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One Friday night in 2013, Liz Gabriel was looking for something to do.
Scrolling through local calendars, the Portland showgoer landed on a concert listing for a Seattle punk band called the Wimps. Gabriel had never heard of them, so she copied and pasted their name into Spotify, took a listen, then headed out to see what was to become a new favorite band.
There were more Fridays like that one—looking for new music, having to look the band up to get a preview. Why wasn’t there a way to get an audio preview that was connected to the listing? Gabriel, a software engineer by day, eventually made it herself.
NearHear (nearhear.app) is a concert calendar that opened to the public for Portland in 2020 (with listings in Seattle, Tacoma, and San Francisco) that lets users hear a preview of what the artist actually sounds like.
“It’s rare to receive universally positive feedback,” Gabriel says.
But she is. Gabriel’s been working closely with MusicPortland, a nonprofit that promotes local music, and recently teamed up with Travel Portland as well. NearHear also offers a weekly Wednesday newsletter—the town’s show listings sent right to you, and if you link up your own Spotify account, you can get personalized playlists aligned with the filters you use to search NearHear listings.
It’s hard to believe it’s still just a one-woman project—Gabriel manually looks through listings to make sure she hasn’t missed anything (algorithms struggle with concert posters on Instagram). The audio also is pulled solely from artists’ Spotify accounts, so if they don’t have one, the user’s out of luck. But there’s growth on the horizon, including an upcoming app that’s being funded by a grant from Regional Arts & Culture Council. There’s no ETA on it, though—go check out some live shows while you wait.
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2024 here!