Some years ago now I used to live in suburbia and work in the city, 1.5 hours each way door to door 15 hours of my life a week taken up by moving my flesh and bones to another location.

Not only was this a waste of my time, but sitting idly reading thru the newspaper on the way home I would see gig listings for gigs that were due to imminently start and I was already heading in the wrong direction from. I’ve since made a point of filling my evenings with live music and here’s how I achieve it.

Automatically Find Gigs

I scrobble all the tracks I listen to, from my phone, my home stereo system, everything, to Last.fm http://www.last.fm/user/mikedixson
This means that my Last.fm data is a pretty complete picture of my musical tastes.

I use the Songkick application on my smartphone to scan my Last.fm profile for artists to track. Song kick then keeps an eye out for gigs posted by artists I like and alerts me on my phone when a new gig is posted.
I’ve also got BandsInTown installed, but this doesn’t seem to let me know about as many gigs as Songkick does.

Money’s not a problem

If I hear about a gig within the first couple of weeks after pay day I’ll usually just book the ticket. But towards the end of the month, like most of you, money’s a little tighter. So what I do is whenever I see a gig that I want to go to I set myself a reminder using Google Now or Google Keep to go off on my next pay day.

That way, come pay day I buy a load of tickets to gigs and set up my coming months.

Size might be everything

I like a lot of small bands that I’ve discovered by going to small/medium size festivals and listening to less mainstream radio like BBC 6 Music.

As a result a lot of the tickets I buy are between £5-£15 a ticket. Much better than shelling out £60-£100 on one gig.

Ticket to ride

A lot of my tickets nowadays are bought thru the Dice app or thru Songkick themselves.
Both of these resellers allow for digital only tickets and no fees!

This keep the price down, and saves me having to hunt around in ‘safe places’ for tickets for gigs that I’ve booked 6 months ago.

Dice app also has a pretty nice interface to just go scrolling thru looking for other gigs that you might not have otherwise known about and then buy tickets for them too.