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Tour Bus - Social Software That Requires No Work!
Less than an hour after I posted my take on Nicholas Carr's comment that social software is a passing fad because it takes too much work, I got an email from Mike Champion that really proves my point:
Saw your blog post about social software you don't have to work to use, and thought I'd shared a site I've been working on that aims to make it easier to find out when bands you like are coming to town without much work. The site is:
http://tourb.us
You can search for shows, or if you sign up can use an iTunes playlist or Last.fm account to bootstrap your list of favorite bands, then you can get notified about shows via email / RSS / iCal.
It's still young (we launched earlier this summer), and doesn't have nearly all the shows in NYC yet, but we're actively working on that.
If you check it out, I'd be curious to know what you think.
I'll tell you and everyone else what I think of TourBus Mike. I think TourBus rocks! (and I love the use of .us too).
This is exactly what I was talking about in my post yesterday. I did five minutes of work last year installing the last.fm agent on my computer. I've installed it now on a bunch of computers in our house so it captures all of our music listens. Last.fm knows what music we like because it watches what we do without any effort on our part.
And by simply entering my last.fm login info into TourBus, I now have this amazing service that tells me when the bands I like are coming to town.
Better yet, I can publish the list of shows I am going to see. Here it is for this fall (doesn't include Austin City Limits, just the NYC shows). I really need a badge/widget Mike because linking is tired and embedding is wired.
What I don't know is if TourBus will alert me before the tickets go on sale. That's the killer app.
Actually the killer app is for me to make TourBus my agent where they alert me of the shows before the tickets go on sale, I check off which shows I want to see and how many tickets I want, and they get them for me. Not sure if that's what Mike has in mind with TourBus, but I love what he's built so far.
September 2, 2006 My Music , NYC , Venture Capital and Technology | Comments (12)
Comments
May be a dupe comment but have youtried podbop.org?
Posted by: howard Lindzon | Sep 2, 2006 10:45:56 AM
Thanks Fred. Right now tourb.us will alert (email/RSS/iCal) as soon as it knows about a show that has your favorites bands in your area, which will hopefully be in time to buy tickets. And we're working to make it simpler to go from finding a cool show to buying tickets, but still have more to do. Hadn't thought about actually being the agent for buying tickets on your behalf, that's interesting.
Also, if you want to put your list of upcoming shows on a blog or site, we have tourb.us badges, at:
For example, our blog has a badge with shows we're interested in.
Posted by: mike | Sep 2, 2006 10:48:53 AM
Wow I am sad I hadn't ran into tourb.us before. Love having a central place to find shows on any given night. I am hooked. Last.fm integration rocks!
Posted by: spi | Sep 2, 2006 11:00:27 AM
Last.fm integration should be more prominent in my opinion because it's a great feature.
Very useful indeed.
Posted by: Raj Bala | Sep 2, 2006 11:00:49 AM
a few months ago this service called Podbop won "best mashup" at Mashup Camp in Mt. View CA. It's a similar concept, except it combines http://eventful.com and Podcasts and community
http://podbop.org/
it's very nice to have a constantly updated podcast feed for your city, so you can listen to sample bands mp3s as well as see the schedule.
just type the city name, then click "Subscribe as Podcast".
anyone can add bands and links to mp3s
Posted by: Al | Sep 2, 2006 2:15:09 PM
Firstly: tourb.us really is killer, at least for someone like me that loves to follow shows and doesn't want to put any work into tracking them.
But Fred, I'm gonna go off topic and step in here and protest about
"linking is tired, embedding is wired"... err, uh, I must DISAGREE. You know from previous threads here that this page, aka: The Blog of Bling, is a blast, but your room is just too messy. You've got all these great toys but they're all out on the floor and we can't find anything. Too cumbersome on my poor browser w/ your 23,511 server calls.
It would be the equivalent of me coming into your office to pitch you and blurting out everything on my mind in detail. We wouldn't have time to cover everything. Attention can't be assumed: I need to offer topics, guage interest, and unveil more detail on each topic per interest (a click-thru analogy), lest we be there all day.
Same is true on this page, though you're not nearly as bad as the avg MySpace page (yet)!
Only half-kidding,
Ken
Posted by: Ken Berger | Sep 2, 2006 2:29:47 PM
Is there any need to point out that this is why building an API and opening your system up is so very important! It brings tears to my eyes, yes it does.
And in other news, Om reports that MySpace is opening an indie record store online which will sell DRM-free music from over 3 million indie bands. The cool thing is each band gets their own “store”, and a small version of the store can be pasted into any MySpace page (viral).
I predict that it won’t be long before the big labels take off their DRM condoms and start selling on the MySpace music store too. You simply can’t ignore over 100 million people. Hurray for music lovers!
Posted by: JontheWayne | Sep 2, 2006 2:39:12 PM
Podbop is definitely a cool mashup, and the ability to preview bands is a great feature. I know I'd use this to decide if I want to hear the opening band or not.
Part of what prevented me from being satisfied with some of the other event calendars already out there was that the show listings weren't comprehensive enough (although perhaps this has improved). We think that by actively going after where the data is, we can build a better concert database through crawling for shows and encouraging fans and bands to add shows as well.
Also, I'm really lazy and was tired of doing the manually searching to find when my favorites bands are playing nearby. Now I rely on tourb.us to let me know about upcoming shows I'll like in Boston.
Posted by: mike | Sep 2, 2006 3:27:19 PM
cool, fred! Now I can stalk you even more effectively...
Posted by: Charlie Crystle | Sep 2, 2006 4:57:04 PM
The features that have enhanced the music consumer's experience --and, with it, the music industry's ability to distribute its product-- should be referenced as Best Practices and used throughout the media industry.
Just think about all the tools that you passionately post about, Fred, that enable consumer's experience --collaborative filtering, online "expert" reviews and commentary (mp3blogs), embedding music video samples in web-pages, real time feeds of graphical sales rankings, syndication of offline-information (events, releases) to PDA's and email boxes, online "interaction" with the celebs and with the fanbase at large, etc.
Aside from epitomizing some of the best examples of Web 2.0 sites, they alslo all contribute to the increased efficiency of the distribution of music and music-products (downloadable tunes, concert tixs, dvds, ipods, streaming accessories, etc.) It's allowed new players who leverage these tools to really flourish in a way that would never have been possible with the gatekeeper/elite AR exec model, and (I would argue) it's reinvigorated passive music consumers' interest level in the medium, and increased the wallet-share that we spend on music.
I think other areas of the media industry need to take a page from the music world's book here and employ RSS, open API's, social widgets, personalization and aggregation in a way that benefits their target customers.
Posted by: Megan Cunningham | Sep 3, 2006 11:54:53 AM
Thanks for the tip, Fred. I have used Upcoming.org for the same thing, but this could be more focused and useful. I'll use the two in tandem for a while ...
Posted by: Geof F. Morris | Sep 5, 2006 12:43:20 PM
Music in the soul can be heard by the world. Tour bus renders genuine music to all listeners. It is a good social software where all people enjoy.
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Wendell
Posted by: wendell | Aug 1, 2008 2:21:54 AM
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