We’re making it easier to find music in a town near yours with our new “area” search, now available only for select regions. This search groups together different communities that make up a metropolitan area.

At a Store Near You

Local businesses looking to target area consumers can contact us for more information on purchasing ads at the city, area, or state level.

Our band profile pages now include a photo of the band, so now you can check out the group you are planning to see. And if you’re still not sure who to go see, we’ll be happy to make suggestions. Our current featured band can be seen on our homepage along with a link to its upcoming events.

In the near future, I intend to email them all and find out. But before then, I thought it would be good to add some more advantages to these accounts. If you look at the settings page, you’ll find you have a lot more settings now to set.

Most of them a focused on editing your profile page. See my freshly updated profile for an example. You can add your real name, show your email address to other users (though not to anyone else, as “anyone else” includes spammers, and enter whatever you want to describe yourself.

In addition to these profile features, you can also tell us you don’t want emails from us (such as that one I intend to send to find out why you all created accounts), or that you don’t want to see ads. Though we’d prefer you don’t do either (we’d like to be able to both communicate with you and make money), the choice is up to you.

To make any of these changes to your account, you need to first login. If you forgot your password, that may be difficult. So another new (and long overdue) feature is the ability to reset your password if you’ve forgotten it.

And of course, creating a Playing Here account still allows you to comment on individual shows and subscribe to email alerts for upcoming concerts in your area. So if you haven’t registered yet, now’s a good time.

Other recent updates include browsing bands, states, and cities. The style has also changed to something that’s hopefully a bit more flexible and more useable on smaller screens. Also, band names no longer update every time they update on MySpace. This means no more bands named “Band Name — new album coming soon.”

As always, let us know if you have any problems with the new features, or any suggestions for future improvements.

But probably the most important difference between Playing Here and other live music listing sites is that we’re not full of crap. By “crap,” I mean live music listings that aren’t live, or aren’t music, or aren’t public, or have the wrong venue name, or the wrong city, or even the wrong state. We’re trying to filter all of this out by moderating events. This moderation was initially a lot of work, but we’ve automated much of it. So now we’re ready for more bands. Have a band you’d like to see listed on Playing Here? Now you can submit the band. We’ll filter out the crap, and publish the live music.

Playing Here traffic per week, first two months

Traffic on Playing Here is steadily increasing, despite the very limited publicizing we’ve done so far. It’s almost entirely from search engines, which seem to love that every event, every venue, every date, every month, every city, every state, every year and every user has a separate page on the site. It’s the latter two, years and users, I want to focus on here.

The number of events on Playing Here is also steadily increasing, and we recently ran into a problem with the inability to display all of the shows for a year on a single page. The page just gets way too big and the server gets tired before it finishes. This is one of the nicer types of problem to have, but it’s still a problem. To avoid this, the year pages (e.g. 2007, 2008) now show a list of months and the number of shows in each month. As a quick visual reference, there’s also a simple bar graph behind the month name. As you might expect, the number of events per month gradually trails off into the future, as bands don’t tend to schedule tours very far in advance.

User pages are new. Whenever anyone leaves a comment on a specific show, their username will link to their user page. Currently the user page only lists comments, so if you see someone say something interesting about one show, you can see what they said about other shows. We have a lot of plans for additions to user pages, but that’s all for now.