Showhopping.com: My latest project (read: folly)

A hobby of mine is going to see live shows for bands that I love. I'm kind of a huge music hound, and get my fix of live music whenever possible. With resources available like Pandora and Grooveshark, It's easier than it's ever been to find new music.

However, while traveling around the Pacific Northwest, it became clear to me that one resource that is not clearly available is how to find good live music in places you're unfamiliar with. It's with this problem in hand that I created Showhopping.com.

A user (or "showhopper", as I affectionately deem them) can visit the site, enter an address (or geolocate themselves), select a radius they are willing to travel from that location, enter a date range (defaulted to between now and 1 month from now), and, if they so choose, either click to retrieve shows (which will populate on the ginormous Google map on the right side of the page) or they can start to enter a few bands into a list. This is where things get more interesting.



I'm kind of picky when it comes to my music, so I might enter a few bands: Band of Horses, Tera Melos, Maps & Atlases, Marnie Stern, Toro y Moi, Wild Nothing, to name a few. When I do this, the site will hound Last.fm's similarity engine (Scrobbler), and look for 100 bands that are similar to each of those bands. That is to say, in the above examples, if I added 6 bands, the site would start combing through the resultant shows and cross-reference 600 bands to see if there were any matches. If there were matching acts, they will display listed in the map by venue in pageable InfoWindows, along with a percentage match indication (ostensibly a percentage denoting how much you'll enjoy them).

So far, the site hasn't gotten much press, but I don't care. I learned a lot while making it about working on an app that relies heavily on APIs, using Linode, and building a one-page webapp. It's definitely more for my personal amusement; I built it for myself and I'll probably be its biggest fan.

Anyway, if you're a music hound like I am, I hope you enjoy it, and if not, maybe you'd like to check it out, anyway. I've got some neat tech going on behind the scenes to make it all work.