Live music · Our own product
Nobody could tell you what was on tonight
Finding out which bands were playing in Nagoya on a Tuesday meant opening venue websites one at a time, and still missing most of the scene. We built the listing that did not exist, and now run it as LiveTribe.
The problem
It began as an ordinary question. Steve, who runs Zergsoft, wanted to know what live music was on in Nagoya on a Tuesday night.
There was no way to find out. Japan has thousands of live houses, and every one of them publishes its schedule its own way: a page of flyer images, a blog, a PDF, a social feed, a calendar widget bolted onto an old site. Almost all of it is in Japanese only, and almost none of it is structured. Answering “what is on tonight” meant opening twenty venue websites one after another, and still missing most of the scene.
The information was already public. It simply was not in one place, and nothing could read it.
What we did
- One catalogue, open to everyone. Artists, venues and shows in a single listing, searchable by city, area, date and genre, with no account needed to browse.
- Schedules gathered automatically. A scraping pipeline fetches each venue site and an AI step writes a parser for that site, so bringing a new venue online does not mean writing new code. Parsers are audited and scored, and re-checked when a site changes underneath them.
- Pages the scene can take over. Artists and venues claim their own page and keep their dates current from then on, which turns scraped data into maintained data.
- Torioki, handled properly. Fans reserve through the artist and pay at the door, the way Japanese live houses already work, with the counts the artist and the venue need on the night.
- Bilingual from the first screen. Every page and every notification in English and Japanese, with furigana on Japanese names so a search works either way.
- Readable by machines. The public catalogue is also published as an MCP server, so an AI assistant can answer the original question directly.
What changed
The question has an answer now. LiveTribe runs at livetribe.jp , local media point at it as the place to check what is on, and venues and artists keep their own pages up to date.
It is also the clearest thing we can show a customer. The scraping, the AI parser generation, the bilingual interface and the reservation flow are the same work we do for other companies, running in production, on a product where the customer is us.