Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

I'm excited to be able to go to SXSW this year (I'm giving a talk on music recommendation). I'm especially looking forward to seeing and hearing some of the thousand-plus musicians and bands that will be playing this year at the festival. This week, the SXSW organizers posted the official list of 2009 artists with 1200 or so bands with links to their home pages. Here's the head of the list:

I found the list incredibly daunting - I had not heard of most of the artists - how would I figure out which ones I wanted to see? I could imagine me sitting in a hotel room all week in Austin paralyzed by the many options.

I decided to deal with this problem directly - I just needed to add some context to this list - some photos, a little bio, some social tags, links to music and videos. If I had all that I could more easily pick the bands that I wanted to see. And so that's what I did. Using Last.fm's and Youtube's web services, I've created my own version of the SXSW Artist catalog that fills in all of the missing context. With the catalog, I can browse the artists alphabetically, by popularity and by tag. Here's an example:

Now, with the catalog, I can, for instance, find all of the bands that have been tagged with "math rock" (there are currently 14 of them), audition them, look at their videos and decide which ones I want to see (Ecstatic Sunshine looks interesting).

Building the catalog was fun. I decided to keep it as simple as possible, just a set of static HTML pages that get updated offline. No AJAX, no servlets, nothing but HTML. By keeping it simple, I was able to create the whole thing in a day. Getting all the data was pretty easy too. It is amazing what you can do with the web services at places like Last.fm and Youtube. It would have been impossible to build this sort of site 5 years ago.

I've put the catalog online - perhaps others will find it useful too. Feel free to check out Paul's SXSW Artist Catalog.