It’s festival season, so this may be a welcome addition to the gigantic directory of music-related information websites and applications already out there on the Web, particularly for live gig buffs. Setlist.fm is an awesome free wiki site (although they prefer to call it a “wiki-like service”) that aims to become the biggest repository of live performance track lists with the help of music fans across the globe.
The good thing about Setlist.fm is that the goal is to collect the real setlists, meaning which tracks artists and bands actually play at live gigs rather than what the setlist says they will. If you have any basic knowledge about the live music industry, you know that those are two completely separate things.
To submit and edit setlists, you don’t necessarily need to register, although the startup behind the site recommends that you do. Once you add tracks for a certain gig, say Metallica’s performance at the Sonisphere Festival in Hockenheim, Germany from last week, the back-end of the system will automatically check the web for a playable stream of the tune, YouTube videos and the lyrics. The site will also auto-generate statistics for artists and bands (example for Metallica) which gives you a good overview of their performance history and what their most played songs at live gigs are.
Setlist.fm comes with a decent internal search engine and enables visitors to easily share the setlist in their Last.fm event review or embed it on their own website or blog. For example, here is the setlist of U2’s concert at Camp Nou in Barcelona, Spain from the beginning of this month:
As an aside, this is most probably the first project that we cover that hails all the way from the tiny nation of Liechtenstein. Which goes to show good ideas can come out of countries with less than 40,000 inhabitants too.
Nice one!
