Today’s post isn’t about a new band, or a gig, or a new single or album, or about a venue. It is about a new release – of sorts. Today* sees the launch of SPOT, a new listings app for Brighton. It’s been developed by Matt Davies and his partner Kim, in association with Music Venues Alliance Brighton. You might have bumped into Matt putting on shows at Alphabet, or if you’ve got a longer memory you might remember him from bands like Milk & Biscuits and Restlesslist, or from running the Hand in Hand.

Since the demise of physical concert tickets, it’s become increasingly difficult to find any kind of decent consolidated list of everything that’s going on – you can follow venues, promoters and bands on social media, but the algorithm is always working against you to try and increase engagement rather than provide you with what you actually want. There are some ticketing websites, but they rely on tickets being on sale with those sites so none are complete. There have been various listings websites, but they’ve relied on someone to collate all the information, so they’ve fallen by the wayside over the years too. Enter SPOT – a community resource where promoters and venues will upload their gigs themselves centrally, with listings more complete than anywhere else. To give you an idea of just how complete, at launch there are over 60 venues promoters and record stores involved (yes – instores are in there too, not just for Resident, but Bella Union, Capsule, Mr Bongo and Rarekind as well).

Matt reminisced about his time in bands – “We’d meet up at Tiffany’s, we’d smoke cigarettes, have a cup of tea, and then we’d go to Resident. That was our routine, on the dole in a band – and we’d look and see what was coming up, we’d pop in and buy a ticket. And we used to sell tickets for our gigs in there too. We’d make tickets out of playing cards, and we’d hand them to whoever was going to sell them. And back then you knew where the information was for gigs, and I wanted to recreate that now for this sort of very fragmented landscape we’re in.”

Another unintended benefit of the way that tickets used to be listed was that it was very egalitarian – a big gig at the Brighton Centre would sit next to a band’s debut gig at the Hope – and that’s something that’s been brought back with Spot. Everything is next to each other, and you’re equally likely to find out about any gig rather than just the gigs who’ve paid some money to Meta for promotion.

I could write more about, but the best thing to do is head to the App Store, search for “SPOT BTN”, and have a play around and find out for yourself

*out today on iOS, but Android landing in the next couple of days