Localist started as an idea that myself and a few friends had while sitting in a coffee shop one day. The place was playing Spotify and it was a band we had never heard of. My friend Sean remarked that there should be a way to listen to bands that are playing in your area so that people can be exposed to new music. After some brief research into various apis, limitations and what information was available we decided that it was a good enough idea for each of us to dedicate 10 – 20 hours a week. Over the next few months, using Express and Mongo as the backend and Handlebars with Bootstrap and a bunch of custom CSS on the front end over the period of three months we build a product that aggregated shows from Jambase, collected band and genre information from Echonest, and created Spotify playlists based on all the information collected. A playlist is automatically generated on a weekly basis for each venue, and for each genre, people can also login with their Spotify credentials and create custom Playslists based on venues they follow, genres they like, or distance from where they live. After 3 month and some serious code sprints we were ready to launch and collect some serious venture capital money, when we got the bad news … Spotify decided to create the same service themselves and release it . Unfortunately for us, Spotify never made mention of working on this on their blog, I suppose it’s the inherent risk of creating a service that is based on someone else technology. We have kept the site up, although the auto creation of new events has been disabled to save bandwidth. Take a look
