TourFilter

Here's a good site to bookmark that will get even better over the next few months. It's TourFilter. However, the name is a bit of a misnomer. Its more of a tour aggregator than a tour filter.

The site is set up for 24 cities/areas in North America. When you click on a city, it pulls together all of the upcoming concerts in that city onto one page. You can view the show listings by club or by date. Now, here's the kicker...next to each artists name, there is a link that says "mp3". When you click on the link, TourFilter connects with The Hype Machine and displays all of the blogs with posts about and mp3 files from the band you want to see. One stop shopping for concerts.

I met the guy, Chris Marstall, who created the site when I was down in Boston for the NEMO music festival. Nice guy. The site already includes Western Mass for all of the venues in the Northampton/Amherst area. However, it doesn't include Montreal and Burlington. I asked Chris about those absent cities. He said Montreal was their next city to add and will be coming sometime this fall. The tricky part of the venues in Montreal is their dual language websites that TourFilter pulls from. However, Chris said its their most requested city so he was going to figure it out.

He said that since Burlington only has a small number of venues, their site wouldn't save people much time. Therefore, it's unlikely to be added anytime soon.

But if you want a quick one stop check for shows in Montreal (when it gets added) and Western Mass, it's a good website to bookmark. The only downside of the site is that it looks like something that was written in an early version of DOS. It's very functional but not very pretty to look at.

By the way, until Montreal gets added to TourFilter, I use this site for a quick listing of Montreal shows. It's not bad but doesn't give you the additional feature of linking into The Hype Machine.