Find local concerts and gigs from music in your iTunes library

Posted on October 10, 2007 at 9:15 am

Here’s a cool idea: download lots of your favorite music from iTunes, install a small program, and find out which bands from your music library will be playing in your city automatically! Well, that sounds a little Web 3.0 to me with communication between multiple programs, services and databases all coming together to create something really useful.

Of course the program I’m talking about, iConcertCal, is not even a web app, but the functionality that it tries to create is the basic concept behind the new Web 3.0 movement. You can see a few examples of this type of Web 3.0 technology today with such services as Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly. Using Yahoo Pipes, for example, you can enter your LastFM user name and it will automatically take your list of recent tracks and find matching YouTube videos for them!

Anyway, iConcertCal is a free iTunes plugin that will monitor your current music library and automatically create a personalized calendar of upcoming local concerts and gigs in your city. The new version of the software will also display album release dates in the calendar.

Apparently the first version of this plug-in had a few problems and would crash iTunes altogether on Mac OS X. However, it seems like they have fixed some of these issues in version 2.0, so give it a shot and it should work. The calendar will be updated once a week and iConcertCal can even search for concerts outside of the United States. If you prefer, you can export the iConcertCal from iTunes in iCal format and import it into your Google Calendar, etc.

Other options include the ability to exclude artists, add additional artists that are not in your library and create a playlist that is monitored instead of the entire music collection. You can also specify a search radius for finding concerts in other cities near yours.

If you’re not into this type of desktop program, you can check out two web based music services:

1. Last.fm Events - You can find local music events in your area via city, artist, festival, or venue. They have a very large database and most bands are listed.

2. SonicLiving - This site might be slightly better than Last.fm when it comes to finding out when your favorite bands are playing. Another cool feature of SonicLiving is the fact that you can scan your Last.fm account and find upcoming shows.

So with or without iTunes, you should now be able to find any local music event for your favorite bands easily! Enjoy! Any other service you know, post a comment!