New York City is teeming with artists and musicians of every genre — it’s just a matter of finding them.
Two music-lovers, Richard Tolley and Alex Jefferies created a live music discovery tool called Gigbloc. Accessible via website or mobile app (iOS and Android), Gigbloc features a heatmap of live music in the city — the hotter an area, the more likely it features live shows on a regular basis.
As the two founders are London-based, there are heatmaps for New York City and London so far.
The New York heatmap shows that the live music scene appears heavily concentrated in Downtown and Midtown Manhattan and northwestern Brooklyn. Users can filter for specific genres, such as hip-hop or folk, by clicking on the genre name and observing the hot spots shrink to only the vicinities featuring groups of that genre.
Certain genres have have different geographical nuances — both soul and indie music appear popular in the East Village, but soul is more popular in Harlem and Midtown, while indie prospers in the hipster enclaves of Williamsburg and Bushwick.
If you want to identify the actual gigs happening, users can click on “Hear the music” and peruse the specific performances shown on the map. Clicking on a tag provides the user with venue information and automatically begins playing samples of the artist’s music via Soundcloud.
If interested, users can hit a link to find ticket information on Songkick. Gigs for each of the upcoming seven days are available to browse, so users can plan ahead for next week.
Tolley and Jefferies generated the heat map via data from the past two months from Songkick, an online platform that lets users track concerts and buy tickets. After collecting names of musical groups and artists, they searched their names on Soundcloud and categorized them into a genre based on their Soundcloud tags.
Tolley told DNAinfo New York that they are in the process of building a tool that allows artists to sign up and feature their music on the map irrespective of Songkick's listings.
