San Antonio may be hotbed for great live music, but that doesn't mean everyone in the city knows where to be and which bands to see at any given time. It's time consuming to be that plugged in, but Spot Caller is here to help.

The Austin-based live music app searches for shows happening around San Antonio and allows you to filter by neighborhood and genre. If you want to catch a show on the Far West Side, Spot Caller will identify where one is happening. Beyond San Antonio, it also has show information in major Texas, U.S., and international cities, from San Francisco to Amsterdam, New York to Sydney.

The app also provides links to artist pages, tells you who the promoter is, links to ticket purchasing, and allows you to share the event on social media. It's an all-in-one resource that takes the edge off deciding where you should be when the music starts. The app is only downloadable for iPhones (an Android version is in the works), but the service can also be easily accessed online.

CultureMap caught up with CEO Dave Blue to provide a more detailed look at Spot Caller.

CultureMap: If you had to boil down Spot Caller to just a few words, what would they be?

Dave Blue: The simplest way to discover live music. Imagine you're traveling abroad, or just looking for something completely new ... you'll need a reliable way to find what's going on without previous knowledge of the local scene. Spot Caller is designed to make that happen for fans.

CM: Spot Caller claims to learn "what you like" as you use it without making users log in. Could you elaborate?

DB: There's a big emphasis on finding events by neighborhood and genre. So as you select a genre filter, or choose an event to view, the app will keep a record of what types of music you interact with most, and use that to influence the ranking of options in the future. This feature is completely private and doesn't require a login because the whole process takes place locally on the device. And let's be real — apps that make you login just so they can spam you are lame.

CM: On the promoter side of things, once an event is uploaded, how does the info update in the app?

DB: The way Spot Caller sources data is by aggregating existing live music events from Facebook. We do this because we believe artists should only have to enter event details once, and then have those spread across as many channels as possible. And we want to use available data and technology to its maximum potential before asking artists to create yet another account, fill out a tediously long form, and yadda yadda yadda.

So Spot Caller is constantly crawling Facebook to find new (and publicly viewable) live music events from millions of artist pages. But there's also a "promo tool" in the app which an artist can use to submit an event by simply pasting the URL of the Facebook event. But no matter how the event is initially identified, we re-sync the data from Facebook every couple of hours until the event is over.

CM: What was the inspiration for Spot Caller?

DB: The shallow answer is to say that when in college, I was constantly frustrated by missing all the cool one-off events due to lack of information. Which is true, but the more honest answer is that I have a primal urge to entertain people, and I would do almost anything — even give my right arm — to avoid a normal, predictable life. So even though I've spent many years learning to code, failing with early prototypes, the work I do is immensely satisfying and will hopefully lead to the entertainment of people on a large scale.

---

Want more great stories like these delivered to your inbox daily? Then sign up for our emails.