Browse Upcoming Shows With Rhapsody Concerts App
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Spotify encourages third-party developers to build desktop apps on its platform, but Rhapsody has a different vision: to craft its own Rhapsody-powered apps beyond its main listening app.
Rhapsody Concerts is the second of these (after Rhapsody SongMatch), combining the ability to find concerts based on your location; stream playlists of songs from the opening acts to the headliners; and, if the music sounds good, to buy tickets to the show via SeatGeek, a service which takes your search and aggregates the results from over 60 other providers.
After testing this app, we’re hard-pressed to see why any Rhapsody subscriber wouldn’t give it a try unless, for some reason, they simply cannot countenance the idea of seeing music performed live, because it provides such an efficient way to find out — and listen to — the bands that are set to appear in your town soon. However, unlike most other concert-traffic apps, Rhapsody Concerts doesn’t take into account the music you listen to, so it might be better suited to small-town music fans, whose show selection is already fairly limited by location.
If you don’t subscribe to Rhapsody, you can still use this app too, but you’ll miss out on its best feature: the ability to hear songs from the bands playing each of the shows. The app doesn’t allow non-subscribers to play samples of that music, although Rhapsody does offer a 14-day free trial.
Right off the bat, Rhapsody Concerts’s clean interface shows you the live music events near your location:
Tap any show of interest and you’ll see all of the artists playing that night (in this case, just Fleetwood Mac). From there, Venue Details drops a pin on Google Maps for you, so you can save the location for when you’re trying to get to the venue.
If you choose to buy tickets online, the app takes you to a SeatGeek page, Rhapsody’s primary partner for this app, in your Safari browser. Wow, these Fleetwood Mac tickets are pricy:
You can also pop over to a Calendar section to check out upcoming shows, browse nearby venues, and check out playlists directly to let your ears do the deciding. In addition, the app isn’t only good for your home town, as other areas, cities and venues can be searched from the app (in other words, if you’re traveling, you can enter the name of your destination to see who’s playing there – edit thanks to Jaime Minney of Rhapsody). You can also increase the search radius for concerts to up to 200 miles. Road trip!
As mentioned, the neatest aspect of this app is its ability to play you music from the bands on each line-up, leveraging Rhapsody’s ability to stream subscribers just about any song on-demand. It also makes Concerts a good app for people who know they want to see live music, but aren’t obsessed with discovering bands on blogs throughout the day. (The super music-obsessive types already know what shows they want to see for the most part anyway.)
It’s also worth pointing out that Concerts also acts as a discovery tool, of sorts. As you’re listening to playlists representing each upcoming show in your area, you can access all of the songs and albums by that band on Rhapsody — but only if you’re a subscriber. Non-subscribers can use most of Rhapsody Concert‘s features, except for the playlists. (A free 14-day trial is available, with credit card required.)
Overall, even though it doesn’t take musical taste into account, Rhapsody Concerts does a fine job of letting Rhapsody subscribers use their ears to find live music, then buy tickets fairly seamlessly. Now you have one less excuse for not seeing more live music.
