Tourfilter is one of those innovative new business ideas that came about because a smart entrepreneur wanted to solve a personal problem. Founder Chris Marstall kept missing gigs by bands he liked, and needed an easy way to track concert listings. When he couldn't find anything user-friendly or complete enough, he built his own service.
The concept is simple: a user sets up a (free) account, picks his/her own city, and then enters all of the bands he or she would like to see in concert. Twice a day, Tourfilter's software crawls through live music venue listings for each city it covers. If it comes across a band people are tracking, it sends them an email, and lets them receive show updates via RSS or iCal. Entering a list of bands is fast and easy, with the system giving instant recommendations based on other users' lists. Users can also listen to thousands of MP3 and RealAudio tracks by bands with upcoming shows, and browse recent music blog listings, organized by band.
Not in a hurry to make money with Tourfilter, Marstall isn't very focused on revenue generation. Of course, it isn't hard to imagine this type of service bringing in money. Recording artists are seeing concerts as a much bigger source of income than CD sales, so advertising would be an obvious start, as well as add-on services such as sms/text-alerts or ticket sales.
Great example of simplifying and streamlining information, of using technology to service local markets at low cost. And of an entrepreneur building a service for the fun of it, without focussing on immediate returns. Do what you love, and the rewards will follow ;-).
Website: www.tourfilter.com
Contact: info@tourfilter.com
Spotted by: zBiz.tv
Email to friendPrevious: Keeping track of kids & keys «
Next: A bar with room service »
Hi Ian,
Thanks for your comment. Right you are! We hadn't spotted Tourbus. Will be interesting to see which service turns out to be the Craiglist for this industry ;-)
Sounds a lot like Eventful.com too.
hi chris from tourfilter here. one difference between tourfilter and services like eventful (not sure on tourbus, perhaps they can weigh in here) is that we don't rely on users to add events. our users simply add their bands and we search club websites for shows. This means our listings are often much deeper, especially for non-top-40 music. For example, eventful lists only 3 upcoming shows for the Middle East, a major venue in Cambridge for indie music, whereas tourfilter has over 50. That's a typical ratio for our bigger cities (Boston, New York, London).
Another difference is our focus on notifications. The main focus of the site is to make it dead easy to enter several dozen of your favorite bands, then get email when they come to town. To do the same in Eventful (at least last time I checked) requires filling out a somewhat involved form for each band, something most people wouldn't have the patience to do several dozen times.
That said I like eventful (and upcoming) and use them all the time to find non-music events (like open developer meetings and such).
At least in middle America, scraping listings produces pretty anemic results. I'd like to see sites (like ours: http://pegasusnews.com) with 70+ concerts on a slow night (150+ on weekends) with these sort of tools.
Maybe we will...
It's not too difficult to imagine users offering to pledge to purchase advance tickets the moment the gig is confirmed.
Consequently, it's not too difficult to imagine bands checking out the minimum potential revenue available at each venue.
One can also invite would be showgoers to propose the maximum ticket price they'd pay (on the basis that tickets would all be the same price).
See T'DAA!
I scoured the web for a site like this until I found SonicLiving.com last month - it's a slick site. For instance, they let you upload your itunes playlist to get upcoming show info. I'll be sure to try out tourfilter to compare.
Not sure how this is any different than pollstar.com, which has been around for years and years.
Sounds almost exactly like Tourbus (http://tourb.us), except that tourbus will import your favorite artists from iTunes or last.fm. Podbop (http://podbop.org/) is another similar service (although without the notification I think).
Ian Van Ness | December 7, 2006 8:08 PM