Bandsintown has come a long way. What was once a useful widget for tracking the tour dates of your favorite musicians has evolved into a socially integrated network and recommendation service. The site has undergone a complete redesign, the first since its 2007 launch. With a reported 30,000 registered members, Bandsintown has a healthy user base but is clearly seeking growth and increased usability, based on its new features and relaunch.
There are two areas of improvement with the redesign, the first of which is the social integration of Bandsintown with other sites including Twitter. Bandintown is leveraging Twitter to help users gain a remote concert experience.
A new live stream posts user-generated updates and media for a given concert so that anyone on the Bandsintown site can stay abreast as to what’s going on. Any tweets from Bandsintown users that are marked with the #live hashtag will be republished on the live stream concert page. This is in addition to other related tweets being pulled in for the live stream, and the tweets included on every artist page.
The other major area of improvement on the Bandsintown site is the recommendations, which have been updated with personalized tracking and alert notifications. Based on your activity in sites including Last.fm and Pandora, Bandsintown can create a personalized set of recommendations for upcoming shows in your area. If you don’t have accounts with the supported music sites, you can manually set up your list of favorite artists in order to receive recommendations and tour dates from Bandsintown. Additionally, you can track artists that are being followed by other users, essentially turning to influencers for recommendations, or you can track a particular venue to see what artists will be playing in the coming months.
In all, the Bandsintown relaunch has done well to begin to take advantage of some of the other social networking and media services out there. The result is a cohesive site for receiving news and updates on the artists and venues you like. The best part about the Bandsintown redesign is the fact that you don’t necessarily need to get set up with a seperate account in order to utilize the service for its key features. I also like that you’re not locked into any one service for receiving recommendations.
Additional mobile support or the expansion of supported third party music sites would only further improve what Bandsintown is working towards, as the personalized recommendation engine space is beginning to heat up, thanks to opening platforms and APIs.
