crossing the nation. More recently it seems three leaders have emerged in the concert tracking industry: tourfilter.com, last.FM and sonicliving.com

Tourfilter is a no-frills site that looks very reminiscent of the now ubiquitous craigslist.com. In Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Washington DC, Detroit, Dublin Houston, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Providence, Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto, the Twin Cities, Vancouver and Western Massachusetts, users can sign up for their tracking service. The first step for a new user is to create their personal list of bands to track. This can be one, or ten thousand, depending on your tastes and how long you want to spend typing them in. Tourfilter is all manual, no iTunes scanning or other fancy gizmos. Also no ads and, they claim, no spam. Rolling Stone magazine reviewed Tourfilter saying "lean, mean, pretty cool .... delivers concert info with a grass-roots twist ... serves as a cool way to discover new artists ..." The quality of their listings depends on the power of their algorithms for web trawling as well as users who, in a way, police the site looking for misinformation or missing events and venues.

Last.FM is a long-established online music listening website that for years has provided internet users with a customized online radio experience. Users type in an artist they enjoy and Last.FM plays songs by other artists that the user should (statistically) also enjoy. The music plays, and users give songs a thumbs up or thumbs down. As the site gains more information about a user's likes and dislikes, the personalized station improves. This is their main business but have been steadily growing a related service of announcing concerts; while listening, if an artist appears that will be playing in a user's area that shows up on the screen with a link to more information about the show. They also have a full Events page where one can search for venues or particular shows in their area. New users may find Last.FM's concert tracking difficult to use, however, as users must build their profile with the site before the information really becomes useful. They do not allow users to suggest a list of bands that they would enjoy seeing live, instead they must allow the website to "learn" that information by listening to their personal Last.FM station and expressing their preferences for bands.

SonicLiving calls itself a "music and events based social network." Like Tourfilter, their only purpose is to help concert goers learn about shows from a select list of artists. Unlike Tourfilter, users do not have to type them in manually; instead SonicLiving can scan iTunes, Last.FM profiles, or Pandora (another online music listening site) accounts to find the artists users are most interested in. Once the scan is complete, users select which artists they would like the website to track and that list becomes a "Wishlist." From that point forward, if SonicLiving learns of a show by that artist in a user's region, that user will receive an email notification with a link to the event details. Currently, this site is active in the fewest number of cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Seattle, Detroit, Las Vegas, Portland, Austin, Boston, San Diego and Miami, but say in their FAQ that "We're adding new cities all the time! If you come, we will build it. Let us know where you live and what's going on, and we'll work on adding your town. Once we've added it, we'll send you and email letting you know!" so it looks like growth for SonicLiving is on the way.

Do these sites work? Yes and No. With thousands of concerts in thousands of cities, no site can track them all. A random survey of one 400 seat venue in New York City found that Tourfilter listed no shows, Last.FM two, and SonicLiving sixteen. But the quality of the data for each venue and in each city varies widely.

Which site, be it one of the ones mentioned here or not, will prevail and provide the superior service is yet to be known. However the site that can give users the best information and proves most useful to concert venues and promoters will likely have the best chance of coming out on top.