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Two decades after attending his last concert, 44-year-old John Erwin decided to get serious about rock 'n' roll again. But Erwin, who was a devoted indie-rock fan during his college years, discovered a whole new world when he turned the radio dial last spring -- a scene splintered by a dozen new subgenres and buoyed by niche music websites, MP3 blogs, and podcasts.

"Let's put it this way. There are friends downstairs at my house playing Bette Midler right now," Erwin said in a recent phone interview, from his home in Weymouth. "For someone my age, it's difficult to find the right way to get back in touch when there's so much out there."

So Erwin, an IT worker, turned to Tourfilter.com, one of two local Internet startups dedicated to helping users connect with their favorite live acts, and discover new ones. Its effect was near-instantaneous: He was soon tracking the tour schedules of a dozen bands that fit his listening profile. And days later, he made an evening trip into the city to catch a live performance at Allston's Great Scott by underground pop outfit Margot & the Nuclear So and So's .

Tourfilter.com, which was started by 38-year-old Chris Marstall in 2005, and Tourb.us , founded last year by Gary Elliott and Mike Champion , both 27, use essentially different software. But each site has found widespread national support by answering the same simple question: When is my favorite band playing next?

"You're dealing with a common complaint here," says Jay Breitling , the editor of popular local blog clickyclickymusic.com. "Live music is very important to people, but most fans face real trouble tracking the schedules of smaller clubs like P.A.'s [Lounge] ."

Tourfilter and Tourb.us's solution is to allow users to create a list of bands; when one of those bands announces plans to visit the user's city, the site will send out a notification e-mail. This is not an innovation in and of itself -- Ticketmaster has long provided a similar option for its customers, and Upcoming.org, now owned by Yahoo! , maintains a large national database of events.

But Tourfilter casts its net far wider than Ticketmaster, and offers a more dynamic Web experience than Upcoming.org, a site that incorporates very little interactivity. In an online market already saturated with content, Marstall's creation is proof that the easiest way for fans to find music news is also often the simplest.

"Early on, I was designing everything as I'd like to experience it," says Marstall, who estimates Tourfilter receives an average of 10,000 unique users a week, in dozens of cities across the country. "The more corporate, the bigger a site is, the more bloated and useless it becomes."

Also different from Ticketmaster and Upcoming.org on Tourfilter there are no advertisements, no gaudy Flash presentations, no extraneous content. Instead, there's a spare, uncluttered interface, with a box for registered users to plug in their favorite bands. As each band is entered, Tourfilter suggests other acts that fit a similar profile; these bands, in turn, can be added to the user's list with a single click. From there, members use an added layer of functionality -- including social-networking functions and streaming audio recommendations -- to reach out to like-minded users, discover new bands, and keep abreast of tour schedules. This winter, Marstall also began experimenting with a podcast, as well an option that allows Boston users to receive text messages of that evening's concerts.

Marstall, who cites Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark as a major influence, has no commercial sponsors and considers Tourfilter a full-time job (he does consulting work on the side to support himself). As a result, he says, the site has "become almost like a novel. I'm the only one working on it, and I'm able to think, on a personal level, of what a user would want to see."

A similar aesthetic prevails at Tourb.us, which was created by Champion and Elliott as an entry in a competition sponsored by local venture firm Y Combinator . Tourb.us didn't snag the top prize -- funding for the project -- but Champion, who works for IBM, says he and Elliott were enthusiastic enough to bankroll the site on their own.

"Both of us had been music fans forever, and we were tired of looking through a million websites for concert information," remembers Champion, who puts the site's traffic at 5,000 unique users per week. "We wanted them to notify us." The duo say they didn't become aware of Marstall's site until they met him at a trade show last year, but the three men are on friendly terms.

Tourb.us, which tracks shows in eight major cities , is exceptionally popular among users of Last.fm , a sprawling online social network built for music fans. Among the features on Last.fm is a plug-in called Audioscrobbler , which automatically monitors a user's listening profile. Audioscrobbler can then point that user to fans with similar profiles, or to new, lesser-known music.

Tourb.us users, in turn, can upload their Last.fm profiles onto Tourb.us; in this way, the site not only allows users to track their old favorites but continuously -- and automatically -- updates the profile with new events. The site has a similar upload function for iTunes playlists.

Claire Cramer, a 23-year-old Somerville resident and creator of the Tourb.us user group on Last.fm, says the interaction between the two sites has helped her stay more wired than ever .

"I totally don't pay attention to bands' schedules," she says with a laugh. "So it has been very, very good for me."

Tourb.us and Tourfilter have also been very good for independent bands, who, even 10 years ago, might have struggled to get the word out about their shows.

"Often clubs don't promote smaller acts, and the bands themselves are forced to self-promote," says Honah Lee Milne , a local booker and event coordinator. "Tourfilter is helping to change that."

She went on, "Let's say I've got a band like [local act] the Televangelist & the Architect , who are totally awesome, but not the kind of band who'd typically have a lot of advertising. Tourfilter gives those bands an added push -- and a lot of the musicians I know think it's amazing."

But if sites such as Tourfilter cut through the extra noise of the indie-rock scene, they also contribute to its complexity -- an irony that has not been lost on some users.

"In some ways the Internet has made promotion easy," says local musician Dave Alpert , a frequent user of Tourfilter.com, who lists his own gigs on the site. "And in some ways it's harder than ever -- people have all this stuff, from MySpace to the blogs, flying at them. These days making a personal connection is so rare."

Alpert's concern may be beside the point. As increasing amounts of music continue to flood onto the Web, advertisers and business owners are already looking past the lost personal connections, and into a world where every bit of content can be paired to carefully researched demographics.

"From my perspective, [Tourb.us] future is about local advertising -- concerts occur in local forums with local audiences, so the site could become fertile ground for highly targeted messaging to its members," says Lee Black , a consultant for Southborough-based marketing firm Management Insight Technologies . "For example, Ticketmaster's online tickets come with local ads embedded on the ticket. . . . So the opportunity for Tourb.us seems similar."

Marstall, Elliott, and Champion, though, maintain their sites are still labors of love. Neither Tourb.us nor Tourfilter has made any money for their creators; Elliott and Champion, in fact, maintain the site in their spare time, and Marstall says he cannot see handing over Tourfilter to investors in the near future.

"I don't want to change the essence of the product, which is geared on such a personal level," Marstall says. "If you have to buy traffic, your idea isn't worth much."