Bootstrapped by Pete Field and based out of Whistler, B.C., Canada, HearWhere is a search engine for live music which was launched in May 2008 but has managed to stay largely under the radar.
The live-performance search engine claims to list over one million music shows. The service tells you who is playing nearby, but also plays the associated music, and subsequently links to the artist’s MySpace page. You can add widgets from artist pages and redistribute them to your accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Netvibes, and other places thanks to a nifty integration with Clearspring. It’s unclear how Field plans to make money from the service, but he will likely try and a combination of advertising and affiliate revenue from mp3 and ticket sales.
The search bar on top lets you filter live music by genre (this won’t work if you’re using Safari or Chrome), date and location. The site auto-detects your geographical location and customizes the listings when you visit. This type of service obviously also belongs on mobile devices, yet for whatever reason Field has pulled the iPhone-compatible version offline.
If you’re into live music, you might want to check out the site. Comparable services include Gig Junkie, JamBase, Madtown Lounge and BandsInTown.
Thanks for the review Robin, I haven’t been intentionally under the radar, it just seems the radar kept sweeping over my head!
A quick correction to your review, the only filter that doesn’t work in Chrome and Safari is the Genre filter. The rest do work, and I’m trying to get the Chrome/Safari issue sorted out.
Now get out there and enjoy the incomparable experience of a live band!
Pete
I know how you feel Pete – I see the radar passing over my head a well. With all the focus on what I feel is a pretty poor architecture by MySpace Music and some buzz surrounding the likes of Facebook and iLike, most other live music sites go unmentioned. My site is host to over 20,000 venues and a growing base of independent musicians (about 2,000 now and growing!). I too geocode based on member location with respect to venues, bands and shows.
http://madtownlounge.com
Allen
I must ask, however: I personally know a lot of the bands that show up in my area – like almost all of them. I’m guessing they haven’t created an account on your site. I have a hunch – unfounded of course – that this data is being scraped from MySpace profiles. I can tell this by virtue of the addresses, genres listed, naming of shows, etc. I would be cautious!
Very nice app
How I wish there’s a similar one that offers a selection of news clips…
Pete, funny i just found this site, even after doing a 15 week project for grad school last year. Let me know if you want me to send my business plan, maybe you could use it some how, theres a couple cool features that your site doesnt have.
I think it is a great idea and I plan to promote it in my local community. Have just done a search an no one locally has used the service.
I don’t do as many concerts as I used to, but it is still fun to find new bands and hear what they sound like. It is a bit shocking to see that there are 3929 live shows on all dates within 25 miles of Grand Prairie, TX, USA. I guess we like live music in the Fort Worth/Dallas area.
I’m impressed. I don’t know where they get their data, but the list is quite comprehensive for my area. Emperor Steve approves.
HearWhere is pretty cool. It’s nice to have an online directory that looks clean and has listings for lots of smaller venues too. Not everyone wants to see Metallica in an audiophobic arena. I love being able to search by genre and then being able to hear the music.. it’s just a cool idea..
I can’t imagine that all of these sites aren’t just doing a value-add (MySpace links, etc.) on top of Pollstar data.
Most social networking sites “scratch each other’s backs” so to speak. Sure, MySpace is the largest player, but even they allow bands to provide an additional URL – often times to smaller sites like ours.
@ Pete, love the site and the idea. The thought of seing and maybe even discovering the new e.g. Amy MacDonald sounds great. Hope that you reach Europe soon and all the best with the site.
Never heard of Amy MacDonald before. People like live music because it is live. This site doesn’t really solve the problem.
Hey Wisdoom, I had never heard of Amy MacDonald before either! That is part of the problem that is being solved.
With HearWhere you not only can find artists that are playing near you, you can also sample the music to help decide what to see.
I think that is what Nicholas was referring to. He might not have heard of Amy before either, but maybe he heard her on HearWhere and now is interested to go see her live.
Wow thats really cool.. There I like doing live gigs but its always esoteric to try to find gigs in my area…
I really like the implementation and idea. I’m still trying to figure out how HearWhere gets its data, perhaps myspace developer network, and funnelling data into its own db with the relevant info. All the other functionalities of this site are easy to reproduce.
Anyways, I think this site is a winner, so I’m gonna make a clone of it.
p.s. if someone else knows how HearWhere gets it’s data, I’ll buy you a beer.
Hey Bobby_d!
Happy you like it. As the creator of HearWhere, I know how I get the data!
Now about that beer…
Or was that “someone else” referring to anybody but me?
hi. Pete. I was being facetious. I really do hope your site does well. I know I’ll be using it. 8-|
Hey Pete. Nice work!
Aside from the fact that Bellingham WA is -not- in Canada, this is the cat’s pajamas. I love the fact that it opens to my location, not something stupid like type-a-zip-code. nice work Pete!
This looks great. Too bad it’s just another web service that everyone will soon forget about because it’s not very innovative, Cuil fail anyone? Welcome to the Internet HearWhere, enjoy your stay while it lasts you’ll soon be dust like all the rest.
Dwayne.
http://probablysucks.com
Here is a music site for lazy people: http://www.vibesparty.com
test it out peeps, I am sure you will like it.
I’m sold. The minute I clicked over, and saw that I had no work to do – the bands and venues automatically showed up for Nashville – and I could click on them and immediately listen to their music – I was hooked. Very cool app – and I’ll probably be encouraging those I work with to work with it.
Pete, lets trade a sponsorship banner…
Confused – i thought it was against the MySpace TOS to embed their player on an external site?
… not to mention scraping profile data of bands. I’ve compared some of the data of bands that I know very well in my area, and it’s verbatim – and they did not enter the information on HearWhere.com.
Pretty sure anyone could scrape MySpace Music pages, parse out the data you want, geocode it, and apply the haversine formula to the currently logged in users location.
The Madtown Lounge has all original data and contrary to some posts, we’ve seen increased traffic nearly every month for two years.
Allen
http://www.madtownlounge.com
Same thing here, Pete – not flying under the radar but not getting picked up either. Seems if your efforts haven’t raised a pile of money that you wont get any mention. Good news is with the economic conditions in the US market, that most competitors wont last anyways unless you are making a profit. BTW – if you want to monetize your traffic with standard IAB ads, let me know. Even with 600,000 local concert fans visiting our sites, we dont have enough inventory for the ad agencies
Pete –
Nice site, but with such a great front-end for finding local shows I’m surprised you don’t have affiliate links for concert tickets.
It’s not that hard to do, for example using eBay Partner Network.
Here’s my attempt… http://jamtopia.com/tickets/
Either way, keep up the great work.
TL
P.S. Can’t believe it but there are more than 50 shows within 3 miles of me just this Friday!