tourb.us, a new calendar service for bands and venues has launched recently. I’d lamented a while back about the lack of development over at upcoming.org, so I’ve officially decided to throw my weight behind the efforts of Mike & Gary at tourb.us.¹ Could be a great resource for bands, venues and people who just want to go out and catch some great live music. All it takes is some dedicated users.

One great feature that caught my attention right away was their way of importing your favorite bands from either an iTunes XML export or a profile at last.fm. Very nice to be able to join and within 5 minutes have it know a long list of music I listen to. It also does SMS text message alerts to your cell phone at programmable intervals leading up to a show you plan on catching.

Looks like I was the first to join representing the Houston area, so today I entered about 40 upcoming shows and 10 venues. More will come as I find time and interest. I encourage others to set up accounts and submit info as well. No matter how slick the code on the back-end, the service will only help our community if there’s enough info in it to make visiting the site worthwhile.

¹“What weight?” you may ask. Well, a few of you may remember back when I used to run the Celtic Houston majordomo list hosted by chron.com. Around the same time was a regular contributor to musi-cal, one of the earliest distributed music calendar services on the web. (Heck, before that I even used to sit around with Carolyn Wonderland & the Bi-Bulb hand-folding Houston Music Calendars prior to distribution.) So it’s not like I’m particularly new to this idea…