Wow! Over 117,000 posters from over 106,000 bands! That’s a serious collection. Gig Posters, at http://gigposters.com/ has a huge amount of visual music culture that you can slice and dice in a variety of ways.

And I do mean a variety. You can browse by bands or designers. You can search by both of those and by city and venue as well. I did a search for Austin, expecting to get a list of posters. I didn’t. I got a list of 26 venues first: Austin, Austin/Dallas, Houston/Dallas/Austin, etc. The plain Austin had 3800 posters affiliated with it. Yup. Since your searches can bring several possibilities, you might want to try several different keywords, names, etc.

Posters are presented in pages of thumbnails. Click on it and you’ll get a larger version (but sometimes not particularly large at all, and some of posters are very detailed with small type.) Details are on the left with information including the designer, the venue, the band being promoted, the date submitted, and a link to any comments that are available on the poster. (A surprising number of posters had comments. This site has a very vibrant community.) Beneath the poster is code for linking in BB forums or on regular websites (in regular HTML.)

Some of the additional information leads to more links. For example, the designer information about a poster links to all posters from that designer. And that’s how I got to browse posters from a guy named Todd Slater, who does some amazin’ stuff.

In addition to the tens of thousands of gig posters for browsing, the site also has classified ads, active forums, top lists of posters, etc. Premium members ($20/year) get chat, the ability to “favorite” things, access videos, and more. The site even has a book, for crying out loud.

This site doesn’t fit into the definition of a “traditional” art site, unless one is thinking of something like ArtKicksAss.com. And just like AKA, some of the content is absolutely not safe for work, kids, or my poor eyeballs. But a lot of it is intricate and astonishing and just plain great. Todd Slater, for example, or Moctezuma, or R. Marx. Do you like music? Do you like illustration? Do not miss this site.