One of my first posts ever on this blog championed EVDB, a search engine for local events and venues. In it, I wrote, “I am looking forward to the day when I can set up an RSS feed of my favorite independent-label musicians, and have EVDB notify me when they are coming to town at a small local venue. Very powerful.” In the months since that was posted, I have been disappointed in the lack of content available in the system during the beta, and have neglected to use the service at all as of late.
This morning, I read Rags’ blog entry about PassAlong Networks’ newest offering, OnTour, and downloaded the application. This program automatically scans my hard-drive for all of the music files that I own, builds a directory of artists which I like from those files, and then presents me with a list of the those acts’ upcoming concerts in my local area. I’ve thought about and talked about an idea like this one informally before, and I am very excited to see that someone actually created the service. You can try it here.
Of course, the software isn’t perfect yet. For example, it has some difficulty string matching (“Ambulance LTD” vs “Ambulance Ltd”). And I wish that I could set up an RSS feed or alert system to notify me when new acts I am interested are booked rather than me having to fire up the application every few weeks. But, for now, color me a happy user (as well as those bands like The Frames, BMRC, and Michael Penn which I now will go see play).