App of the Month – Bandsintown

For iOS users looking for a great guide to local music, there’s probably no better app than Bandsintown Concerts, available for free from the App Store.

SongCastWhat makes Bandsintown special is the personalized experience. Setup is a breeze, if you allow it to connect to your Facebook account. It will quickly and automatically pull down your location as well as any other information it needs. Then, in a particularly novel twist, it searches your device’s music files to profile what concerts you might be most interested in seeing.

After that, it gives you a cloud-like listing of all the concerts in your area. Artists you have in your collection are in bold, with recommendations in lighter fonts. On the same screen, there’s a simple slider that controls the balance between known acts and those it’s recommending.

The recommendations seemed spot-on, such as correctly guessing I might like to attend Explosions In The Sky despite not having them on my iPod at the moment. It even works as an online music promotion and discovery tool, quickly pulling down graphics, upcoming tour dates, and options to track new artists not currently in your library.

Tapping on a band opens up new options. Depending on availability, it can stream music through Last.FM, Pandora, rdio, Spotify Premium, and Google Play, assuming you have accounts with at least some of these services. It also features vast Facebook integration and sharing options.

List of concerts you’re planning to attend, or might attend, can be quickly built and shared on Facebook, if that’s your sort of thing. In some cases, tickets can even be purchased directly through the app, although of course only through certain partners and venues.

At a price you can’t argue with, Bandsintown is a great online music promotion tool that comes highly recommended.

 

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