Matthew Miner

New Music Playlist: Upcoming Shows

I’m always on the hunt for new music. My usual gotos are radio stations on Apple Music — Elton John’s Rocket Hour for its eclectic selection, The Alligator Hour for a weirder mix — and free stations like Radio Paradise. Tim Bray’s Song of the Day blog posts were a fertile source of recommendations while they lasted.1

I recently went to a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert and wondered how I would stumble on them if they weren’t already in my library.2 Countless other great bands play mere blocks away but never cross my radar. So my newest music-discovery-goto is compiling a playlist of bands visiting Vancouver in the near future and chucking it on at work.

The Just Shows RSS feed provides a solid directory of upcoming acts (though only for Canadian cities it seems). Once a week I look up the newly listed bands and enqueue their top hits. I ought to automate this process. I’m told Apple Music has an API. Could happen.

The signal-to-noise ratio thus far is lower than I’d hoped. On the plus side, when I hear a band I enjoy I can see them live almost immediately. And I can pretend that I’m truly in the know when it comes to the local music scene. That’s worth something.