Yesterday, Ben and I (well mostly Ben) built a Spotify app that helps you find bands to see at SXSW who are on your playlists. Yesterday, I also learned how outdated my javascript skills are. The app pulls data from showlistaustin.com (unofficial shows) and sxsw.com (official shows) and cross references that with one or more of your Spotify playlists. The app runs inside of Spotify and at the moment it is ugly, but functional. We may clean it up for next year’s SXSW, but for now it is time to go see some bands!
If you want to give it a try, here is how:
- Enable developer access for your Spotify account here.
- Create the following folder on your computer:
~/Spotify (Mac OS X and Linux)
“My Documents\Spotify” (Windows) - Pull the code from my github account and place it in the Spotify folder you just created. You can pull the code either using “git clone” or by downloading the zip file and unzipping it into that folder. You should end up with a folder called “spotify-showlist” inside of your Spotify folder.
- Launch Spotify.
- Update Spotify if you are not running the latest version.
- In the Spotify search box, type the following and press Enter: spotify:app:showlist
- You should now see the app. You can drag one or more of your playlists to the app, select whether you want to see Official Shows or Unofficial Shows, select a day, then press Filter Shows.
- You should now see a list of shows that match your selection.
- Spotify doesn’t let you print from inside the app due to a limitation with the Chromium Embeded Framework (I talked w/ the head of Spotify’s developer relations about it at a SXSW party last night), so if you want to print the list of shows you will need to copy & paste it into another app such as MS Word. Make sure you copy and paste the whole window if you want to retain the font styling for printing.
- The Official show listing includes a link to the SXSW site for each band so that you can add shows to your SXSW schedule and sync it to the handy SXSW Go mobile app.
Enjoy!
