Robot Rock

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I follow a lot of rock clubs on Twitter. As someone who goes to shows an average of 1-2x per week, I’ve found it to be the easiest way to track upcoming events here in Seattle.

I also check Songkick every now and then to check tour dates for specific bands I’m interested in. As part of this process, I found that it’s possible to not just see future dates, but past dates for bands. So I also like to torture myself by seeing what amazing shows I’ve missed.

I suppose in some weird fashion these two activities helped germinate the idea for my new Twitter bot: shozebot.

What does shozebot do? Why, it tells you all about (completely, utterly fake) upcoming shows by combining each of the following randomly-selected elements into a single tweet:

  • a two-band combination from my iTunes database of ~1200 artists
  • a date
  • a Seattle venue
  • some typical rock club Twitter account promotional lingo

Example:

It’s currently set to tweet once every 3 hours, and it’s been amusing so far to see the combos that have been generated, especially since all artists are weighted equally for now. That one-hit wonder with a single song in my music database has the same odds of turning up in a tweet as, say, the Go-Betweens (120+ songs).

At some point I’ll rewrite it with fancier logic that support city-specific venues, greater weighting for artists that constitute a larger chunk of my library, and maybe even inserting matching band Twitter handles. (But only if I want to confuse the hell out of bands!)

Credits