Introducing the new setlist.fm Forum

After working hard on the internals of setlist.fm for some weeks, here's a new visible feature for all of you setlist people: the forum.

If you've got any question how a thing on setlist.fm works or how you should deal with a special case in a setlist or if you just want to share your feelings about a concert, artist or anything - go ahead and post it.

The reason for adding a (some might call it old-school-) forum was simple: comments to a setlist are great, but they just apply to the specific setlist and some interesting discussions might get lost ... no worries anymore, post them to the forum. Or imagine if a person is looking for a setlist that isn't in the database yet, where to post it? The answer is: the forum.

We started with a few categories that might get adapted and enhanced in the course of time. Also, as it is with every feature on the website, we'll improve the forum with new features you'd like to have!

Hope you like it!

P.S.: To post new topics and entries, you'll have to have a free setlist.fm account.

Average Setlists now open to the public

We're happy to announce that our response to our feedback forum's top suggestion is now open to the public: Average setlists. You'll find them in the artist statistics, where you'll find a new row of tabs (see screenshot below) with the first two stats being the (well known) song statistics and the second one the new average setlist.

You're now able to see average setlists based on year or tour. As average setlists of all concerts ever played by an artist generally doesn't yield sensible results, we chose best not to show it at all.

Here's an example: Metallica's average setlist from 1984:


Hope you like it! And again, if you think that some average setlist don't make any sense at all, please leave a comment in the thread in our feedback forum. We'll then tweak the algorithm until the average setlists rock even more :-)

First birthday

On September 22, 2008 setlist.fm went online with its first version, an empty database and a lot of optimism. Now, a year later there are almost 60,000 setlists, 5,000 artists and over 20,000 venues on setlist.fm. So it's time to say thank you to all of you who entered setlists, edited venues, added artists and suggested features. You guys really rock!

After the major update last week, we decided to work some extra hours for a neat little birthday feature that makes searching for setlists even easier: search suggestions!

Have a look at the improved search that gets its suggestions from popular queries of the last weeks!

We also improved the OpenSearch-Plugin, which has been available from the very start but didn't get promoted a lot. Either click the following link to add setlist.fm to your browser's search engines or do it the (slightly) harder way shown below.

It's really worth adding, here's the plugin in action

Have fun ... and don't hesitate to post your birthday wishes in the comments ;-)

New Features on setlist.fm!

Good news, everyone (stolen)! After weeks of hard work we not only changed the server infrastructure but also introduced some new features:

1. Venues

That's by far the biggest change. There was a notable amount of setlists with weird venues. Weird as they were duplicate, lacked of city or country or just contained question marks.

From now on, each venue must be assigned to a city. The user interface changed slightly for this one, but should be as easy as it was before.

It'll take some time though until all previously 'dirty' cities are assigned to a city.

This way we can come up with some new statistics in the future based on club, stadium, city, region or country.

There are now dedicated venue pages listing all setlists of the venue and venues in the same city. E.g. check out

• Madison Square Garden setlists
• Royal Albert Hall setlists

For those interested: we get the cities from the huge geonames.org database and enhance them with cities and towns that are entered manually.

2. A list of covers on artist pages

Previously it was hard to find out who covered who. Now it's easy - get on any artistpage and you'll find a box showing which bands/artists got covered by this artist and which bands/artist sang covers of this artist. E.g.

• The Beatles setlists
• The Velvet Underground setlists

3. Improved search

That's somehow connected with the venues - it's now possible to search for setlists by venue names, cities and countries using the advanced search. Generally all cities and countries are displayed in English, yet it's also possible to search by their name in some foreign languages.

E.g.

• A search for setlists in "Austria" using the German term for Austria: Österreich
• A search for setlists in "Munich" using the Italian term: "Monaco di Baviera"

for some artists and cities, nicknames are also taken into consideration, so e.g. the funny query

• fab four big apple will return all setlists of The Beatles's New York concerts

As a usability improvement, there's also a box for artist results that lead you right to the artist pages, e.g. this query:

• A search for the cult

4. A hidden gem for you loyal blog readers

There's a hidden feature which is currently in beta - so we'd like to get your feedback first before we present it to the broad mass. In response to this suggestion on uservoice, there are now Average setlists for each artist that tell you what songs were played the most on which position. Check out how to see the average setlists and tell us what you think in the post on uservoice.

Hope you all like the new stuff - if you do or if you don't, tell us. Either in a comment to this blogpost, mail us, send us a tweet or direct message, add us as your friend on last.fm, become a fan on facebook or do all at once ;-)

rock on

It's about Michael Jackson today

This will be one of the days that will be remembered in the same way as the day Kennedy got shot, Elvis Presley died or John Lennon was murdered.

The King of Pop is dead but his music will live on forever - there's just nothing more to say.

