Where’s The Nearest Live Gig? Gigbloc App Has Just The Heat Map For You

The Velvet Underground. The Talking Heads. Sonic Youth. These are iconic New York bands of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that got their start playing memorable gigs in small clubs.

Digable Planets. TV on The Radio. Parquet Courts. These bands represent a sliver of brilliant Brooklyn bands of the 1990s, 2000s, and right here and now. And of course, they also got their start playing small clubs all over the county of Kings.

So what new bands are up next? And how can you find them?

London-based Gigbloc has created an app can help you find the up-and-comers, your favorites, and even give the band a listen before you head out to see them live.

Founders Richard Tolley and Alex Jefferies have built a website-based  “heatmap” of both New York and London-based venues, as first reported by Time Out New York.

The mobile app allows you to view venues and music genres that will be playing on a particular date during the week. In addition, the app works in tandem with the Soundcloud audio platform so that you can sample a song by a band playing near you or anywhere else in the city.

In the example above, the band Five of the Eyes played on March 19 at The Rock Shop (249 4th Avenue near Carroll Street). Their song “Isabella” is available to listen to via Soundcloud.

We had a chance to speak with co-founder Richard Tolley from his London office to find out about the development of Gigbloc, and their future plans for the app.

Park Slope Stoop:  What interested you about wanting to create the Gigbloc app? Do you have a music background? Are you a huge music fan yourself?

Richard Tolly: Yeah, so I’ve always gone to a lot of gigs, but because I live in London going to the big band gigs means you have to buy tickets for gigs pretty much as soon as they come on sale, even for smaller/medium sized bands.

They also play in very large venues which lack the personal touch which you can get in small venues. As a result I always try to go see smaller, undiscovered bands at local venues with small crowds for a better experience, but it’s a right pain to actually discover those kind of gigs.

You can get gig listings for all the venues you know about, then copy/paste band names into Soundcloud/Spotify/YouTube and give them a listen, but its time consuming, and also means you don’t really discover new venues organically unless you’re following some bands around.

So I wanted to make a system to bring it all together — small venues, marked on a map, which lets you listen to everything that’s playing around you so you can passively listen to what’s going on and decide if you want to go to a gig.

My co-founder, Alex [Jefferies], has a background in music tech/production, and collectively we have a few friends who are in various bands so we’re both pretty familiar with how the circuit works for bands that are starting out.

Since you’re based in London, how are you getting to know the music that is happening in New York?

We’re using Songkick’s API for the source for the upcoming gigs in each city, and then we try and tie the data from there into Soundcloud and Google Maps to present what’s happening in a nice easy to consume way.

We’re trying to only show venues with a capacity below a certain size as it’s very much a “this week” kind of deal, but we’re still working on that. Ideally we’d know what gigs still have tickets available at the door but we haven’t found a good data source for that yet.

Is there a way that music fans and musicians can “crowdsource” so we can suggest adding more venues to the app?

Yeah we’re creating a system right now where bands can sign up and make sure their music/events are on the system, and ditto with the venues. There’s just two of us though so its going to take a bit of time, and we’re also busy adding features to the user facing app itself.

[Last week] we pushed out genre filtering on the map, and right now we’re working on a list view for the whole week so you can just listen to all the Indie gigs which are on over the coming week in New York for instance. After that we’ll try and finish up our work on a system for bands and venues! We’ve had a bunch of emails from bands and venues asking us for this so it’s right at the top of the list after we’re done adding features for music discovery.

Gigbloc is available for viewing via both website or app. You can download the app for iPhones, Androids, and can be found on Google Play.