Gigzee: Find Gigs in Your Area With an iPhone App
You’ve finished work on Friday night, you’re in the pub and you want to find out what bands are playing near you tonight. These iPhone apps are here to solve your problem: Gigzee will use your phone’s GPS positioning in conjunction with Google Maps to tell you who’s playing up to three days in advance at venues within a certain radius (default is 2 miles, but you can set it to be whatever you want). The app draws down information from Myspace, as well as from user submissions, but only a small minority of bands are using it, mostly in the US, so don’t expect a comprehensive service. That said, it’s free and easy to use, so you can’t lose out, and if you visit their website, they’ll give you a list of gigs in your area over a much longer duration. A smart thing to do might be to ask the venues in your area to sign up to the service and update their myspace profiles sensibly, but that’s a bit proactive for all but the most dedicated music fan.
Bandloop approaches the problem from the opposite angle, asking you to add a set of bands that you’re interested in, and then feeding you information on when they’re going to be where – a band based rather than a geography based approach. They also make a Strong Bad reference on their site, so they can’t be bad! This is another free app, supported by ads.
The Jambase app allows you to approach from either perspective, with the same current-location GPS functionality as Gigzee (although you can still put in a different area code if you want to know who’s playing elsewhere), and the ability to add favourite artists to a roster that will update a gig calendar for you. It also features music samples dragged down from LaLa.com, and links to ticket-purchasing sites, although this only really works for major artists.
The most pro-active (read laziness enabling) app in this field is iConcertCal, which will scan through your iPhone (or iTunes) and figure out who your favourite bands are based on the plays they’ve had from your catalogue, and then auto-generate a list of the gigs that they’re playing in your area. The plug in seems to work pretty well, but since it’s based on your iTunes list, you’re a bit stuffed if you use Spotify Premium or any other apps that bypass the iPod’s official-Apple-product contents.
Any one of these products should help you avoid this kind of disaster:
