Music Machinery

This weekend at Music Hack Day SF, Seatwave is launching their Ticketing and Event API.  This API will make it easy for developers to add event discovery  and ticket-buying functionality to their apps.  At the Echo Nest we’ve incorporated Seatwave artist IDs into our Rosetta ID mapping layer making it possible to use Seatwave IDs directly with the Echo Nest API.  This makes it easier for you to use the Seatwave and the Echo Nest APIs together.  For instance, you can call the Seatwave API, get artist event IDs in response and use those IDs with the Echo Nest API to get more context about the artist.

For example, we can make a call to the Seatwave API to get the set of Featured Contest with an API call:

http://api-sandbox.seatwave.com/v2/discovery/category/10/eventgroups/featured?apikey=4A14A77EC6F04EC8B0DB924D12F8E81B

The results include blocks of events like this:

{
“CategoryId”: 12,
“Currency”: “GBP”,
“Id”: 934,
“ImageURL”: “http://cdn2.seatwave.com/filestore/season/image/thestoneroses_934_1_1_20111018165906.jpg”,
“MinPrice”: 95,
“Name”: “The Stone Roses”,
“SwURL”: “http://www.seatwave.com/the-stone-roses-tickets/season”,
“TicketCount”: 1810
},

{
“CategoryId”: 10,
“Currency”: “GBP”,
“Id”: 702,
“ImageURL”: “http://cdn2.seatwave.com/filestore/season/image/redhotchilipeppers_702_1_1_20110617124457.jpg”,
“MinPrice”: 45,
“Name”: “Red Hot Chili Peppers”,
“SwURL”: “http://www.seatwave.com/red-hot-chilli-peppers-tickets/season”,
“TicketCount”: 1134
},

We see events for the Stone Roses and for RHCP.  The Seatwave ID for RHCP is 702.  We can use this ID directly with in Echo Nest calls. For instance, to get  lots of Echo Nest info on the RHCP using the Seatwave ID, we can make an artist/profile call like so:

http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/artist/profile?id=seatwave:artist:702
&bucket=biographies
&bucket=blogs&bucket=familiarity
&bucket=hotttnesss&bucket=images
&bucket=news&bucket=reviews

To show off the integration of Seatwave and Echo Nest, I’ve built a little web app that shows a list of top Seatwave concerts (generated via the Seatwave API). For each artist, the app shows the number of tickets available, the artist’s biography,  along with a play button that will let you listen to a sample of the artist (via 7Digital).

The application is live here:  Listen to Top Seatwave Artists.   The code is on github: plamere/SWDemo

The Seatwave API is quite easy to work with. They support JSON, JSONP, XML and SOAP(bleh).  Lots of good data, very nice artist images, generous affiliate program, easy to understand TOS.  Highly recommended.  See the Seatwave page in The Echo Nest Developer Center for more info on the Seatwave / Echo Nest integration.