I always use to have a habit of forgetting about bands I wanted to see; it's a real pain trying to keep up with the 20 odd interesting acts going around - then making sure you can get your hands on a ticket, collect together some friends, and make the show. My old method consisted of perusing the Bristol Ticket Shop listing, then buying all my tickets right there. Unfortunately they update their listing about once a month, and it looks like the back of a cheap tin of curry sauce (impossible to read)... it also turned out quite expensive thanks to the booking fee.

At some point I started googling bands I'd heard on the radio & in podcasts (this is the one thing myspace does well), and started looking for live shows online. Enter Ents24, who must have been doing some good SEO because they came up consistently, and have since revolutionised the way I get around to seeing live shows.

Ents24

To my surprise they're based here, in Bristol, which probably explains why they are the most up to date gig listing that I've found so far. There are a few things that make this website so essential to me:

My Artists

A list of artists you've subscribed to, there are only a few bands they didn't have - but they were canadian!

Frequent tour updates

Whenever a band has it's tour details updated, you get an email with the new show, and all the others previously added

My Events

once you find a show you want to see, add it to your events diary. This is the real killer feature - you can subscribe to the events with common calendar apps (iCal, Google Calendar, for example), and you can also send a link for your diary to your friends; they'll be able to access the full summary (here's my ents24 diary).

So now I just add any new tour dates that arrive in my inbox, and I'll get a reminder from Google on my phone a few days before the event. I can get some people together, buy tickets, and I'm sorted... no more forgetting!

Competition?

You might be thinking “why not use last.fm”, well I did - but we didn't get on for a number of reasons:

• Annoying multiple artist entries;
• Unreliable information (it's user submitted after all);
• The audio player didn't work very well;
• I couldn't add bands without listening to their music - the whole scrobbling thing was too tedious;
• Live shows either weren't there, or not updated;

So, Ents24, keep up the good work, you rock.