Showlist

Find out who's playing near you in the next couple of weeks, and turn that lineup into a playlist.

Pick a place, a radius, a date window and some genres. Showlist scans concert listings, collapses the lineup down to the artists playing, pulls each one's best-known tracks, and saves the result as a playlist in your Spotify or YouTube account.

▶ Live: https://jwildfire.github.io/showlist/

It's a static site — no server, no database, no accounts. Everything runs in your browser, and your keys and tokens never leave it.

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Two paths

1. Preloaded — nothing to set up. data/shows.json ships with the site: a list of real upcoming shows for one metro area (currently Durham, NC and everything within 60 miles — Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Cary, Saxapahaw, Greensboro), refreshed by a weekly sweep of public venue calendars. Open the site, hit Find shows, done. No key, no rate limit.

2. Anywhere else — bring a Ticketmaster key. Free, about two minutes (see below). Then any city or ZIP, any radius, live listings.

Rows are compact by default so a month of shows fits on one screen — there's a Compact toggle in the header if you'd rather have room to breathe.

Either way you get a real tracklist with nothing connected: song titles come from Apple's public iTunes Search API (keyless, no login), and every track carries a YouTube and a Spotify search link that works for anybody. Connect Spotify only when you want it saved as a playlist in your account. And there's one button that does the whole thing: ⚡ Just do it for me — next 14 days, every genre, top 3 tracks per artist, playlist built and waiting to be saved.

Quick start

1. Open it and press Find shows. The preloaded Triangle listings answer immediately.
2. Connect Spotify in Setup, press Build playlist, then Save to Spotify.
3. Only if you want another metro area: add a Ticketmaster key in Setup.

What you need, and why

The site has no backend to keep secrets in, so it uses your credentials, stored in your own browser's local storage. Every field is optional; fill in what you want to use.

Ticketmaster API key — for finding shows

1. Register at developer-acct.ticketmaster.com.
2. Your default app appears immediately under My Apps.
3. Copy the Consumer Key into Showlist's Setup panel.

Free tier: 5 requests/second, 5,000 requests/day. A scan costs 1–3 requests.

Spotify client ID — for songs and playlists

1. Go to the Spotify developer dashboard and Create app.
2. Name it anything. Tick Web API.
3. Under Redirect URIs, paste the URI shown in Showlist's Setup panel — exactly, including the trailing slash. For the deployed site that's https://jwildfire.github.io/showlist/.
4. Copy the Client ID. Put it in js/config.js and commit it — client IDs are public identifiers, not secrets, and then the site is zero-setup on every device: visitors just press Connect Spotify and log in. (Pasting it into the Setup panel instead works too, but only for that one browser.) Leave the client secret alone — PKCE doesn't need one.

Dashboard erroring? It's a heavy single-page app and it fails fairly often — usually transiently, and frequently because a tracking blocker or strict privacy mode breaks it. Try an incognito window with extensions off, or come back in a few hours. Meanwhile the site still works: build the playlist, press Copy list, and paste the Artist - Title lines into an importer like Spotlistr or Soundiiz — they run their own registered apps, so you just log into Spotify there.

While your app is in Spotify's default development mode, only you and up to 25 accounts you add under User Management in the dashboard can log in. That's normally plenty for a personal site; lifting it needs a quota-extension request to Spotify.

Development mode also constrains the Web API in two ways this app works around, both confirmed against a live development-mode app:

• /artists/{id}/top-tracks returns a bare 403 Forbidden. Showlist tries it once, then switches to ranking /search results by Spotify's popularity score for the rest of the run.
• limit above 5 returns 400 "Invalid limit" — on every endpoint, even though the documented maximum is 50. Omitting it defaults to exactly 5. So every request here asks for 5 and pages with offset when it needs more.
• Creating a playlist can return a bare 403 Forbidden — for both public and private, with reads on the same token working fine, so it is not a missing scope. An app in that state can read Spotify but not write to it. Showlist detects this, retires the Save to Spotify button, and points at Copy list → an importer instead. Lifting it needs a quota extension from Spotify.

None of this touches playback. Spotify's embed player needs no token and no app permissions, so ▶ Play all and the play button on each track work regardless: press one and the playlist runs top to bottom in an embedded player, advancing by itself. Whole tracks play for a viewer signed into Spotify Premium in that browser; everyone else hears the 30-second preview.

Showlist asks for permission to read your top artists and to create playlists. It never modifies playlists it didn't create.

Google OAuth client ID — for YouTube (optional)

1. In the Google Cloud console, create a project and enable the YouTube Data API v3.
2. Configure the OAuth consent screen (External is fine) and add yourself as a test user.
3. Create an OAuth client ID of type Web application, with https://jwildfire.github.io as an Authorized JavaScript origin.
4. Copy the client ID into js/config.js (or the Setup panel). Same story as Spotify: while the OAuth consent screen is in testing, only accounts you add as test users can authorize.

Mind the quota: the default allowance is 10,000 units/day, and each track match costs a 100-unit search plus a 50-unit insert. That's roughly 60 songs a day. Showlist tells you the estimated cost before spending it.

Bandsintown app id — for the watchlist source (optional)

Request one at artists.bandsintown.com.

