Finding live music in Japan can feel like detective work.
You hear a rumor about a great band, track down a venue’s website, scroll through Instagram posts from six weeks ago, and maybe figure out what’s playing tonight.

That’s why I was genuinely excited to discover LiveTribe, a new website that makes finding live shows in Japan easy.

Whether you live in Japan or you’re just visiting, LiveTribe saves you hours of searching by organizing local gigs, artists, and venues into one clean, searchable place. Want to find blues on a Tuesday? Or a rock show nearby tonight? You can actually just… search for it.

I spoke with the creator of LiveTribe about what inspired the site, how it works for both fans and artists, and what makes it different from other gig listings in Japan. If you love small venues, local scenes, and discovering bands before they blow up, this is a resource you’ll want bookmarked!

Blues on Tuesday

Why did you start LiveTribe?

I love live music at amazing funky little clubs where I can sit front row and meet the musicians in person after the shows. There are many thousands of great clubs and bands out there that are just hard to find! For example, to find a blues show on Tuesday, you had to know all the venues out there and then search through 20 different web sites to find the “schedule” page.

After that you had to search through each of those pages.

Some venues don’t have a homepage at all, so you have to find their Instagram or Facebook page and scroll through all the shows until you find what is playing on Tuesday.

Clearly, lots of venues and musicians are struggling with the same problem. People are using Instagram, Facebook, WordPress, free blog sites etc. None of this is easily searchable or centralized, so these awesome shows and artists don’t get the attention they deserve.

That is why I started LiveTribe.jp. On https://livetribe.jp you can now search for “Blues on Tuesday” and see a list of everything near you with prices, times, maps and contact information for the venue AND direct links to the home page for the venue and the artist as well as their social media pages.

So, everything is organized into one clean resource.

This is super important for us – we want to support the venues and artists by introducing fans directly to them as well. You can look at a local club or artist and see their full schedules (or whatever they have entered) or click to follow them.

We currently have about 400 active shows, 500 artists and 30 venues but this is growing rapidly. Traffic on the site is up more than 500% over last month. Still a long way to go but it seems that we are meeting a need. LiveTribe also pushes content out to other sites, our Instagram page and Facebook – soon to be more.

We are happy to share the show data with other sites because we want the music out there as the first priority.

How does the site work for artists?

Venues and Artists can use it as their show calendar and even embed the calendar in their own site or even just use it as their own home page. They have their own QR code to give out to customers or fans for easy access. With one click they can share their shows to their own Facebook and Instagram pages.

Their fans can follow them to see new shows. And of course it all works on mobile or PC. We have tons of new features coming, new shows, venues and artists are added daily, so hopefully everyone can find something they like and bring live music to a new level. If there is a venue or band that isn’t on the site yet please tell them about it so they can add their shows to the party!

Oh yeah, and it’s free, because everyone should always be able to find blues on Tuesday. Note that it is only available in Japan because of the overwhelming traffic.

How does your site differ from other gig sites for music fans and tourists searching for gigs?

For fans, (and this is my favorite part), you can find “Blues on Tuesday in Nagoya”! Try that on Instagram.

What do you do? Follow 50 different accounts, then manually sort through hundreds or thousands of posts on all the accounts to find a blues show in Nagoya on Tuesday? Instagram is great, but a searchable, organized database of shows it is not.

Fans can follow venues or artists and see all shows for their favorites organized by date! In one place! No searching or filtering!

Our entire reason for existing is to make it easy for artists and venues to share live music and easy for fans to find it.

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Thank you LiveTribe for sharing your thoughts about the live music search with me!

I already shared how to manually find shows in Japan – mostly from hard detective work like going to bars and finding upcoming show posters, digging through Instagram, ticketing sites… but LiveTribe does that all in one place, and helps artists control their own info while reaching new listeners.

I can’t wait for more people to use it, and hopefully you will find your next favorite artist on there! They could be waiting for you on a random Tuesday. The live music scene is your oyster! 🙂

Until next time! ❤