Now that it's so easy to have a ton of favorite bands, staying on top of their tours can be time-consuming or impossible, without the right technological assistance. There are plenty of free sites that can help, but SonicLiving -- for residents of New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, London,
Detroit, Chicago, Portland, Austin, Boston, San Diego, and Miami -- tailors its alerts precisely without requiring a lot of heavy lifting on the part of the user, by importing band names from iTunes, Last.FM, and/or Pandora (and if you don't use at least one of those from time to time, youprobably don't like music that much anyway).
A simple interface (below) handles this super precise setup process, although adding songs from iTunes involves running a small downloadable scanning application. To avoid adding artists in your collection you'd rather not see live, you can tell SonicLiving to add only artists from whom you have more than five songs, check off boxes for scanned bands before they get added to your account, and add band names manually:
Once you've set up your profile, your bands show up in a wishlist,
along with the number of upcoming shows they're playing. From there,
it's simple to add shows to your calendar, which you can access viaRSS, iCal, Google, Yahoo, Mozilla/IE, 30 Boxes, or a simple text list.
Considering how easy it is to set up and how effective it is atidentifying shows of interest, SonicLiving can quickly become anindispensable tool for finding out about new shows, so you can be theone to tell your friends about them, rather than the other way around.
(thanks, fred)
