Bellingham Sounds
Weekly local music infrastructure for Bellingham, Washington.
Launching July 12th... but you can play around with it here.
Like all great stories begin: once upon a time, I got bored.
Bellingham Sounds came out of a period of my life where I was going out to music just about every night for months. I was at The Shakedown, Oddfellows, Wild Buffalo, Blue Room, house shows, open mics, and wherever else something was happening. At first, the project was bigger and messier in my head. I thought I might start recording performances, helping artists with media, building artist profiles, creating a directory, and maybe turning the whole thing into some kind of local music discovery ecosystem.
Some of that still might happen... but not right now.
The simpler, more useful problem was right in front of me: Bellingham has a lot of music happening, and it is harder to track than it should be. I know because, for the first time in my life, I kept a calender. Every night I was carrying a notebook with me and drawing tables and calendars by hand so I wouldn’t lose track of what was happening, who was where, what I got to see. Spreadsheets were impractical on the run, hard to update from my phone, and somehow less useful than pen and paper when I was bouncing between venues.
There are venue websites, Facebook pages, Instagram posts, calendars, posters, group chats, and word of mouth. If you already know where to look, you can usually find what you’re looking for. If you are new, busy, broke, curious, or just trying to plan a night, the scene can feel strangely difficult to navigate.
Bellingham Sounds is my attempt to turn that scattered information into a clean weekly index.
The site is built to organize live music in Bellingham by week, venue, and vibe. Shows are collected from local venues and public listings, then organized into a shared calendar people can scan quickly.
If you are someone like me, with a wide range of tastes and a willingness to follow the night wherever it goes, knowing what is happening makes it easier to actually choose well. It lets you optimize for the kind of night you want: one quiet acoustic set, one loud rock show, a weird open mic, or a full route across town. If you are really committed, you can even chain together multiple shows in one night. I once hit six.
Admittedly, I did not care much for two of them, so really it was more of a sprint between Honeymoon, Shakedown, Wild Buffalo, and Make.Shift.
More or less, Bellingham Sounds is a free local music aggregation service. People can check the website, see what is happening on any given day, and eventually receive a weekly email before the week starts. For artists, venues, and DIY spaces, it creates another surface where shows can be discovered. For people trying to go out more, it lowers the effort required to actually show up.
Honestly, I just want more people going to music.
Bellingham has a thriving scene in a lot of ways, but it can still feel split between the people who already go out constantly and the people who only hear about things after they happened. Sometimes people truly do not know. Sometimes they only know one venue’s rhythm and miss what is happening everywhere else.
Core Features
- Weekly local music calendar organized by day and venue
- Fairly complex content architecture using dynamic fields to make listings easy to scan without flattening the information
- Weekly publishing workflow for collecting, reviewing, cleaning, and organizing listings
- Email list integration for sending out the upcoming week’s shows on Sundays
- Submission pathways for artists and bands (currently depreciated)
- Foundation for future artist profiles, interviews, clips, and broader scene documentation
Media
Project Details
Role: Founder, designer, editor, developer
Built with: Webflow, CMS collections, spreadsheets, manual research, AI-assisted development and copy iteration
Scope: Local music calendar, email list
Status: Active development