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Searching for events abroad

The opportunity for a short trip to Paris—including a possible day trip to London—fell into my lap last week. I began a search for events in both cities that might be of interest to me and my travel companions. I managed to locate the sort of alternative weeklies in which I figured I was likely to find the kind of events I wanted. But so far as I could tell, none of them—not nme.com, not Les Inrockuptibles—offered functionality that would allow me to search using a date range. I was left doing finds for the dates of my trip on long laundry lists of events. The basic message I heard: out-of-towners need not apply.

Aloud.com, the service used by Q4music.com, enabled date-range searching as part of its advanced search functionality, but did not allow me to determine what sort of events I wanted to search over that range. Billy Elliot the Musical, anyone? Only conglomerate ticketmaster gave me the robust date-range functionality I was looking for. Perhaps those service fees are doing some good after all. But even ticketmaster’s date-range search was a click away from the front page.

Here in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune’s Metromix event guide offers a date-range search right on the front page. But on the music page of the website of the Chicago Reader—my go-to source for concert and event news—users could review concerts scheduled for any day in the next two weeks, one day at a time.

I don’t know quite what to make of all this. There seems to be an element of a hipster exclusivity at work in the alternative weeklies, which in some ways I understand—limiting the pool of potential buyers to people in the know increases your chances of getting into the shows you want to see. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe search functionality of the kind I want is more difficult to implement than I thought.

If you’ve got an example of a good events search engine at home or abroad, let us know at blog at closerlook dot com.