Apple helps you discover gigs in Maps and Music. A feature that Spotify has been offering for several years now.
Apple wants to go beyond the simple broadcast of live music by offering you to find it “in real life”. The apple brand has added features of discovery of concerts in its Apple Maps and Apple Music apps. In Maps, you’ll find over 40 “Guides” highlighting upcoming gigs in 14 major cities around the world. This might help you decide where to go when you arrive in a city or discover a scene you don’t know. You can also see upcoming shows at these venues via a Shazam discovery module that pulls its information from Bandsintown.
Apple helps you discover gigs in Maps and Music
Apple Music, for its part, also includes this Shazam module to view an artist’s upcoming shows. If one of your favorite artists is on stage soon, it might make you decide to buy tickets. There’s also a Set Lists section where you can listen to songs played at certain gigs while you enquire.
These two new experiences are available now. These novelties are not entirely surprising. Apple has long emphasized human content selection in Music, such as with many custom playlists and other DJ mixes. These integrations extend the strategy to support gatherings in physics. Maps also has Guides for food, shopping and travel. A coordinated move for Maps and Music is quite unique, however, with the company betting it can drive interest across both services by leveraging gigs.
A feature that Spotify has offered for several years now
In any case, this is a function that Apple Music’s great rival, Spotify, has been offering for several years. In 2015, the company began recommending concerts based on your listening habits using Songkick’s concert discovery services. Since then, Spotify has incorporated more information around live events into its app – now artist pages often have full details of upcoming gigs, with those in your area highlighted. We don’t yet know how this feature is implemented by Apple, but the integration into Maps seems like a very good way to use the Guides feature that was introduced a few years ago now.
