Hello all. Well today’s BLOG is about searching the internet For
Jam-Base like web sites. Jambase.com is a website to search for concerts
and festivals across the county. I think it has actually been around
for almost twenty years because I've been using it for at least fifteen.
The main key to this site was it's festival guide. There are plenty of
web sites out there that tell when the concerts are, of specific artist,
and yes they play festivals so you can find them that way. But there
are very few websites that will tell you where different festivals are
across the country. I used this site to plan my tour cross country for
summer 2003. The trip failed half way through, but that's a different
story. Through this site, I found festivals across the country and even
on the cliffs of Mexico. And you would think after all this time, that
some one else would create a site that might get more notoriety. I don't
think a lot of people know about Jambase, but maybe. Plus, it would be
cool if there was something better out there that I had yet to discover.
I searched in Google and Yahoo and am reluctant to say, I didn't find much. There are a couple sites out there that will track an artist for you like Songkick.com. There they say, “We built Songkick so we’d have one place to track our favorite bands so we’d never miss them live. We want to take the hassle out of finding out when your favorite bands are coming to your city.” But this still doesn't tell us about festivals.
I found a few people trying to make money off of merchandising but that's to be expected. Some of the cooler ones were sights like Wolfgangsvault.com and Nugs.net. Wolfgang himself is an old rock and roll promoter that saved tons of concert paraphernalia over the last 50 or so years. So now he has opened a museum in New York displaying some of his best stuff. His website previously mentioned, sells posters and live videos of concerts. Mostly older stuff as far as I can tell though. Nugs is a little different. They sell and give away live audio streams of concerts by your favorite band and show. Yes, the Gourds that played Missoula a couple of weeks ago is already there for those that can't remember it, and this one is free. It looks pretty sweet.
The only sites that I found that even closely resemble the search capabilities that Jambase had were Pollstar.com and a site made by some concert townies in love called Oh/My/Rockness at ohmyrockness.com.
For those that don't know Pollstar is an organization that tracks venues sales, profit, and attendance/capacity. It crunches all this data to use as a tool that people in the industry can use. They also have a magazine with articles on the industry and a yearly award ceremony. They are big. Oh my Rockness is not that. They have a calendar of smaller venues from a few major metropolitan area's across the country. None around here though.
The very coolest site I found was called iclips.net. Because of the name, I get the feeling the they are based around Apple, but these guys live stream festivals. It even looks like they do it well. They have quite the impressive band and festival list for people using their service.
“Featuring performances by: Umphrey's McGee • moe. • Primus • STS9 • Gov't Mule • Gogol Bordello • Shpongle • Lotus • Leftover Salmon • Michael Franti & Spearhead • Yonder Mountain String Band ...and A LOT more!,” is listed on their site.
And all this only cost 60 dollars for the whole summer of festivals. The show themselves usually costing hundreds a piece. Well anyway, I know this went on too long but I wanted to express my disappointment and delight over the thing I did not find and the cool new things I did. I hope you enjoyed. I'm out.
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