The listing sources

	Preloaded sweep
Question it answers	"What's playing near Durham in the next couple of months?"
How Showlist uses it	Reads data/shows.json, filters by your radius, dates and genres
Needs	Nothing
Freshness	Refreshed weekly; the app shows the sweep date

	Ticketmaster	Bandsintown
Question it answers	"What's playing within N miles of me?"	"Where is this artist playing?"
How Showlist uses it	Scans every listed music event in your radius	Checks a watchlist of artists for dates that land near you
Best at	Clubs, halls, arenas, festivals — broad coverage	Small rooms and DIY shows Ticketmaster never lists
Genre filters	Yes	No — its listings carry no genre tags

Bandsintown's public API is artist-oriented, so that mode needs a watchlist. Type names in, or press Import from my Spotify to seed it from your top and followed artists.

How a playlist gets built

location + radius + dates + genres
        │
        ├─ data/shows.json (preloaded)  ─┐
        ├─ Ticketmaster events search    │
        └─ Bandsintown per-artist dates ─┤
                                        ▼
                              shows (you can uncheck any)
                                        ▼
                     artists, deduped across nights, soonest first
                                        ▼
     Spotify top tracks (if connected)  ·  iTunes Search (if not)
                                        ▼
        playlist → Spotify · YouTube · search links · clipboard · JSON

Artists are deduped case- and punctuation-insensitively, so a band playing three nights contributes one set of tracks. The playlist is ordered by show date, so the soonest shows are at the top.

Who can actually use a deployed copy

	Who
Browsing the preloaded listings	Anyone. No login, no key, nothing to install.
Building a tracklist	Anyone — songs come from the keyless iTunes Search API.
The per-track YouTube / Spotify links, and Copy links	Anyone. They're just search URLs.
Demo data	Anyone.
Ticketmaster / Bandsintown listings	Anyone who brings their own key or app id.
Saving to Spotify	The app owner, plus up to 25 accounts added under User Management in the Spotify dashboard — and only if the app is permitted to write playlists at all (see the development-mode notes above). Anyone else can paste their own client ID in Setup and use their own app.
Saving to YouTube	The owner plus test users on the Google consent screen (up to 100) — and all of them share one 10,000-unit daily quota, roughly 60 songs a day in total.

Only the two save rows are gated. Everything up to and including a finished, clickable tracklist works for a stranger who has never heard of either dashboard.

Those caps are the OAuth providers' rules for unverified apps, not something this site imposes. Lifting Spotify's needs a quota-extension request; lifting Google's needs a security assessment for the restricted YouTube scope. For a personal site, staying inside them is normal.

If someone hits the Spotify cap, the app now says so explicitly rather than reporting a generic sign-in failure.

Privacy

• Keys, tokens and settings live in localStorage / sessionStorage in your browser, under the showlist: prefix.
• Requests go directly from your browser to Ticketmaster, Bandsintown, Spotify, YouTube, and the two keyless geocoders (Open-Meteo, Zippopotam).
• There is no analytics, no logging, and nowhere for data to be collected — the site is a folder of static files on GitHub Pages.
• Forget everything on this device in Setup clears all of it and revokes the YouTube token.

Development

No build step, no dependencies. Edit the files and reload.

python3 -m http.server 8000    # or: npx serve .

Tests:

node --test tests/unit.test.mjs   # pure logic: dates, geo, genres, playlist assembly
node sweep/validate.mjs           # checks data/shows.json before it ships
node tests/smoke.cjs              # browser walkthrough (needs: npm i -g playwright)

The smoke test serves the site, runs the demo → build → save path with the Spotify API stubbed, and fails on any console error or horizontal overflow.

Layout

index.html            markup and the setup dialog
styles.css            one dark theme, CSS custom properties
js/app.js             wiring: controls → source → artists → tracks → playlist
js/ui.js              DOM rendering
js/state.js           localStorage: keys, controls, watchlist
js/geo.js             geolocation, geocoding, distance, geohash
js/dates.js           date-range presets and per-API date formats
js/genres.js          one genre vocabulary, mapped per source
js/playlist.js        shows → artists → ordered tracklist
js/sources/*.js       local (the preloaded sweep), ticketmaster, bandsintown, demo
data/shows.json       the swept listings, and the area + venues they cover
sweep/                the weekly refresh spec and its validator
js/music/*.js         spotify (PKCE), youtube (Google Identity Services),
                      itunes (keyless track lookup), player (Spotify embed)
js/links.js           credential-free search URLs per track

Track lookup and playlist saving are separate concerns: resolveTracks picks the songs (Spotify or iTunes), createPlaylist saves them (Spotify or YouTube). Adding a service means writing one module with either half; adding a listing source means one module exporting meta and findShows that returns shows in the shared shape. Both are registered in one line in js/app.js.

The weekly refresh

Ask Claude Code to "refresh the Showlist sweep" and it follows sweep/README.md: re-searches the venue calendars, prunes shows that have happened, validates the file, and pushes. The Pages deploy runs off that push, and the app shows the sweep date above the results, so stale data is always visible rather than silent.

There's a paused weekly routine set up for this ("Showlist weekly concert sweep"). It's paused because a routine-fired session has no way to gain write access to this repo — see sweep/README.md for what it needs before it can be switched on.

Sweeping a different area

Nothing about the city is hard-coded. Edit area (label, lat/lon, radius) and the venues list in data/shows.json, then run the sweep again — see sweep/README.md. The source dropdown names itself after whatever area.label says.

Deploying your own copy

1. Fork or clone this repo.
2. Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Deploy from a branch → main / / (root).
3. Register your Pages URL as the Spotify redirect URI and the Google JavaScript origin, as above.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.