Now featuring Twitter, last.fm and Pandora integration, Bandsintown offers a powerful yet easy-to-use suite of tools for discovering local live music you might want to check out.
Beyond a look and feel overhaul, Bandsintown has added a number of features to enhance "social music tracking." You can track artists to get alerts about upcoming shows of artists you like, as well as recommended similar artists from the Bandsintown concert engine. Track a venue to get updates about upcoming shows as soon as they're announced. Plus, track friends and other users with musical tastes you admire to see which artists they're tracking, what concerts they're attending and what they've tweeted about the shows they've seen.
Tweet it
That's where the Twitter integration comes in. First off, you can log into the site with your Twitter account to set up your profile. Then when you're at a show, simply add the #live hashtag to send your tweets to Bandsintown and have them collected in a personal concert archive. You can also access a real-time Twitter stream that displays tweets from local shows by your favorite artists, so you can still "experience" a bit of the show even if you weren't able to attend.
Import your favorites
Added integrations with last.fm and Pandora help you import your favorite artist data directly into Bandsintown. This is extremely handy for music lovers who already use one or both of those services and would otherwise have a long list of favorites to manually add.
Find artists in your area
Based on the artists you track and your location data, Bandsintown generates a personal concert cloud based on your musical preferences. You can filter the cloud by date range, distance from your city and ticket price, as well as add new artists to track right from the left-hand sidebar. The concert cloud offers a unique and visually intuitive way to find artists you might like who'll be playing in your area.
Once you find a show you want to attend, Bandsintown helps you buy tickets right there as well. Aggregating inventory from more than 60 ticketing providers in 140 countries, the upcoming concert database is comprehensive enough to give you access even to small and obscure artists at off the beaten path venues.
The ticket purchasing interface also offers the ability to comparison shop for cheaper tickets or less expensive service fees. If a show is sold out, Bandsintown can help redirect you to other sellers who may still have available seats.
Going mobile
The iPhone app also has a straight up listing of all local shows in your area by date, which is a killer feature if you're out and about looking for something to do or on the go trying to arrange plans for later in the week.
Overall the combination of the new site features and the iPhone app is a significant and positive addition to Bandsintown. The site is intuitive and easy to use, and quickly connects you to live shows you might be interested in. For music lovers and frequent concert-goers, we can see this becoming a go-to service for keeping on top of a busy live show schedule. For folks who just want to see the occasional show now and then, Bandsintown offers a very quick and no hassle window into what's going on near you.
Now if you'll excuse us, Bandsintown just majorly filled up our dance card.
More music resources from Mashable:
- 5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Music Collection