Spring is just around the corner, which, for live music fans, means resuming the trudge through blogs, sites and social media posts in search of the elusive new quality band.
That schedule-centric slog, however, may officially be played out.
NextWeeksPlaylist.com now offers New Yorkers the ability to create a playlist based on upcoming live shows around the city. Spotify log-in credentials are required, but once you’ve signed in, the website allows you to select up to 570 venues in New York City, then generates a Spotify playlist featuring bands playing those venues the following week. The playlist automatically updates each week with the following week’s headliners. Users can also opt to select from genres if they are not familiar with city venues.
In addition to the playlist, users receive a weekly email with links to tickets for bands that strike their fancy.
Astoria-based software developer Blake Sawyer created the passion project after growing tired himself of scouring the web for new local artists.
"I love doing stuff with location, what’s going on around you, and I’ve always wanted to do something with music," said Sawyer, 33, who’s lived in the city for four years. "I was chatting with a friend and we thought, why not make a playlist of bands that are coming to the city?"
When the site first went live in late 2017, it scraped show information from a host of individual websites. But the current version of NextWeeksPlaylist.com uses SeatGeek’s API, which limits results to tickets available on SeatGeek.
"I feel like I made a little bit of a sacrifice there. SeatGeek has kind of the known venues and all the known music, whereas I was trying to kind of (focus on) what’s the underground, what are the smaller venues," Sawyer said. "But it let me grow to more cities and be more broad."
Sawyer said he is currently exploring options to include more music services, such as Apple Music and YouTube. And while the site offers the free service for dozens of cities, he said the lion’s share of traffic comes from New York City.
