Straight Outta Boston: Tourfilter

We know that keeping track of shows is tricky. You've gotta check Torontoist (obviously!), all the newspapers, the artist's website, venue websites, and call your friends. It sucks, and sometimes you only hear about a show once tickets are sold out or - worse - once it's already happened. But we have good news.

Our Bostonist pals sent us a link to Tourfilter. Tourfilter's a super-easy way to track when your favourite bands roll through town: you just enter your username, password, and e-mail address, and any bands you want to track. That's it. You'll get a fancy dancy e-mail whenever the site picks up new listings. We added The Beatles and Buddy Holly, just in case (and we even got a result for each).

Since it's still a pup - the site's only recently come across the border from Boston to Toronto - Tourfilter's not perfect yet. It'd be nice if it told you shows that were playing in a user-defined area around the city, it misses shows that aren't at one of their listed venues, it's not great at handling bands with very common names (Cake, for instance), and it's not pretty. But if it keeps improving as quickly as it is now, Tourfilter might just become a staple for the local young and restless on par with Craigslist. Check it out.

Update: Chris Marstall, the site's developer, suggests that any suggestions for venues to be added to the list should be e-mailed to him. He assures that "they'll get added with gratifying quickness."