In some ways, growing up in the 90s made it easy to stay in touch with bands and concerts in your local area. Every city had one (or a few) music newspapers that would come out weekly, with reviews of new albums and ads for upcoming concerts in town.
By the early 2010s those newspapers had mostly died off, replaced by websites with digital versions with a similar goal. The only catch? A huge variety of sites had appeared, each catering to a slightly different target audience and promising the latest music news.
Suddenly the monopoly on concerts and tour info had gone away, and without subscribing to dozens of sites it became harder to stay in touch. Luckily in recent years a new breed of Concert/Artist tracker apps has popped up, aiming to get you instant alerts whenever one of your favourite bands books a gig – no matter what tour agency or venue they use.
Concert Tracker Apps To The Rescue
For many years I’ve been using Songkick (launched in 2007), which hooks natively into Spotify to know which artists I’m following at any point. I get email notifications when a new gig is announced, including pre-sale announcements to make sure I don’t miss out on tickets. Very cool, and still a great choice for anyone wanting to track local events.
The same year, the Bandsintown app launched with its own version on the same concept. Different processes for sourcing info and different social features, but both found success with well over 10 million users each today. Together they’ve dominated this space, with competition mostly coming from general event trackers such as Eventbrite.
While people have claimed that Songkick’s alerts are more timely, Bandsintown has grown to support artist import from a number of music streaming services (handy if you’re not on Spotify like I am), as well as a Recommendations feature to widen my search to other artists I may not actively follow but may enjoy.
What About When I'm "On Tour"?
No, I don’t mean I’m about to launch a surprise new rock band… But living in Perth (famously skipped over by maning touring artists) means I do enjoy searching out concerts while I’m travelling on holiday.
It didn’t take me long to find a Multiple Locations/Cities feature in both Bandsintown and Songkick, so if I’m going to a single city then I’ll start tracking that location ahead of time to get an idea of who will be around.
I do however enjoy the occasional holiday that will take me from city-to-city, and that’s where things get trickier. On my next East Coast USA trip, I was keen to catch a concert or two if I can line up dates – but I’m in 7+ cities over 4 weeks! That’s a lot of tracking, but luckily I had Bandsintown’s Radius feature to the rescue to let me track a larger area. Within a few minutes I had an alert across Northeastern USA setup, synced to my Spotify artists plus anyone else it may recommend. Way better than keying in artists manually, or signing up to 50 different newsletters to see who is going where!
Other uses for the same feature might be to track your hometown as well as larger cities nearby (Canberra plus Sydney for example), just in case you spot something that is worth a drive. Hope that helps a few other music fans stay in touch through their travels.
