Facebook Music will essentially be a way for musicians (or their labels) to create their own fan pages just like on MySpace, each with a separate sub-domain within Facebook. Facebook members will be able to join any artist’s network as a “fan.” This will be similar to joining a group, but centered around music. Members will be able to listen to streamed songs, watch videos, add music to their own pages, find out about upcoming tours, and meet other fans. Facebook is also supposedly working on sales widgets for these pages (to be introduced at a later date) so that artists can sell downloads directly through Facebook.
It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against MySpace, and if bands will move their web presence from MySpace to Facebook. Many bands don’t even have their own website these days, and prefer to just use their MySpace page as their “homepage”. This is really silly because you’re essentially giving MySpace all of your traffic, and making your fans look at all those banner ads.
As Christopher Penn said at Podcamp this weekend, you don’t want to build your house at the intersection of major highways, but you want to post billboards to direct traffic to your own home on the web. In other words, use these sites to promote your own website, but don’t give all of your content to them.
Ever since Facebook opened up it’s platform up to developers, we’ve seen a plethora of interesting apps created for Facebook. This was a brilliant move on the part of Facebook, because it means there is now a way for 3rd party developers to tap into a huge existing social network, one that is growing at a phenomenal rate:
350,000 new users per day
50 million users
# of users double every 6 months
average person spends 21.5 min on the site
65% come back the next day
It will be interesting to see what happens with Google’s OpenSocial which launches tomorrow. Apparently, it provides a common set of APIs for accessing social networking data.
If I’m building a social networking app for musicians/bands today, I don’t think I necessarily want to be tied to one particular platform which may go out-of-style tomorrow. Can anyone say Friendster?
As mentioned in my last post building a live music calendar, I’m disappointed that the websites that list jazz events in Boston don’t offer the data as an RSS or iCal feed. One example of this is the WGBH Jazz Calendar, which has probably the most comprehensive listing of jazz events in the Boston area.
In my talk about Plone4Artists at EuroPython 2005, I mentioned a tool called Scrape ‘n’ Feed, which will scrape a website and generate an RSS feed. Well, it’s been a year since I first discovered this tool, and now I’m revisiting it to see if I can make it work. Here is my first foray into this scraping business.
Once I installed these two packages, I downloaded the ScrapeNFeed.py script and created the following file ‘getwgbhfeeds.py’:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import BeautifulSoup
from PyRSS2Gen import RSSItem, Guid
import ScrapeNFeed
class WGBHFeed(ScrapeNFeed.ScrapedFeed):
def HTML2RSS(self, headers, body):
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(body)
eventTable = soup.firstText('Sort By:').findParent('table')
tds = eventTable.fetch('td',{'class':['searchres', 'searchres_off']})
items = []
for item in tds:
link = item.findNext(’b')
eventLink = self.baseURL + link.a['href']
if not self.hasSeen(eventLink):
eventTitle = item.a.string
eventDate = item.contents[0].strip()
eventLocation = item.contents[5].strip()
items.append(RSSItem(title=eventTitle + ‘(’ + eventDate + ‘)’,
description=eventLocation,
link=eventLink))
self.addRSSItems(items)
WGBHFeed.load(”WGBH Concerts”,
‘http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wgbh/events.eventsmain?
action=showCategoryListing&newSearch=true&categorySearch=5596′,
“See all the jazz concerts posted to the WGBH calendar”,
‘wgbh.xml’,
‘wgbh.pickle’,
managingEditor=’name@domain.com (First Last)’)
Run the script with ./getwgbhfeeds.py and it will output a file wgbh.xml , which is in the RSS 2.0 format. You can then open this file using your RSS reader of choice, and view all the Boston jazz events.
Once thing that I noticed is that some of the items in the list have an extra <br /> which means the title doesn’t get read in correctly. I’ll have to find a way to ignore the <br /> which I sure will be fairly simple with BeautifulSoup.
What’s next
At the OPMLCamp a few weeks ago, I met Mike Kowalchik, the creator of grazr. After seeing this tool, I immediately thought about how useful it would be for generating a browseable directory of event listings. You simply supply grazr with an OPML file, and it will then display all the RSS feeds and their entries. After I get a couple more event listing sites scraped, I’ll generate the OPML file and try them out with grazr.
While reading from Derek Siver’s O’Reilly blog, I came across Mark Hedlund’s talk Entrepreneuring for Geeks which described how the more technically minded can move into making companies of our own. He started out the talk with a set of proverbs.
