Tourfilter DJ Night Tonight, Site Improvements Continue

Not all technology startups are out for big money. Tourfilter began as an idea to develop a tool so the founder, Chris Marstall, so he wouldn't miss his favorite bands when they were in town. Unlike some of the other sites like Pollstar or Tourb.us, Tourfilter doesn't track bands from their tour calendars but off of the venues in a specific area. Bostonist has been on board from early on, it's almost a year old (turning 1 on April 1), and the site has seen a fair amount of media attention from the likes of the Boston Globe, Metro, and recently both Wired and Rolling Stone. Tonight the site takes center stage at River Gods in Cambridge where Marstall will DJ the evening using all bands tracked in Tourfilter.

Tourfilter doesn't follow the traditional model of a startup. There's no venture capital funding the site – it's using the Craigslist model: a useful tool for the people. On a recent Thursday night Bostonist joined Tourfilter founder Chris Marstall and a rogue team of friends to help make all 14,000+ bands track in the 24 cities Tourfilter is set up to scan. It was a barn raising for the modern era. The backend software works its magic, but needs a little human help to learn what it should be looking for to create the listing accuracy that makes the site a helpful tool. The gathering was just as friendly as the emails that hit our inbox from time to time, "Hi, looks like Fluttr Effect is coming to Paradise Rock Club on June 23!" with a link and a p.s. that you can reply to the notification and your reply to the email will actually be read by a real person (Marstall). After a quick explanation and two hours of trolling through lists of shows a dozen or so cities were now ready to make sure that residents wouldn't miss a show.

The following day we took a check of a couple of the cities from the night before and the listings had exploded. Bands tracked in other cites were now showing up across the board, creating a nationwide community of Tourfilter trackers. Some cool features that have been added to the site since it began include integration with Hype Machine and other streaming music sites so users can listen to the bands they like, the Tourfilter Mixtape using Hype Machine to pull tracks from artists who have upcoming shows in the city, an RSS fee so you can drop your personalized music agenda onto your blogs sidebar (or Google/MyAol/Yahoo/etc. front page), universal search, a tool for discussion about a show, and the SMS tool: send the text "tonight" to msgme and get back a list of all the shows being tracked in Tourfiliter for your city.

Tonight Chris Marstall will take Tourfilter headquarters out of his apartment and over to River Gods in Cambridge for Tourfilter DJ Night. Marstall will be spinning tunes from bands tracked in Tourfilter with upcoming shows in the area. He'll have some calendar flyers of upcoming shows – so when you hear a tune you like you'll know when they'll be playing. We might suggest you just sign up for Tourfilter and track the band, it'll make sure your email inbox gets hit when their next show is announced and when you browse over to Tourfilter next it will be sitting in the calendar.

Image from the Tourfilter barn raising at Chris Marstall's house. Marstall (shaved head, glasses) in center pointing out to friends and family how they're going to help make Tourfilter better.