5 ms·

Show HN: Festival Hunt – Discover, filter and sort music festivals

62 points by craze3 8y ago

peterownen2 8y ago
I like it. Since when are you live and which features do you plan next?
bflesch 8y ago
I like the concept, and great CSS animation for the listings!
- aloisdg 8y ago
  I miss Metro Design
h0h0h0h0111 8y ago
I've been toying with a similar idea for Europe, cool to see there are others. Looks pretty nice for a first iteration. UI needs a little more tidying and some images (e.g. the festival lineup image on https://festivalhunt.com/ultra https://festivalhunt.com/ultra) lose their aspect ratio. How much of this did you manually input, and how much is scraped? Keep up the good work!
zeitg3ist 8y ago
It would be nice to be able to filter by continent/country. Not living in the US, 90% of the festivals listed on the website are irrelevant to me.
conflagration 8y ago
Nice service to get an initial overview. I am a regular festival-goer, but I prefer to go to more "underground"-ish festival (for the lack of a better word). Those festivals don't necessarily want to be easily discoverable (i.e. the Fusion festival in Germany goes great lengths to suppress the hype around it). For me the discoverability problem is another one: In recent years, I am listening to so many new bands and musicians, that I am totally loosing track of their names. It occurred to me more than one time, that someone was talking about a band, whose name I thought I never heard before, to later find out that they did a song or album, that I actually listened a lot. This also goes for festivals: I walk around at a festival and hear a familiar song playing somewhere and realize, that there is a band playing that I enjoy a lot, but whose name I didn't remember at all. I know other people have this problem too and I assume this is a by-product of the UX of streaming music (when you have to put a CD or vinyl on every time you want to listen to a band, ofc you learn the names much faster). So what I actually need is a service, where I can paste a link to a festival website, which the service scrapes and does entity recognition on. Then the resulting list of bands should be matched against my Spotify history and tell me the matches (either because I actually listened to the bands, or by some means of collaborative filtering). I am thinking about doing this in script form for this years Fusion festival, but would also like to know, if more people are interested in a service like this.
- gripfx 8y ago
  Songkick does exactly this. Links with various music and social media accounts, then matches concerts and festivals in areas that you specify. Whenever a concert is announced by an artist I listen to in a city I have selected, I get an email with details on where and when tickets are on sale.
  - conflagration 8y ago
    Thanks for mentioning Songkick, I just registered there and looks like a good service overall. Reminds me of some of the last.fm functionality I was using in the past for that matter. What its still missing, is support for the functionality I described for festivals. Yes, they match festivals for you, but they don't tell you, which bands you should see there. Also they would have to update their database pretty often to i.e. work for Fusion festival, which announces the line-up only a few days prior to the festival, or to account for additions to/changes in festival line-ups.
    - gripfx 8y ago
      IIRC bands that you track are in bold on an events page. No predictions on who you should see though, that's probably out of their wheelhouse. I do think they have some kind of API acces to ticketing sites though because more than once the emails I get had working links to artist presale that I could use. Another app that I use is Dice. Not sure what the avaibility is outside of the UK but I have got (relevant) suggested events based on other tickets I bought from them.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 8y ago
  > (when you have to put a CD or vinyl on every time you want to listen to a band, ofc you learn the names much faster). "Back in the day", I was getting new music every Tues/Thursday. It always amazed me how quickly I could catalog artist/trackname/what it sounded like in my brain. Later, if I heard another DJ play that track, I could recall the artist/track/cover art/record label info very quickly. It's kind of like any other skill really, when you do it all day every day, it's easy for you. Stop doing it for awhile, and the skill diminishes. I think it's also another example of that physical/tactile interaction with learning. Reading the info on the record, associating the visual of the cover, associating the sound of the track all while physically touching the vinyl/CD really embeds the data in the brain.
_nowbotica 8y ago
Your content would be more useful to a European audience if you added a a less generic electric dance music category, Techno, House and Drum and Bass would a be great addition. Otherwise, good work, useful thing.
jlgosse 8y ago
