It is finally time to pull the plug on tourb.us, a concert tracker Gary Elliott and I launched in 2006. The site has been on auto-pilot for quite some time, but until recently was still at least useful at sending notifications about upcoming shows. Now the number of shows it finds has fallen too low to justify keeping it running.
So it goes.
Although tourb.us never gained the traction we’d hoped, it was successful in ways I hadn’t anticipated. The project began as a side project in 2005 – back when people used the phrase “web 2.0” without much irony or a grimace – to solve a simple problem of knowing when bands are playing nearby. Developing the site introduced me to Ruby on Rails. Sharing all the responsibilities from design to marketing to user support taught me a ton. Beginning with Paul Graham’s first Startup School it lead to meeting a bunch of interesting, like-minded people around Boston. Not to mention receiving several job offers, a surreal, all-expenses-paid trip to L.A., and some other unique experiences. So I remain bullish on side projects.
Have no fear, there are still plenty of concert trackers out there. A quick list includes Tourfilter, Last.fm, SonicLiving, Songkick, Bandsintown, iLike, iConcertCal, JamBase, OnTour, track50, Eventful/Upcoming/Zvents, TicketMaster/LiveNation and likely more. I’m not sure which one(s) I’ll use yet, and have been kicking the tires on several. For me, the most important factors are the concert coverage and how easy it is to keep my list of bands up-to-date (preferably with a Last.fm integration since I scrobble my iTunes listening.) But I might be just a tiny bit biased toward wanting a particular set of features.
A big thanks to those who have made building & running tourb.us such a great experience.