Apple wants to go beyond streaming live music to helping you find it in real life. The company has added concert discovery features to both Apple Maps and Apple Music. In Maps, you’ll find over 40 curated “Guides” that spotlight hot concert venues in 14 major cities around the world, such as a techno club in Brooklyn and symphony halls in Vienna. This could help you decide where to go when you’re new in town, or highlight an unfamiliar scene. You can also browse upcoming shows at those venues through a Shazam discovery module that taps info from Bandsintown.
Apple Music, meanwhile, also includes the Shazam module to let you browse a musician’s upcoming shows. If a favorite artist is playing soon, this could help you land tickets. There’s also a Set Lists section where you can listen to tracks played at certain tours (such as Sam Smith’s and Kane Brown’s) while learning about the productions.
Both experiences are available today. The additions aren’t completely surprising. Apple has long emphasized human curation in Music, such as many of its custom playlists and DJ mixes. The integrations expand on that strategy to cover in-person gigs. Maps has also had curated Guides for food, shopping and travel. A coordinated push for Maps and Music is relatively unique, though — the company is clearly betting that it can raise interest in both services by using concerts as a hook.
This is a trick that Apple Music’s main rival Spotify has been doing for years. Back in 2015, the company started recommending concerts based on your listening habits using the Songkick concert discovery services. Since then, Spotify has integrated live event details further into the app — now, artist pages generally all have details on concerts, and they focus on ones that are in your area. We haven’t yet seen how Apple’s integration compares to Spotify, but the Maps integration sounds like a good use of the Guides feature that rolled out a few years ago.
This story originally appeared on Engadget
