Problem

Over the past few years, I’ve been using Resident Advisor’s event page to find live music in NYC. While I’ve had fairly decent success finding live music that I like, it can be daunting finding them to begin with. On any given Friday there can be 40+ shows in NYC, where each show could have 8+ artists. If I wanted to figure out which show I’d most likely enjoy on that night, I’d have to look up 320 artist music pages, then listen to a few of their songs or mixes.

This led me to frame the problem of finding live music in a different way: If I only had 1 hour in my day to decide on which live music events I’d enjoy most, what would be the easiest way to accomplish this?

Solution

The best way to quickly sample music events is not through multi-page event listings, but through a curated playlist of the artists playing those events. The benefit of hearing the artists on the event list over reading the setlist is that my ears are generally more available throughout the day than my eyes. In other words, while working I can listen to music or a podcast, but can’t read a book or article.

I built an automated system called ra-preview which maintains this curated playlist in Spotify. It allows the listener to get a sampling of artists that are playing in NYC within the next two weeks. If you like the artist you’re listening to, you can navigate to the artist’s profile page in Spotify and purchase a ticket to one of their upcoming shows.

Technical Overview

To build the ra-preview playlist, I stitch together data from Resident Advisor’s API and Spotify’s API. From a very high-level, the process for building the playlist is:

1. First, query Resident Advisor’s GraphQL API to get all event listings happening in NYC over the next 2 weeks. The event list data (generally) has a list of artist names.
2. Next, search Spotify’s API for the top song from every artist in the list.
3. Then, update the playlist with a list of each artist’s top song.

This process will automatically run once a day, ensuring the playlist is always up to date.

Afterthoughts

So far while using this playlist I’ve found a bunch of new artists that I really like. I’ve actually found so many that I tend to have a glut of show options.

In the future, I’d like to extend this idea to:

1. Create a way to link the song to the Resident Advisor event listing so that a listener can more seamlessly purchase a ticket.
2. Create playlists for the cities that I’m travelling to in the future. That way I can figure out which shows I’d like to attend before I arrive.
3. Create a single playlist that samples events from every single region in the world. I’d use that playlist to find an artist that I really like, then plan a vacation around seeing them no matter where in the world they’re playing.

Eventually Resident Advisor or Spotify could build something like this. In the meantime, I’ll be maintaining my vision of this idea.