Hotlist Features The Roots’ Okayplayer and Tribe Called Quest Film
Hotlist, a service that helps you decide which upcoming events you will consider hot, appears to have enlisted The Roots' Okayplayer and the film Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest to create events listings on their service and make Hotlist look a bit hotter.
Launched in 2010, Hotlist is both web-based and mobile and keeps track of where folks have gone in the past, where they're planning on going and what's happening now. It draws on information both posted to the site and on other web services, including Facebook and Yelp, to help you decide where to go. That makes it a potentially useful service for promoting your musical appearances and related events.
Hotlist draws together a variety of services to help you discover and plan for future events and coordinate with your friends, if so desired. Folks post their event plans, create networks of friends and contacts and also coordinate their plans through the service
While it could be used as simply an event planner, Hotlist shows you upcoming events from all the people you follow and also draws on outside services to reveal additional events of interest. In particular, Hotlist leverages Facebook friends, locations and interests in creating your list of events worth attending including venue info and what kind of crowd is expected based on their aggregated information.
The music marketing potential of Hotlist is enhanced by the ability to create custom hotlists. For example, The Roots' Okayplayer hotlist features upcoming concerts and additional Okayplayer channels have plans for hotlists.
Michael Rapaport's documentary, Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, also has a hotlist featuring upcoming showings. Both hotlists are currently featured on Hotlist in either a promotion or crosspromotion though neither seem to have identified many people expecting to attend any of the events.
These are pretty obvious uses of the service for music marketing in that they are simple lists of upcoming appearances. The Sex & The City hotlist reveals more creative potential by listing venues featured in the show. However people don't seem to be revealing their plans to visit such spots as The City Baker.
Given the limited activity on these featured hotlists, especially on the concerts and film showings, I have to wonder how effective this service is in showing you possible attendance at events by folks not in your networks. Since letting you know what kind of crowd is expected is one of the distinctive features of Hotlist that's a bit disappointing.
Hotlist is nicely designed and potentially a useful service however I would suggest setting up an account, creating a custom hotlist of your upcoming shows so that they're included in the system and then giving it a closer look to decide if deeper involvement is warranted.
Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance: World Dance News is his primary web project.
