Local Lineup
I go to a lot of concerts by myself. Some people think it’s weird, some think it’s cool, but really it’s just because I can never convince any of my friends to go see random small bands with me. Regardless of the reasoning, seeing live music is something I greatly enjoy doing. I built Local Lineup both so I would never miss if an artist I knew was performing in my city and to help find new music. I also wanted an excuse to learn Javascript, React, and basic server hosting. It is by no means intended to be a clean a finished product; I found CSS and web UI work to be extremely tedious and I don’t care if it looks bad as long as it works.
There are two “tools” within Local Lineup. The first, and more powerful, is the Shows by Venue tab seen above. After selecting their city, the user can enter as many venues that they’re interested in as they’d like. This list will be used to collect every show happening for the following week (the week after the next, not the upcoming week) at each location. The list of artists performing, sorted by day of the week, will be emailed to the user Sunday afternoon. At that time, the Local Lineup playlist that was created in their account will also update to include songs from each artist. The user has the option to choose how many songs per artist will be used, and also whether or not to include the opener musicians for each show in their playlist. If the user just wants to see a list of the upcoming shows for the chosen venues in their browser without having to wait until Sunday, there’s an option to do that at the bottom of the page too.
The second “tool” is the Shows by Artist tab. This isn’t integrated with the email and playlist system, but is useful for checking to see if any artists within the user’s Spotify library have any scheduled shows in a specific city. The user chooses a city, a Spotify playlist (or their main library), and can filter the artists included in the search from within their chosen playlist. Local Lineup will check multiple large ticketing websites (BandsInTown, Songkick, and SeatGeek) for any shows by the chosen artists, combine the results, and display them to the user sorted by date as seen in the above image. If the chosen city is San Francisco, I also include results from foopee, an awesome and long-running bay area music site. I found that different services commonly had missing artists here and there, so by amalgamating the results it ensures that every show is accounted for.
The Spotify login is performed through Spotify’s OAuth flow on their hosted domain, with Local Lineup receiving only an access token upon redirect. This token has a very basic scope granted to it and is only used to read a list of the user’s public playlists and to create the Local Lineup playlist if they choose that option. Local Lineup never sees the user’s password.
I’ve got a long list of improvements and features that could be added, but it gets the job done for now.