5 Apps To Discover Who’s Playing in Town

1) Songkick: The site and app provides a dead simple way to track your favorite artists and sends you notifications when one of your tracked artists books a gig in town. The site also lets you browse through your location to find out who’s playing in your city on a particular day. Other than the tracking feature, which works great, the site also recommends you similar artists to start tracking. When visiting their browser site for the first time, it’s much easier to find artists you already know about than to discover new artists that happen to be in your town. If you download their iPhone or Spotify app or integrate with Facebook, Songkick will scan your music to find artists you listen to who have concerts scheduled nearby. 

2) Bandsintown: This app works similarly to Songkick, where you can track artists that you like for upcoming shows. Bandsintown has a very deep integration with Facebook, with many artists keeping a tab on their Facebook Timeline specifically for tour dates through Bandsintown. One great feature included on the website is a “Concert Cloud”—just like a tag cloud, the Concert Cloud tab includes a list of artists with ones that you track in bigger and bolder typeface. Even better, there are three sliders that let you select the date range, distance from you location, and maximum ticket price to narrow down the search results. If you happen to be in a city like New York, where a lot is going on, the list can be a bit hard on the eyes. The customization on the left, however, makes it easier to tweak your searches without navigating to a new page. 

3) Live Nation: The LiveNation Concert Calendar app pulls in your data from Facebook to recommend you shows in your area via Ticketmaster’s concert and comedy show listings. Although it’s not as snazzy as apps like Songkick and Bandsintown in terms of its functionality, TechCrunch’s review says the graphical interface is worth checking out.

4) ConcertCrowd: This app works mostly on your Facebook ‘likes’ to give you concert updates in your area, but you can also follow what your friends are interested in to get more recommendations. ConcertCrowd works off of new music you discover through the app, your current ‘likes’, and your social graph.

5) SeatGeek’s Columbus: Not to be confused with Columbus, Ohio, SeatGeek expanded their product offering to give you personalized live event recommendations. Submit a few of your favorite artists and performers and they’ll do the rest. SeatGeek provides interactive maps of venues to give you the best deals and information on ticket purchases—now they do live event recommendations as well.