From the Salmon

Some of the greatest products seem obvious in retrospect. The truth is, simple, elegant solutions to the obvious are a lot harder than you’d think. So when someone creates something in this category, it’s well worth celebrating.

Here’s an example of what I mean....

I’ve always found it a bit of a challenge to keep abreast of upcoming concerts. I’m subscribed to dozens of band and venue email lists, I scan the alternative newsweeklies for concert calendars, and I’ll occasionally drop by something like Pollstar to see what might be on the horizon. But I have to filter through a lot of listings I don’t care about, and when I find concerts, I don’t always remember to add them to a useful calendar.

What I’ve needed is a tool that would aggregate upcoming concert calendars and personalize a calendar for me, based on artists that I listen to. Sounds great, except most tools require me to do a lot of initial training before they will know to look for particular artists. It has to be easier, right?

It is.  In fact, it’s downright obvious.

This past week, I stumbled across iConcertCal, an iTunes plug-in for Mac and Windows that will build an upcoming concert calendar based on — wait for it — the artists in your iTunes library.

It’s a quick installation, and it just works. A few minutes after downloading it, I had a pretty impressive calendar in front of me. 

It’s extensive, but it’s by no means exhaustive. For example, it hasn’t yet picked up Patty Griffin’s concert at the Warfield on March 16, which is odd, since that’s a pretty major venue.  But that’s a minor complaint, and one that will probably diminish in later versions.

Now I just need to find the time, energy and money to see more shows.  Fortunately, the calendar doesn’t retain past concert info from week to week, so I don’t even remember all the great stuff I missed last week.