2004: GrooveGuide – where groove meets street!

GrooveTip really should have morphed into a MySpace-type destination for musicians (also founded in 2003) or even CitySearch, iTunes, TicketMaster or Facebook. It didn’t but success still comes in a myriad of ways.

(last updated: 3 January 2021)

In order to launch and promote the GrooveTip website, I distributed a free, pocket-sized, street-press leaflet around Melbourne – only once – GrooveGuide.

Prior to this, in early 2003, I went to the USA and in New York City I picked up a pocket-sized gig guide booklet that inspired me to do GrooveGuide.

[ UC Berkeley | NYC | March 2003]

That guidebook for NYC (and other capital cities) soon shutdown. In hindsight I may have been able to use GrooveTip to consult with that US firm, ie sell the software.

The first artist featured was Snaplock Rhythm. Their music was also sold on the site.

Interestingly, vocalist Paul Havea (1976-2007: pic below left) is on this recording who went on to play with IllZilla – as did the drummer and sax player.

The full PDF download of GrooveGuide is below. After GrooveGuide, Beat Magazine started distributing a full PDF of their magazine via their website.

GrooveGuide June 2004 (PDF download)

To create GrooveGuide, I created filters in TextPipe Pro and scraped websites to rapidly obtain event information to be converted into sql statements for subsequent insertion into a UIPublish database.

From here, the event information was displayed easily on the Xoops Groovetip website using its display blocks and was also reformatted for a single-web page for PDF generation (for printing – see PDF above.)

screenshots: 11 Jul 2004 | 24 Sep 2004

I was then ready to easily create and distribute GrooveGuide every fortnight but that would cost over AUD$500 for each print run – and this wasn’t viable for me at that point without a sponsor.

Eden seen on the GrooveGuide cover is still playing as Eastward and I was playing with Toby at the time.

Of note, during this time in 2004, Moshtix switched from being solely a ticketing provider to also a destination site for event information and still is to this day. It also has a Moshguide.

[ 13 Jun ’04 | 13 Sep ’04 | 3 Jan ’23 ]

As mentioned elsewhere, I had worked alongside Mr Petrie a few times sometime between late ’03 and early ’04 and even drove up to Sydney to do so in the Hyundai Excel. Yet, by the time the Moshtix site had been redesigned in 2004, we had already parted ways. After reading an interview with him, I am confident that it was after the redesign that it became a takeover target as a media destination, not just a ticketing agent.

Incidentally, in that period, I neatened up concert pianist Alan Kogosowski’s site.

The original developer’s name was removed and new “Buy Now” links were added which are not visible in the archive snapshot.

[ 26 Jul ’04 | 6 Dec ’04 | – ]
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