This is amazing, and something I have been looking for for a long time. One problem though, at least EDC, Govenor's Ball and Bonnaroo dates all seem to be wrong
cr1895 8y ago
It's very light on festivals outside of America. I didn't notice a single Dutch one. There are dozens and dozens, and that's just one country.
- kurjam 8y ago
  Yeah, from now until end of December there's just one listing for a metal festival in Europe. I'm not really expecting to see all the small ones but would be nice to have the major ones at least. Site looks nice and it's kind of comfortable to skim over the stuff and filter a bit. I'm not really a huge fan of the genre icons, some of them don't really make sense for me and look a bit like placeholders imho. Other than that, good job and good luck.
- nickthemagicman 8y ago
  This needs to be a github or something where this information can be outsourced and then fetched in json format and displayed on this site.
- dokem 8y ago
  Dozens!
deanclatworthy 8y ago
This is great. I had this exact same idea and half-coded it about 7 years ago (called it festmap). I wanted to also index the artists, but gave up when I realised how difficult it was to scrape. Nice job, it's clear, and easy to use.
blakesterz 8y ago
What's running the backend? Is it open source?
Cub3 8y ago
Date formatting is backwards for a UK audience might be worth using the browsers locale
motivated_gear 8y ago
Backend seems down for me. Also the second filter date picker is positioned so its off my screen (23" standard monitor). Cool concept though and it seemed to work for others judging from the other HN comments
raspypy 8y ago
https://www.musicfestivalwizard.com https://www.musicfestivalwizard.com This one suits me nice. Relevant info through adequate filtering.
taxidump 8y ago
It would be nice to filter out/in Live Nation, large corp. ect. events. I personally like the idie fests. Great job!
dzsofa 8y ago
I just have a tiny comment: you seem to have quite a few console logs left in the code (for debugging reasosns perhaps?), but it would look nicer if you could remove them. :)
- dylan604 8y ago
  I've wondered about this myself. There are times when I debug with console.log/.error during the dev cycle with potentially sensitive data that I would definitely remove before deploying. There are other times when I have output that just kind of lets me know where things are during execution where I've had the internal discussion of leaving them in or not. I usually lean on removing them all. However, I've had the console open on several large sites, and they are constantly filing up the console with output. It seems like it is mainly the 3rd-party libraries that sites include. Even Amazon's home page outputs content to the console. <sidebar> However, it is oddly satisfying for me to see the console full of warnings from Firefox of 'Request to access cookie was blocked' or 'Loading failed for the <script> with source googleadservices or doubleclick' type of messages.
s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
ImagineFest is missing (EDM camping festival in Georgia)
dylanz 8y ago
Where does the data come from, and, why isn't Dirtybird Campout on the list?
majortennis 8y ago
I know we can use OCR but just thinking about how festival lineups are often an image with a crazy font for different bands and yeah the exclusivity or underground elements for this hurts my head. I shall investigate the alt text for festival lineup images
tdhz77 8y ago
Can't find fyre festival.
marssaxman 8y ago
Seems odd to include Burning Man - if you go there expecting it to be a music festival like the rest of these, you're likely to have a bad time. I mean, yes, it does so happen that a lot of people bring mini-festivals to share as art projects, but that's not what the event itself is about.
stevehiehn 8y ago
I would legitimately use this. I just moved to Vancouver, Canada & had to do some serious Reddit research to find all the small/midsize fests. Is it crowd-sourced data?
pmohun 8y ago
The very first result, Coachella, is listed as $300. Having attended multiple times (and going again in 3 days), I can assure you that the actual cost is much higher. It makes me skeptical of the rest of the information displayed for festivals I am less familiar with.
dawhizkid 8y ago
I know new social networks are so 2010, but I honestly can’t believe there isn’t a mainstream social app that shows popular upcoming live events (concerts, festivals, events , etc) near you or elsewhere with an RSVP function to see who is going (and thus see events that are trending or popular and upcoming). Eventbrite and Facebook sort of do this but neither have event features that are really optimized for this IMO. Would definitely use that all the time.
- minimalist 8y ago
  Last.fm does this and has existed since the early 2000s. It had such a nice, active community in the audioscrobbler days. The community is a ghost of its former self after the sell-out to CBS, departure of the founders, redesigns that were reviled by the community, and advent of spotify, which slowly implemented many of the features that made last.fm useful.