The three proverbs that struck close to home for me were:
pay attention to the idea that won’t leave you alone.
build what you know
momentum builds on itself
Pay attention to the idea that won’t leave you alone
Several events have occurred in the past two weeks which have echoed these words in my mind.
During the BarCampBoston I spoke with other geek entrepreneurs about the problem of finding live music, and the guys from tourb.us told me about how they are scraping venue’s sites to get concert listings. They are providing a service that answers a particular need - when is my favorite band coming to town?
This triggered a memory of an exchange I had more than a year ago with trombonist Phil Wilson at the Jazz Journalists Association panel at Schullers Jazz Club. Jon Hammond organized a panel discussion on the topic of Boston as a Launching Pad for a Jazz Career. I asked the panel what kind of online tools or services could be provided to re-ignite the jazz scene in Boston. And Phil said that he would like to see a service that would notify him when a musician was going to be performing.
Then at the last Python meetup, Dan Milstein raved about the python scraping library BeautifulSoup and described how capable it was at scraping baseball scores off a website. I played around with BeautifulSoup awhile ago, but never actually built anything using it.
Scratch an itch
“Build what you know” affirms that the most basic advice of idea generation is to scratch an itch you have yourself. Now I have an itch to scratch. I love going out to hear live music, especially jazz - but there is no single site that aggregates the concert listings. There are several sites I must visit:
MyRootdown Improv Music Calendar is a great site built by graphic designer and improv enthusiast Shawn dos Santo. Shawn is doing a great job of posting events he hears about, but there’s no way for people to post their own gigs
The WGBH Jazz Calendar is good but again, it doesn’t have an RSS/iCal feed so I have to manually visit the site everytime I want to see who’s playing.
Each and every venue has their own concert listing page (Scullers, Regattabar, Wallys, Berklee, Reel Bar, etc.) and of course, none of them have RSS or iCal feeds.
I’m sure there are others that I don’t know about
The basic problem here is that there is a fragmentation of information. Since none of the sites publish their event listings in any sort of structured way (RSS, iCal, hCalendar), it’s tedious to monitor these listings and thus hard to stay on top of what’s going on in the Boston jazz scene.
The “Pull” method
Immediately after hearing Phil’s suggestion, my technical mind started churning as I thought about generating dynamic RSS feeds based on artist or band name, and then using something like Feedblitz to turn those RSS feeds into email notifcations. As much as us geeks would like to think it’s true, the average person still has no idea what an RSS feed is or how to use it. Email is still the lowest common denominator.
But the question still remains how to get the data into a system in the first place. It is not likely one can expect musicians to enter their gig listings themselves. And here is where Beautiful Soup comes in - if I scrape the event listing sites, I can put the data into a system, extract the metadata (band, location, date/time, cost, etc.) and syndicate these concert listings as RSS feeds and subsequently email notifications.
There is even a python script called Scrape ‘n’ Feed which will automatically turn a page scraped with BeautifulSoup into an RSS feed. This is why I love python - there is almost always a library that does exactly what you want. And there is also a python script to convert iCal into RSS.
The “Push” method
Now suppose for a moment that one could get musicians to enter their gigs into some sort of system, and what if you could offer a service, let’s call it GigBlast, which would push their gig information out to a bunch of event listing services: WGBH, eventful.com, upcoming.org, boston.craigslist.org, meetup.com, etc. using the API provided by those services or in the case of WGBH which has no API, use python libraries such as clientform to submit the form.
This would make it easier for musicians to get the word out about their gigs, give fans a tool to be informed when these musicians are performing, and ultimately get more people to go out to hear music which would create more demand for live music. Maybe I’m an idealist to think that it will have such far reaching effects, but even if no one else uses this service, at least I’ll be scratching my itch!
Momentum builds
Stay tuned for more thoughts on publishing events to the web using Apple’s iCal. This will simplify the data entry process even more as musicians can simply add their event info to iCal, and in the background it’s it’s transparently uploaded to their website and automatically pushed out to the event listing services.
I also want to explore the use of microformats, such as hCalendar, which I think have a better chance of being adopted among musicians, venues and bloggers since it is fairly easy to implement - just a few changes to the HTML template. Pages formatted with hCalendar are a breeze to scrape using Technorati’s events feed service and can be searched using Technorati’s experimental Event Search tool.
Well, after many days of sideways rain, the sun has finally come out in Boston, so I’m going for a jog in the Fens.
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