Last week I discussed using Google Alerts to find gigs and monitor your local music scene. I talked specifically about how to have Google automatically send you leads from your local Craigslist website. That’s a great way to do it, but today I want to talk about how to have Craigslist itself send you potential job leads as soon as they are posted.
There are at least 3 different locations on Craigslist that will list jobs for musicians – the musician community, the jobs board, and the gigs board. See the screenshot below.
Now, Craigslist is a great place to find gigs. The problem, though, is the non-stop, useless, dead-end, no-pay, irrelevant, crap gigs that make up the majority of the postings. On active Craigslist boards in big cities like New York, Chicago, LA and San Francisco this is especially true. There are so many postings that it can be difficult to sift through and find what you want.
One way to filter through the ads is to search keywords using Craigslist’s search function. There’s no way to search the entire Craigslist website from one search box, so you’ll have to search each of these three sections separately. Think about what words people would use when posting a job you might be interested in. I search things like “accompanist,” “piano,” “pianist,” etc. You’ll have to search each term individually – you can’t combine terms like you can on Google. (You can combine keywords in Craigslist searches – see Marks comment below. Thanks Mark.) I seem to have the most luck searching just the term “piano.” I guess most people tend to write something like “looking for something who plays guitar or piano…” or “looking for a piano teacher” or something else along those lines. The term “accompanist” also gets me some good stuff sometimes.
Craigslist's RSS feed
The next step is the clever part. At the very bottom of your search results, you’ll see an RSS button. That RSS feed is actually the results of your search, not the RSS of the entire section. So if you subscribe to the RSS feed, all future ads that match your criteria will automatically be sent to you.
This RSS feed is useful in other situations as well. For instance, I’m looking for a new sublet in Queens right now and I have a feed set up to send me any housing ads that say “Astoria.” The results I get are very timely and very relevant.
Try this method out. I find it makes Craigslist much more useful, and makes it less likely for quality opportunities to slip through the cracks.
Also, if you need a primer on how RSS feeds work, or what RSS feeds are at all, try this link.
Hey, great tip, thanks. I find Craigslist is a great source of gigs, even better than more focused sites, but I was getting very fed up with hitting it 10 times a day.
I just wanted to add a couple of things. I only just found this myself, but you can search for multiple terms if you separate them with a vertical bar (hold shift and hit the backslash key). So you can search for piano or pianist with the single search: piano | pianist. Also, the Craigslist search is very picky. I nearly missed a great gig last year because I was searching for ‘keyboard’ and the ad asked for a ‘keyboardist’. So the search string I use now is
piano | pianist | keyboard | keyboardist | pit | accompanist
Thanks again – I’m really enjoying the blog.
Mark
Mark – that’s great advice. I didn’t realize you could do that. I’ve moved over to your method now.
The only one I find somehow problematic is the term “keyboard” in the jobs board. That gives me lots of results with people talking about typing on a computer keyboard. I’m not sure how to get around that, so I just took that term out for the Jobs section.
Overall, that works great, though. I added a note in the article to read your comment. Thanks so much!
Thankyou for this artice, you’ve just saved me a great amount of time!
Thanks for the great tip, you just made browsing Craigslist a lot more fun!
Great article! I’ve never used rss feeds before but this is really going to change my life.
Absolutely. Get on the RSS train, Reuben, it’s a great invention!
Thanks for your input on piano gigs. I do singles, have switched to keyboard since some pianos are not fit.It seems that Karioki (sp)and bands are most prevelent in my Kalamazoo, MI. area,but I’m still looking for gigs in lounges, or seniors’ homes, etc.
You say that works…but it never worked for me. My feed never updates. It just sits there with static contact, regardless of how many new posts actually are made. I figured it was just because CL wasn’t set up to create feeds for customized search terms, so I tried to make it an RSS feed for the whole category. Still doesn’t update. Am I just missing something?
Jared
This is awesome, thanks a lot! I tried to keep up with craigslist in the past but it was too much to deal with because of all the noise, which this deals with perfectly.
Yeah, this technique really helped me out when I first moved to NYC. It beats visiting Craigslist every few hours and having to sift through everything.
For some reason the RSS feed didn’t want to work with Safari. I opened Firefox and it worked just fine.
FYI.
Good info, thanks Chris.