bandloop

It's been a couple years since iConcertCal introduced its iTunes plug-in, which scans your iTunes library and creates a personalized concert calendar for your city.

Now, Apple has accepted an iPhone version of iConcertCal into the App Store. The concept is the same: it scans songs stored on your iPhone, then uses the iPhone's GPS to create a list of shows by those artists in your area. If you install the iConcertCal plug-in to iTunes, the app can also create a list of artists from your entire iTunes library (which is probably larger than the number of artists … Read more

The recording industry is increasingly looking at live-music revenue as one way to make up for falling sales of recorded music, and as a consequence, concert-listing sites are sprouting like mushrooms. I've been a longtime customer of Jambase, and have been impressed with Bandloop's iPhone application enough to keep it installed long past my usual testing time, but Wednesday I added a new one to my bookmarks: Livekick.

Founded last year by Aviv Eyal, who helped found video-sharing site Grouper and sell it to Sony in 2006, and his partner Yarden Tadmor, Livekick's been in public beta … Read more

TechCrunch broke the story Tuesday that Seeqpod, a Web search engine for music files, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company is facing lawsuits from record company Warner and EMI because even though it doesn't post any material itself--it's just a search engine--it makes no effort to filter out copyrighted material.

So far, the site itself still up and running, but my absolute favorite name-it-and-play-it service, Songerize, which uses Seeqpod as its back end, appears to be broken. The labels have been targeting independent developers who use Seeqpod's API, so I wonder if the heat got … Read more

Bandloop is a relatively new service that helps you find live shows in your area.

I had mixed feelings about the Web version of the service--I'm not so fond of the way it forces you to pick favorite bands to follow--but today, I had a chance to try out their new free iPhone application, and I'm very impressed. It's a cut above the iPhone version of JamBase, a long-established gig-listing service.

The Bandloop app is simple, as all good iPhone apps should be. If you've got a 3G iPhone, you allow Bandloop to find your location. … Read more

Last week, I posted about Bandloop, an online service that helps music fans find out when their favorite bands are playing a show in their area. I noted its similarities to Jambase, and mentioned that it's hard to compete with Jambase's "near perfection."

On Thursday, I got an e-mail from Bandloop developer Owen Grace, who pointed out a couple of key areas where he thinks Bandloop tops the competition. First, every venue entered in Bandloop's database is geo-coded with precise coordinates, which makes it possible to map out an evening's entertainment precisely. For example, … Read more

I've often praised JamBase, which lists tens of thousands of shows across the United States. If you want to know who's coming to town or who's playing tonight, it's infinitely more convenient than scanning the listings in your local paper.

Now it looks as if JamBase has some strong competition in the form of Bandloop. It's hard to improve upon JamBase's near-perfection, so Bandloop works in basically the same way, with a few improvements here and there.

Artists and fans populate the show database, which keeps it up-to-date--the site has more than 50,000 … Read more