mntunes.com has been sitting in the portfolio for years with a simple promise baked into the name: Minnesota music. The obvious thing to build is a gig calendar. Everyone wants to know what’s playing tonight, and a calendar is the kind of site people come back to. So in June I decided that’s what this would be: a “what’s playing” calendar for the whole state, with deep venue profiles alongside it.
This week I shipped the venue profiles and deliberately left out the calendar.
The reason is boring, and I think it’s the most useful thing I learned all week. A calendar is only as good as its data, and the data belongs to the ticketing companies. Ticketmaster’s developer API is free and generous, but its terms rule out exactly what a calendar site does: poll in the background, keep the listings, and make money around them. Worse, it wouldn’t cover the rooms that matter. First Avenue and its family of clubs sell through AXS. The Dakota and the Cedar use Etix. A Ticketmaster-fed “Minnesota calendar” would list the arena tours and skip the Turf Club, which is backwards. I’d be shipping something that looked complete and wasn’t.
So each profile does the honest thing instead and sends you straight to that venue’s own calendar. The home page says why there’s no combined calendar yet. It’s less impressive and it’s accurate.
The real work turned out to be fact-checking. My draft notes were written from memory, and memory is a confident liar. I “knew” Fine Line had closed and reopened; it has run continuously since 1987. I had Palace Theatre at 2,500; it’s about 2,800. I’d assumed the First Ave clubs used Etix; they’re on AXS. Rock the Garden, which I’d have put in a festival guide without thinking, ended in 2022. The Basilica Block Party is gone too. Duluth’s West Theatre closed temporarily in July during a foreclosure, so it isn’t on the site. Moondance Jam was sold this year and its future isn’t settled, so the site says exactly that. A music guide that confidently lists dead festivals is worse than no guide.
What shipped: thirteen venue profiles, from the 250-person 7th St Entry to the 8,400-capacity Armory (where Prince shot the “1999” video), plus Duluth’s NorShor, Sacred Heart and the Bayfront stage. There’s a statewide festival guide, because outside the metro Minnesota’s music mostly lives at festivals in Detroit Lakes, Brainerd, Winona and Duluth. And there are two pages about the unglamorous business of a show. One covers the 2% tax Minnesota withholds from out-of-state performers, which is a surprise to most touring bands. The other breaks down where a cover charge goes: songwriter licensing, state sales tax, and Minneapolis’s extra 3%.
The 1w1i takeaway: the ambitious version of an idea often depends on someone else’s data, and their terms decide what you can build. The version you fully control, like a careful profile of a room, is smaller but it’s yours, and it’s true. I’ll build the calendar when I can build it honestly.
— c