62 points by craze3 8y ago

peterownen2 8y ago

I like it. Since when are you live and which features do you plan next?

bflesch 8y ago

I like the concept, and great CSS animation for the listings!

aloisdg 8y ago
I miss Metro Design

h0h0h0h0111 8y ago

I've been toying with a similar idea for Europe, cool to see there are others. Looks pretty nice for a first iteration. UI needs a little more tidying and some images (e.g. the festival lineup image on https://festivalhunt.com/ultra https://festivalhunt.com/ultra) lose their aspect ratio. How much of this did you manually input, and how much is scraped? Keep up the good work!

zeitg3ist 8y ago

It would be nice to be able to filter by continent/country. Not living in the US, 90% of the festivals listed on the website are irrelevant to me.

conflagration 8y ago

Nice service to get an initial overview. I am a regular festival-goer, but I prefer to go to more "underground"-ish festival (for the lack of a better word). Those festivals don't necessarily want to be easily discoverable (i.e. the Fusion festival in Germany goes great lengths to suppress the hype around it). For me the discoverability problem is another one: In recent years, I am listening to so many new bands and musicians, that I am totally loosing track of their names. It occurred to me more than one time, that someone was talking about a band, whose name I thought I never heard before, to later find out that they did a song or album, that I actually listened a lot. This also goes for festivals: I walk around at a festival and hear a familiar song playing somewhere and realize, that there is a band playing that I enjoy a lot, but whose name I didn't remember at all. I know other people have this problem too and I assume this is a by-product of the UX of streaming music (when you have to put a CD or vinyl on every time you want to listen to a band, ofc you learn the names much faster). So what I actually need is a service, where I can paste a link to a festival website, which the service scrapes and does entity recognition on. Then the resulting list of bands should be matched against my Spotify history and tell me the matches (either because I actually listened to the bands, or by some means of collaborative filtering). I am thinking about doing this in script form for this years Fusion festival, but would also like to know, if more people are interested in a service like this.

gripfx 8y ago
Songkick does exactly this. Links with various music and social media accounts, then matches concerts and festivals in areas that you specify. Whenever a concert is announced by an artist I listen to in a city I have selected, I get an email with details on where and when tickets are on sale.
- conflagration 8y ago
  Thanks for mentioning Songkick, I just registered there and looks like a good service overall. Reminds me of some of the last.fm functionality I was using in the past for that matter. What its still missing, is support for the functionality I described for festivals. Yes, they match festivals for you, but they don't tell you, which bands you should see there. Also they would have to update their database pretty often to i.e. work for Fusion festival, which announces the line-up only a few days prior to the festival, or to account for additions to/changes in festival line-ups.
  - gripfx 8y ago
    IIRC bands that you track are in bold on an events page. No predictions on who you should see though, that's probably out of their wheelhouse. I do think they have some kind of API acces to ticketing sites though because more than once the emails I get had working links to artist presale that I could use. Another app that I use is Dice. Not sure what the avaibility is outside of the UK but I have got (relevant) suggested events based on other tickets I bought from them.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 8y ago
> (when you have to put a CD or vinyl on every time you want to listen to a band, ofc you learn the names much faster). "Back in the day", I was getting new music every Tues/Thursday. It always amazed me how quickly I could catalog artist/trackname/what it sounded like in my brain. Later, if I heard another DJ play that track, I could recall the artist/track/cover art/record label info very quickly. It's kind of like any other skill really, when you do it all day every day, it's easy for you. Stop doing it for awhile, and the skill diminishes. I think it's also another example of that physical/tactile interaction with learning. Reading the info on the record, associating the visual of the cover, associating the sound of the track all while physically touching the vinyl/CD really embeds the data in the brain.

