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Looking for a good guide to gigs
I am in the UK and would like a decent gig guide. I just Google artists I want to watch to see if they are on tour at the moment. I am not fused on the ticket master guide. Can anyone give me good recommendations?
Spotify is actually surprisingly good for this, which is one of the things I miss most about it after having switched over to YouTube Music. Most bands have their tour schedules listed on their main Spotify page under the "On Tour" section. Spotify also has an awesome "Live Events" feed page (set your default city there). And you can also enable "In-person Concerts & Events" notifications as well, which are usually pretty decent at letting you know when the bands you "Follow" and similar "Recommended" bands will be playing in your area. I really should just go back and enable all the notifications again, even though I don't listen on Spotify anymore.
The only gripe I have with using Spotify for this is that I live pretty much equally distant from three cities and it will only really suggest for one of them at a time. AFAIK there isn't a way to say, "show me venues from X, Y, and Z areas." Or even X and Y.
That may not be a common problem though. So if that's not a deal-breaker for you, then yeah, Spotify is great for finding shows.
Yeah, that sucks. But it's better than it was. At least now you can change your default region/city manually. But for a few months after the feature first came out you couldn't do that, and your default location was based on something which I could never figure out what. So I was defaulted to Thunder Bay for some unknown reason, which is somewhere I've never lived, and is also about 1300km (14+ hour drive) from where I actually live!!! Ontario is a big place, so the notifications feature was entirely useless for me until they updated it. :P
It's definitely much better now. Maybe because of a VPN(?) it used to give me suggestions for stuff all over the country. Now I'm essentially griping about having to manually change my region every once in a while. It is kind of a pain, and I wish you could add more than one region/city, but it's really not a big deal. I still use it because other than that one drawback it still works really well for discovery.
I don't think it was geo-IP based, because I tried moving my IP location around using my VPN, and it seemingly had no effect. And it wasn't my credit card registered address either, since I don't live anywhere near Thunder Bay and never have. So I genuinely couldn't figure out what it was using to pick my default location. Oh well, at least everyone can manually change it now. I agree that it would be awesome if we could set multiple locations to monitor though, since I am also close to a few other cities with lots of music venues in them too.
What I usually do is check the venues themselves. There are pretty few in my country anyway. But all of them have months and months of upcoming shows listed on each of their websites. My area is a lot smaller than the UK though, and I suppose it also depends how far you're willing to travel?
I know this is probably not quite what you were looking for, but hopefully helpful anyways 😊
I've been getting email alerts from a website called bandsintown for years now. I think I set up an "account" like 5 or 10 years ago. You can link your Spotify account and choose what bands you care about following, and you'll get email notifications when they release tour dates. Through it, I've seen events for Tool, The Heavy, Megadeth, Mutoid Man, and Red Fang.
I'm in Ireland and go to gigs once every 2 weeks (on average). I share your pain. For smaller/underground gigs, which is what I like, it's typically not advertised well. So there's some hunting involved.
I do mainly 3 things:
I still get to find out a few things late or by friends but that mostly covers it.
Jambase is pretty solid for major US metropolitan areas: https://www.jambase.com/concerts
Others like song kick will import a last.fm library and give you recs based on an area: https://www.songkick.com/