Maybe you feel like remembering his best days today - here's a setlist from his 1989 Bad tour:

• Michael Jackson Setlist, Los Angeles on January 18, 1989 (more Jacko setlists)

Perhaps you also enjoy this blog post by Douglas Newman who explains the impact of Michael Jackson on his life in a lovely way and also says that "only cynics can claim that Michael Jackson didn't have some kind of impact on their lives"

New stuff all over the site

During the last couple of weeks we dealed with most of your requests on uservoice and are now happy to present to you the new version of setlist.fm! Here in brief what we did:

1. Support Bands and Dealing with Festivals

There were many good suggestions on how to deal with support bands and festivals but most of them either contained having a designated field when editing or a new tag. We wanted to avoid that and did the following: Setlists of the same venue within the same couple of days are now neatly arranged in the new, wider right column. Just have a look at this Kaizer Chiefs setlist to see it in action. Just be sure that the name of the venues match, if you're unsure about the format to use, have a look at the new adapted guidelines. Support bands can also be found there (same venue, same day), see this R.E.M. setlist for an example.

Bonus: we also added a timeline right below the festival/support band/same day and venue feature - showing the concerts before and after the one you're currently looking at

2. Links on setlist page to add setlists more easily

For those rocking people out there who add more than one setlist of the same artist (and probably same tour) there are now two links on the setlist page. One next to the artist name and the other one next to the tour name (if present). Clicking on that will open the "add setlist" page prefilled with artist and tour.

3. Empty setlists

There was a request asking for a list of empty setlists to encourage users to fill them in. We added the possibility in our advanced search to limit your search to setlists with content or without content (non-empty and empty).

4. Statistics on start page

There are now statistics on the start page showing the amount of setlists (with content!), different artists (with at least one setlist) and tours. Already a pretty impressing figure :-)

5. Play the entire setlist

Clicking on the play button next to a song in the setlist used to play only one song and needed another click on the next item to play the next song. Fortunately that's no longer the case! The next song starts automatically after the previous one ended - so re-listen the whole setlist without further ado :-)

6. Bonus: Autocompletion for tour

The tour field now also offers autocompletion - but please be aware that all tours are taken into consideration, not just the tour of the current artist.

Tell us how you like the new stuff by either commenting to this article, by email or if you'd like to suggest new stuff, in our uservoice forum.

rock and roll!

Fancy Setlist Bookmarklet for Last.fm Users

Today, I was doing some administration of our feedback forum. First of all, it's great to get your feedback and suggestions! Thanks, you all rock! Please keep on suggesting your ideas. We'll try really hard to get your ideas into our site. We're sorry that we only completed 2 ideas so far. The reason is that we are currently working on a new project - top secret, but we'll let you know ;)

I felt really bad when I had to decline a suggestion - sorry for that, really. However, this idea inspired me to create a cool bookmarklet for all last.fm users out there. Clicking this bookmarklet on a last.fm event page (e.g. The Kooks in Munich) will take you to the setlist on setlist.fm - and import it, if the event is in the past and doesn't exist yet.

Simply drag and drop this link to your bookmarks and try it yourself: Last2Setlist

The Subways in Concert at Conrad Sohm/Austria

It was hot. It was packed. It was sweaty. It was awesome! Having rocked Japan, Australia and the Netherlands, English alternative-rock band The Subways from Welvyn Garden City finally made it to Austria and stayed for an evening at the Conrad Sohm in Dornbirn.

Entering the stage at around 10p.m. they started off Kalifornia, a new song from their 2008 album All or Nothing. They rocked on - non stop for four more songs - until the first chords of Mary made the crowd slow down a bit. But as the chorus roared out of the amplifiers the 500 people got mad again: fans hit the stage, trying to kiss Charlotte on the cheek and then got pulled down by the security personnel (one succeeded though), a tiny Wall of Death and pogo throughout the rest of the concert.

With a speed of 15 songs per hour, what seemed like no more than ten minutes, they left the crowd shouting for more. Guitarist Billy Lunn took his semi-acoustic and started playing Strawberry Blonde, a ballad about his relationship with bass-player Charlotte Cooper. The importance of this songs also reflects in his tattoo saying "Strawberry Blonde" across his waist. After a minute Charlotte and drummer Josh Morgan joined the stage to end the song together. Rocking the house then again with Boys & Girls, the Subways decided to blow the club into pieces by closing the show with Rock & Roll Queen. With an extended version consisting of some great singalongs due to Billy's infamous interaction with the crowd and his stage-dive climaxing in a shot of Schnaps and half a pint of beer on the bar, they finished the show with a translated version of the second verse:

Du bist die Sonne

Du bist die einzige

Du bist so cool

Austria is Rock and Roll!

Find the whole setlist on setlist.fm:

• The Subways at Conrad Sohm, Dornbirn, Austria, April 2 2009

A scan of the original setlist is available on the setlist.fm facebook-page (where you must become a fan ;-)). The Subways promised to come back, I doubt, however, that the club will be big enough if word gets round how they rocked the house.

Another great gig by soundevent.at

Photo courtesy of partypeople.at

Phish reunion tonight

There aren't many bands with such great fans and such a cult about their setlists. Well there are The Grateful Dead, U2, Bruce Springsteen ... but only one of them rocks the stage tonight in Hampton, VA: it's Phish!

