gigulate – blog

Hello folks!

I would like to introduce our brand-new release, Gigulate Widgets.

With Widgets we’ve tried to make it super simple for anyone to take music news or gigs and make a super simple Flash widget to embed into pretty much anything.

So whether you want a widget showing the latest Vampire Weekend news or the most important gigs in your area, for example: London, it’s super easy. What’s more, Gigulate’s widgets are fully customisable and super-smart.

(You’ll notice that I’ve dropped an example Nine Inch Nails news widget into the page just to give you a taster)

Also, you may recently have noticed the look and feel of Gigulate gradually changing. That’s because we’ve been updating the design. It’s Gigulate 1.6 – part of our ongoing process to improve and tweak the experience.

We’d love your feedback on both the new design, and our new widgets. Try them out for yourself in the new Gigulate Widgets section.

Pip pip!

John.

A Happy New Year then. It’s cold in London.

After a season of excess, we’re all making resolutions: eat-less/eat-more drink-less/drink more, go to more concerts/go to better gigs, discover new music/rediscover old bands.

Here at Gigulate we’ve taken a quiet (read:poor) Christmas to get everything in order, we have elected to skip the hedonism and debauchery for a few weeks to start the detox early, fix up the Gigulator’s innards and make it super-reliable for the volume of juicy information it’s going to be sifting and sorting. Scouring all the world’s music news, blogs and local concert listings requires a fair old amount of power, and that’s before the Gigulator has even started to sort it meaningfully, so we knew we’d need some serious power to prevent a fail whale.

So that’s just what we’re going to promise in 2009, if you’ll bear with us for a few weeks <perhaps take this valuable time to enthuse to close friends and relatives about what the Gigulator is going to provide for you, every minute of the day <ahem>). Here’s a summary for the uninitiated:

1. The fastest meaningful snapshot of the music world with relevant, valuable concert listings in your area. So you can get up to speed on the music scene, or find gigs everybody is talking about in a few seconds.

2. An archive for every Artist and music source that matters, from across the web. What are they doing? Where are they? Where are they playing next? Who are they playing with? Who is discussing them?

3. Something you can rely on. Gigulate isn’t designed to replace your favourite music website. But it’ll always be here – churning through, ready for you to visit first in order to make subsequent visits to other places more valuable.

4. Informed and informative. Gigulate has been developed by passionate music fans, experienced journalists and industry experts to be an independent, unbiased experience built on the coolest web technology.

Oh, there’s much much more than that. We’ll be in touch soon.

Become a fan at Facebook, or drop our RSS into your favourite reader to stay up to date. We’ve a group going too, and we’re working on Twitter if you’re really keen or a bit of a Twit.  Wish us luck.

xx

(Lykke Li by ToastyKen used under CreativeCommons)

News. News. News. What’s that all about?

It’s how we keep in touch with our artists. All of us know that we enjoy keeping up to date with information about our favourite artists just as much as we need to discover new ones. That’s what Gigulate is all about. We’re obsessed with all kinds of music information. You’ll be able to find out what your artists have been up to, and News is just the start of it. The Gigulator’s going to start crunching up all sorts of juicy snax that will make sure you’re more informed about your artists than you’ve ever been before.

We’re putting some extra effort in to make sure everything works really smart before we let the riff-raff in. We’ve decided to invest in some super-clever technology that will give us the chance to really blow each other’s mind in 2009. Do keep us posted with things we can fix and keep up the great ideas – it won’t be long, now.

Until then, here’s five stories from the last week that we discovered first on Gigulate.

Coldplay, Chris Martin hints at imminent retirement – Contactmusic

Sheikh felt ‘betrayed’ by Michael Jackson – Yahoo Music UK

Lykke Li announces brand new American tour dates – Pitchfork

Jimi Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell found dead – NME

Kanye West denies assaulting photographer – People

More updates from us, soon.

xx

(Radiohead in Barcelona by Alterna2, used under CreativeCommons)

Bit of a music industry post. We’ll generally to stick to commentary related directly to Gigulate here, I’m sure John or Duncan are planning to drops some bits in about the way it works or how the design is shaping up to give you more of an idea of how it’s coming together (we’re just days away from our first public beta) now and there’s a couple of things to tidy up – response times are an issue when we’re doing so much computation and we’ve a lot of the experience we still want to build, but it’s all built around the Gigulator and that’s running along just fine – for a six-week old. So we’ll roll it out and start collecting your thoughts on it.

Here’s Gigulate on The Guardian Tech Weekly podcast this week – do listen.

But on to other matters… (more…)

We’ve been sat on this for a little while, not too long.  Weeks, not months.  Sorry.  It’s come from a few little discoveries we’ve all had working with music over the last few years: Namely, that good quality music information is hard to find, and that you’d be silly to rely on one place for all of it.   In the past, I’ve often found myself listlessly sifting through various websites on the lookout for the latest, most useful information on a band I have just been listening to, or loved and missed. Of course – I eventually found it – but I’ve never been sure who was the most reliable source. Who got to the story first? Who has the best access to the information? And which site merely read the story, copied it and rewrote it?

Likewise, Music fans like us rely on music information a fair bit: to tell you when a band announces a tour, a new record, to tell each other what we think of it, or even just to find out what artists are up to. Most importantly (and this is the irritating bit) there’s nowhere to go to find out who the most talked about bands of the moment are and just find a way to see them play – we’re all agreed that it’s the only way to know if they’re any good.

Gigulate has been designed with the help of music journalists and writers to quickly solve that little conundrum. Our mighty wizards are almost done creating a machine able to find out who’s talking about bands you love, and who everybody is talking about that perhaps you don’t know. In the shortest space of time, you’ll be able to get right up to speed.

All of this information will help you decipher music without wading through endless pages, the Gigulator is designed to work out who the most authoritative sources are, and bubble up the best stories with Gigs for every band available right next to them so that you can book tickets to the most talked about bands easily.   This very second, it’s sat in the corner of our tiny bedsit, sifting through the mass, and learning as it goes.   Less time spent = more time for fun.

More on how it will work soon,

xx