Headline Feeds
iConcertCal, an app by iConcertCal Inc., is available for US$2.99 at the App Store.
It's not always easy to find quality live entertainment. The problem isn't necessarily a lack of venues (although that might be the case if you live in a small town) or a shortage of musical acts willing to play in front of a live audience (what else are they going to do to make a living? Sell CDs? Ha!).
The hard part, from a music fan's perspective, is knowing who's playing, where, and when. There are zillions of Web sites out there that do event roundups (just look at your local weekly, really). Most venues, from the divey-est dive clubs to city-sized stadiums, at least have an online calendar with upcoming events. And you can always just ask the Beast Itself, Ticketmaster, which shows you can look forward to paying giant service fees to see in the near future.
The down side to doing that is you usually have to wade through a lot of shows you're really not interested in before you find something worth going to.
iConcertCal is an application that's been available for a while for the PC and Mac platforms, and to date it's seen over half a million downloads. It's an iTunes plug-in that gives you a personalized list of upcoming events in your area, based on the artists in your library. It's now also available as an iPhone app, which works in the U.S., UK and Canada.
Entertainment Tonight
iConcertCal for iPhone digs into the music stored on your iPhone to figure out the artists you like. It also notes where you via GPS. It automatically cross-references that info with online data about who's playing when and gives you a list of concerts sorted by date.
Click on any entry, and you're given a set of options. "Tickets" kicks you over to a Web site for purchasing (usually Ticketmaster); "Email It" cues up a pre-written email with concert details and links that you can send to friends; and "Map" shows you where the venue is located. I presumed "Listen" would just shuffle you back to the iPod app so you can listen to a song from this artist stored on your phone, but where would the money be in that? Instead, "Listen" takes you to your iTunes app, where you can buy an over-the-air download of that act's latest material.
It looks like this app searches out concerts for all the artists in your library, not just the ones you play often or the ones from whom you own just one or two songs, though you can manually tell the app not to look for shows from a given artist anymore (we all have our shyPod moments, after all). And it looks up the artist regardless of when, where and how you got the song -- Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) yesterday, iTunes last year, Napster in November of '99, etc.
If you don't want iConcertCal to limit you to musicians you already know, you can select "All Shows," which gives you a long list of acts playing today and into the future at everything from small clubs to major arenas. You can also sort by venues to see a list of locations sorted either by name or their distance from your current location. A search function gives you info on whatever artist or location you want to know about.
Also, if you have the iConcertCal iTunes plug-in on your home computer, there's an option to sync all the artists in your library to the iPhone app. That way, the information you get isn't limited to what's present on your iPhone, which is great if you have a small-capacity phone and a huge library at home.
Bottom Line
This app and its desktop counterpart will for now on be one of the first places I look for live music. It's incredibly convenient. The only nits I could manage to pick with it are really pretty minor.
A few odd entries had me wondering about the app's reliability. For instance, iConcertCal told me an band was playing two shows at the Hollywood Palladium -- Aug. 30 and Sept. 1. The Palladium's own site, however, only listed the Aug. 30 show -- no event was displayed for Sept. 1.
Sometimes clicking on a concert date wouldn't give me the option to buy tickets; instead, it would offer to let me look for "Web Info." Doing that sometimes took me to a site called "JamBase," which was painfully slow for iConcertCal to load. However, I was given the option to view the site in Safari, which loaded just fine and took me to a place to get tickets after a few clicks.
Finally, I couldn't figure out where exactly iConcertCal gets its information. Not saying I distrust it; I'm just curious.
But like I said -- minor quarrels. iConcertCal is worth the price for
music lovers who want a personalized and easily accessed list of
upcoming nearby concerts from artists they like.