As we're on the other side of the globe (and couldn't manage to get tickets), we hope that some Phish fans will keep track of the setlist. For this special occasion, we already prepared the setlist page:

Phish reunion in Hampton Setlist

... hope you're all as excited as we are :-)

Setlist.fm hits the blogosphere

We had slightly more visitors last week, due to a blogpost on springwise - so we thought about tuning the site a bit, but as we had to do some other tasks first we decided to postpone it for a day or two...

And that was an hour before it happened: Setlist.fm on Mashable. Boom. The visitors skyrocketed for a few hours (well not the visitors but the numbers, you know what I mean) and we had to do some emergency tuning to keep the site up and running ... and of course we succeeded :-)

We were also very really pleased about the reactions the article caused, here's a short list of nice follow-up blog posts in different languages:

• zeus jones mentioning setlist.fm (english)
• largehearted boy on setlist.fm (english)
• setlist.fm on genbeta (spanish)
• a Juventus and music addict about setlist.fm (italian)
• vbeta on setlist.fm (polish)
• samro (english from south africa)

and a tweets best-of (by the way: follow us)

• Agent_M digs it!
• warbrain's new favourite site
• Molly's new favourite site
• ... and many more

We received some really valuable feedback as well - so if you've got any suggestions for improvements contact us. Furthermore we're thinking about using a fancy feedback system such as uservoice to let you (the best users in the world) decide even more what features you'd like to see next. We're still looking for the best system though, so if you have experience with one, just post a comment :-)

More precise statistics, neat autocorrection and moderators

Having realised that the song statistics for artists, tours, years and users rock but lack a bit of cleanliness, we decided to improve that stuff. Now the statistics not only base on the name of the songs but also on the covered artist (and are case sensitive to keep the whole thing even cleaner). Here's how it looked before:

and now the cover's there too:

The second new thing is an (optional) autocorrection feature on adding or editing selists. It uses heuristics of already present songs to determine which song was meant. Sounds complicated - well it is, but only behind the scences. Here are some examples how the autocorrection works. 

 

If you come across users with badges next to their user name and are wondering what that means: either click on their names and read what it says on their profile page ... or just read on. They're moderators. Trusted users who are allowed to do a bit more than the regular user is allowed to do. And also if it comes to conflicts, they are the one you have to convince ;-)

Here's a list of setlist.fm's Roadies ;-)

• leglessmoof
• beau99
• bigdaycoming
• sicko
• iq-wunder

Your own, personal, song statistics!

Again, a new feature on setlist.fm. Requested by Jay some weeks ago, it's now online, and it's even fancier than expected:

Mark setlists as "attended" and see your concert and song statistics by artist and/or year. Here's how it works:

1. Add Gigs

Add gigs simply by adding you as attendee

2. View your statistics

Navigate to your profile and click on "Concerts" - there they are!

3. Compare with other users

Go to other users' profile and look what they attended. A highlighted artist means that both you and the other user attended a concert of this artist. If a concert is highlighted, you even attended the very same concert!

Have fun with the new stuff, digg your stats, stumble them, Show them to your friends and - most importantly - tell us what you think about it!

PS: also digg and stumble this entry to spread the news ;-) 

Now supporting Facebook connect!

News from the feature department: setlist.fm is now supporting Facebook connect!

1. What is Facebook connect and what's my benefit?

If you've got a Facebook account, you can use your facebook email address and your facebook password to log into setlist.fm. Then your friends on facebook can see in their feed whenever you

• added a setlist, 
• edited a setlist, 
• left a comment and 
• more to come.

Of course you can choose which data to publish in your feed. And, needless to say: don't worry we won't save any of your personal data! For more details, take a look at the Facebook connect entry on Facebook's blog.

2. How to connect

2.1. Existing Users

Just sign in with your setlist.fm username/mailaddress and password, hit the connect button in the top bar and fill in your facebook credentials.

2.2. New Users

If you don't want to have a dedicated setlist.fm account and just want to use the fancy feed stuff, just hit the connect button and provide your facebook credentials.

If you've got problems connecting your facebook account, don't hesitate to contact us! And if you like setlist.fm - why not become a fan of the application? You can also discuss about setlist.fm-facebook features there. 

MIA. in concert

After the relaxing but concertless holidays, the live performances are finally back - even in rural areas. One of the first bands coming back on stage in Austria was the very successful german band MIA. consisting of Bob (B), Gunnar (D), Ingo (G, KB), Andy (G) and Mieze (V). 

As part of their "Willkommen im Club" (=~ Join the Club) tour they started the 2009 leg in Hohenems/Austria. The band obviously had a lot of fun performing as they broke the 2 hours threshold - they played 23 songs including 3 encore sets. Another highlight of the show was when vocalist Mieze asked a fan (named "Heidi" - very fitting for a concert in the alps isn't it?) to join her on stage to dance the Viennese waltz, the most typical Austrian dance, with her.

Here's the setlist:

• MIA. setlist January 9, Hohenems, Austria

Another great soundevent gig. Check out soundevent.at for more gigs in the Western Austrian/Eastern Swiss/South German area!

Photo by partypeople.at