Bandsintown is a new social networking site that helps you find, well, bands in town - your town.
The idea is this: You create a profile, noting your city and favorite bands (last.fm users can also access their account to pull musical taste). Once in, you can view shows by date range, price range and distance from your city. All upcoming shows will appear as as a tag cloud on the right, with shows that most closely match your musical preferences highlighted.
For example, if you picked Dilated Peoples and Maximo Park as favorite artists, and you lived in Minneapolis, Mos Def and The Fratellis would be a whole lot bigger than Balkan Beat Box and Leann Rhimes.
Through the site, you can also find “fansintown” and, ideally, network with those that have similar taste or are attending the same shows as you. Cool stuff! Is it unique? Yes and no.
Social networks like Facebook operate on the broadest principles of social networking – they start with the network itself and build down. Interests are added to the person. You can find other people who like the X-Files or support Lobsterman for President.
However, niche SNS are built from interests up. For youth, the web is about discovery and experiences–not just superpoking–and music is a vast common ground. (It’s like the weather is for old people.) Bandsintown operates like other music-focused SNS (iLike, iMeem, Blip.fm, even MySpace to some extent), but brings it to the local level. So, like Going.com and Eventful, it helps bring community and recommendations to life, but solely tied to music.
Gen Y lives online, yes, but they also like to go outside. On the whole, they value experiences over content, and music over everything else. They also want things to be easy, automated, and sharable. Thanks to Bandintown’s widgets, you can share your concert schedule with your SNS friends. And speaking of SNS friends, if you follow them on Twitter, you can get free tickets = more fun than weather updates.
