Rough Draft

Upcoming.org

Buzz recently told me about Upcoming.org, a social software site for keeping track of concerts and other live performances. There's over a thousand people registered for the San Francisco "metro", so it's got a decent user base. You can see my personal page here. I added all the shows mentioned in the previous post to my events.

The site has some cool features including RSS feeds, subscriptions for iCal, and "badges". I've added a Upcoming Concerts RSS feed for the site. You can subscribe here and I also put a link to it in the sidebar. I updated my concerts page to use their badge to generate my list of upcoming shows. I'm not taking advantage of the iCal subscription yet. The events are all listed as "all day events" rather than listing the event start time and they also don't show the venue. I'm not sure if that's a limitation in the webcal format or if they just didn't set it up to use those pieces of information.

I was hoping Upcoming.org would also be a good place to find out about new shows. There have been far too many times that I've found out about a show either after it's already sold out or after it already occurred. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how useful it's going to be in that respect though as the only event of the four I'm currently attending that I didn't have to create was Death Cab for Cutie. If anyone knows of a good central site (or better yet RSS freed) that gives listings of concerts (especially for indie shows) in the Bay Area, please let me know.

Update:
Buzz hooked me up with an invite to Sonic Living. It's a site similar to Upcoming.org, but seems to have fixed a lot of the problems I listed with Upcoming. First, they populate their show database on their own in addition to relying on users to add shows. All 4 shows I have tickets for in November were already listed on the site, so that bodes well. In addition the iCal subscription includes the show's start time and the venue so I should be able to use that as my concert calendar rather than keeping my own manual one. The site is currently in an invite only beta. I don't have any invite codes yet, but I imagine some will appear in my account soon, eventually so if you're interested let me know.

Also thanks to Jeff for pointing me to EVDB, I'll have to give that a look too. And thanks to Chris for reminding me of Pollstar. I wasn't aware of Pollstar's abilities to track up to 10 bands for you.