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