UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

February 24, 2006

Gigs revisited …

Filed under: Ideas,Music — SpaceDog @ 3:21 pm

A while back I talked about wanting an RSS feed for gigs in my area. Using the ones I found from gigs.co.uk seems to be working OK but they’re not perfect. There’s a lot of events there that I don’t care about, the feeds themselves don’t contain much information so you’re forced to go to the website to check and the ways the feeds are formed off the searches means the date coverage of the feeds is a bit odd.

A bit more searching revealed at least one other person who wants some sort of ticket alerts. Let’s make a wish list for a decent ticket alert service …

  1. Different alert mechanisms (RSS, e-mail, SMS, personalised home page, etc)
  2. Different alert timings (event announced, tickets on sale, tickets running out, event date, etc)
  3. Multiple filter options (any/all of band, area, distance?, venue, event, price, time, day, rating ?)
  4. Multiple streams per user for different settings
  5. Optional recommendation of similar events based on known preferences
  6. Decent coverage, say 99% of all events

Only the last point is difficult, getting the information, once you have that the rest is just a matter of organisation, storage, processing and presentation (spot the over-simplification !)

If the stumbling block is getting the data I’m not sure I see why, both the bands and the venues should be motivated to enter the information to encourage sales, I guess the trick is getting enough momentum behind it to convince users on all sides that it’s worth their time. Start off by offering enough incentives to get the basic service off the ground, get the initial data by scraping the current ticket sites and aggregating as much existing information as possible.

It’s got built in money making potential with if you offer a click through to buy the tickets via an affiliate, like Ticketmaster’s Affiliate Scheme.

Worth some more thought I feel.

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