I think I’m just lazy.
We have a local alt-newspaper that lists upcoming events, concerts, etc. But I hate having to go and pick one up every week, and I hate having to search through for upcoming concerts I might be interested in.
What I’d really like is an online service that keeps track of…oh, I don’t know…the top 10,000 touring bands. I can give them my e-mail address and a list of the bands I want to be notified of if/when they’re coming to my town. Hell, they can even sell me the tix and market crap to me from time to time.
Think Counting Crows. Was once a bigger name band, but I don’t think has had hit radio play in years. If they were coming I’d like to see them, but I’m not so excited that I’ll check out their website with regularity. And I hate that paper.
Is there anything like this?
Well, it’s not exactly what you’re asking for (actually, I can’t say that - it might be) but I’ve bought tickets from Ticketmaster.com several times, and I get emails whenever an act that is similar to the one I already saw comes to a venue nearby. I’ve never actually gone in and tried to customize the settings, but it may be possible to do that. That’s as close a solution as I can come up with.
I check out http://www.pollstar.com from time to time. Just like you, there are certain bands I’d be interested in seeing but don’t care enough to go elsewhere to check on tour schedules and the like.
You can have it show you all the concerts coming to your area, or you can look up a particular band’s tour schedule, view upcoming shows for a particular venue, etc. I think there are some notification options you can set but I’ve never used any of them.
There’s a widget called OnTour that looks at your iTunes library and tells you when those bands are coming. I’m not sure what the source is, though, and a lot of smaller bands are missing.
Myspace is also good for this stuff too. Reputation aside, Myspace acts as sort of an RSS feed for bands. Add the bands you’re interested in, and they’ll usually post bulletins about upcoming concerts and other news, and it’ll all show up on your own homepage.
These two are generally how I find out about concerts.
I was just coming in to say myspace, but someone beat me to it. You can friend the bands, and also friend any venues that have pages. This comes in handy for the smaller bars / clubs that don’t advertise in many places, in addition to venues out of your immediate area that you can still drive to.