_nowbotica 8y ago

Your content would be more useful to a European audience if you added a a less generic electric dance music category, Techno, House and Drum and Bass would a be great addition. Otherwise, good work, useful thing.

jlgosse 8y ago

This is amazing, and something I have been looking for for a long time. One problem though, at least EDC, Govenor's Ball and Bonnaroo dates all seem to be wrong

cr1895 8y ago

It's very light on festivals outside of America. I didn't notice a single Dutch one. There are dozens and dozens, and that's just one country.

kurjam 8y ago
Yeah, from now until end of December there's just one listing for a metal festival in Europe. I'm not really expecting to see all the small ones but would be nice to have the major ones at least. Site looks nice and it's kind of comfortable to skim over the stuff and filter a bit. I'm not really a huge fan of the genre icons, some of them don't really make sense for me and look a bit like placeholders imho. Other than that, good job and good luck.
nickthemagicman 8y ago
This needs to be a github or something where this information can be outsourced and then fetched in json format and displayed on this site.
dokem 8y ago
Dozens!

deanclatworthy 8y ago

This is great. I had this exact same idea and half-coded it about 7 years ago (called it festmap). I wanted to also index the artists, but gave up when I realised how difficult it was to scrape. Nice job, it's clear, and easy to use.

blakesterz 8y ago

What's running the backend? Is it open source?

Cub3 8y ago

Date formatting is backwards for a UK audience might be worth using the browsers locale

motivated_gear 8y ago

Backend seems down for me. Also the second filter date picker is positioned so its off my screen (23" standard monitor). Cool concept though and it seemed to work for others judging from the other HN comments

raspypy 8y ago

https://www.musicfestivalwizard.com https://www.musicfestivalwizard.com This one suits me nice. Relevant info through adequate filtering.

taxidump 8y ago

It would be nice to filter out/in Live Nation, large corp. ect. events. I personally like the idie fests. Great job!

dzsofa 8y ago

I just have a tiny comment: you seem to have quite a few console logs left in the code (for debugging reasosns perhaps?), but it would look nicer if you could remove them. :)

dylan604 8y ago
I've wondered about this myself. There are times when I debug with console.log/.error during the dev cycle with potentially sensitive data that I would definitely remove before deploying. There are other times when I have output that just kind of lets me know where things are during execution where I've had the internal discussion of leaving them in or not. I usually lean on removing them all. However, I've had the console open on several large sites, and they are constantly filing up the console with output. It seems like it is mainly the 3rd-party libraries that sites include. Even Amazon's home page outputs content to the console. <sidebar> However, it is oddly satisfying for me to see the console full of warnings from Firefox of 'Request to access cookie was blocked' or 'Loading failed for the <script> with source googleadservices or doubleclick' type of messages.

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago

ImagineFest is missing (EDM camping festival in Georgia)

dylanz 8y ago

Where does the data come from, and, why isn't Dirtybird Campout on the list?

majortennis 8y ago

I know we can use OCR but just thinking about how festival lineups are often an image with a crazy font for different bands and yeah the exclusivity or underground elements for this hurts my head. I shall investigate the alt text for festival lineup images

tdhz77 8y ago

Can't find fyre festival.

marssaxman 8y ago

Seems odd to include Burning Man - if you go there expecting it to be a music festival like the rest of these, you're likely to have a bad time. I mean, yes, it does so happen that a lot of people bring mini-festivals to share as art projects, but that's not what the event itself is about.

stevehiehn 8y ago

I would legitimately use this. I just moved to Vancouver, Canada & had to do some serious Reddit research to find all the small/midsize fests. Is it crowd-sourced data?

pmohun 8y ago

The very first result, Coachella, is listed as $300. Having attended multiple times (and going again in 3 days), I can assure you that the actual cost is much higher. It makes me skeptical of the rest of the information displayed for festivals I am less familiar with.

dawhizkid 8y ago

I know new social networks are so 2010, but I honestly can’t believe there isn’t a mainstream social app that shows popular upcoming live events (concerts, festivals, events , etc) near you or elsewhere with an RSVP function to see who is going (and thus see events that are trending or popular and upcoming). Eventbrite and Facebook sort of do this but neither have event features that are really optimized for this IMO. Would definitely use that all the time.

minimalist 8y ago
Last.fm does this and has existed since the early 2000s. It had such a nice, active community in the audioscrobbler days. The community is a ghost of its former self after the sell-out to CBS, departure of the founders, redesigns that were reviled by the community, and advent of spotify, which slowly implemented many of the features that made last.fm useful.