About guiljam.nl

How it started

guiljam.nl grew out of two things that seemed to have little to do with each other: clips of concerts that would otherwise be lost on a phone, and the wish for music that can stay on through the whole working day. Together they became one site: the concerts to look back on, the music to switch on.

The concerts

Anyone standing at a concert soon films a song on their phone. It usually ends there: the clips disappear among thousands of photos and are never watched again. That is a pity, because reliving a concert is a joy, even when picture and sound are not perfect. That is why the clips are gathered here, per concert and in the order of the night, with the setlist alongside to listen back to the whole show. Every artist with a concert has a page of their own, with the line-up around that night and all the clips. The concerts are what this site is about.

The concert calendar

Beside the concerts that have been, there is also what is still to come. The concert calendar shows the upcoming concerts in the Netherlands and Belgium by artists with an album or a track on the record shelves, updated every day from Ticketmaster and setlist.fm. Every concert has a page of its own with the venue, the start time, the support act and the start of ticket sales, and with what the site has of that artist: the hits, the albums and tracks to prepare for the night. Every artist page shows the upcoming concerts too.

Time to Play

The other half of the story is the music at home. A large playlist in Spotify looked like the answer to having music on all day, but its shuffle is not truly random: the same songs kept coming back and others never got a turn. So a script of its own came about, one that compiles a new block every two hours. To choose from, the vinyl albums from the own shelves were recorded one by one, every track analysed for tempo, energy and mood, and the artists along with them, so that within a two-hour block nobody comes by twice, not even as a member of a group. With that data the playlist adapts: calmer at night, more energetic in the morning, sometimes tuned to the weather or a holiday, and never the same two days in a row. That playlist is called Time to Play and simply lives here online: the block playing now, with the time each track comes up.

The record shelves

What was mapped out for the playlist grew into the record shelves. The albums are arranged by kind and year, each with its cover, the tracks per vinyl side and a Spotify button. The artists have a page of their own with their origin, their albums and, for a group, the members over the years on a timeline. And every song has a page of its own, with the albums it appears on, the concerts it was played at and how it did in the chart. The shelves are not finished: albums are still being added, and every album that joins plays along in Time to Play from then on.

The Dutch Top 40

Because the Dutch Top 40 is here week by week, from the very first chart in 1965 to this week's. Every record, artist, week and year has a page of its own, with year charts, decade charts, the all-time list and the records alongside. So for every song from a setlist or from the shelves you can see at once whether it was a hit.

Something different every day

The home page brings it all together. Under Today: whose birthday it is, who died on this day, which records were number 1 on this date in earlier years, which concerts were filmed on this day and which are on tonight. Below that what is playing now in Time to Play, the latest concert videos, this week's Dutch Top 5, the newest albums and the collection in numbers, with the next concerts alongside.

What you can count on

The clips are recordings of our own from the crowd, posted on YouTube: the picture moves and the sound is sometimes loud. There are no reviews and no complete registrations, but there is who played, what was played and what it looked like. The setlists are put together per concert in the order of the night; the songs play in the version the artist has on Spotify, usually a live recording from another concert, not that night's performance. Everything else comes from data: the albums with cover and tracks from Spotify and with the year of release and the vinyl sides from Discogs, the artists and their members from MusicBrainz and Discogs, the charts from top40.nl, the official site of the Dutch Top 40, and the upcoming concerts from Ticketmaster and setlist.fm. The albums are the records from one set of shelves, not a complete discography, and what is not known is not there. The clips play through YouTube and the music through Spotify; what that means for your data is on the privacy page.

A hobby, not a business

The site has no commercial purpose. There are no ads, it is not promoted anywhere and it is not a shop window for services. Building websites and databases has been its maker's day job since 2002, and this site is the place to try out things that have no room in regular work, and to rebuild something when that makes it better. The music is the reason, the building is at least half the fun.

Contact

Everyone is welcome to look around. Is something not right, or is there another reason to get in touch? That can be done at mg (at) guiljam.nl.