Shazam, an app popular for identifying the music source by just listening to a few seconds of audio, has added another cool trick to its kitty. The Apple-owned app now offers a neat concert discovery feature that doles out information about any upcoming concerts and tickets for a nearby show featuring the song it just looked up, or the artist behind it.
Talking about artists, Shazam users can now head over to an artist’s page in the app to check out time and venue details of their upcoming live shows, tour calendar, and other relevant concert details. Moreover, there’s also an option to mark the dates of interest in one’s own calendar.
The dedicated concert pages are now available on the official Shazam website, and in the mobile apps for both Android and iOS. The app is sourcing all that information from Bandsintown, a platform for cataloging music events used by everyone from music fans to artists and event managers.
A convenient ticket sale outlet for artists
Thanks to its partnership with Shazam, artists can now put all their concert and tour-related information on the music recognition service. And thankfully, the process is not complicated either. Artists simply have to submit the relevant event details on their Bandsintown profile, and all that information will automatically be pulled to their artist page on Shazam.
While the new Shazam feature is great for artists, it comes at an opportune time, just as COVID-19 restrictions are easing and music fests are returning to their usual fervor. Providing a dashboard for event discovery in one of the most popular music apps out there is a clever move to keep users hooked, gain new ones, and yes, make some money while at it.
Financial details of the partnership between Bandsintown and Apple haven’t been disclosed yet. But it is yet another sign that Apple is trying to forge a closer relationship with artists. Last year, Apple revealed that its music streaming platform pays nearly double that of rivals like Spotify, based on the pay per stream metric.
Another solid business move by Apple
Apple says other platforms maintain a tiered system of payouts for music labels, but Apple Music maintains a 52% headline rate for all labels. As per a report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple pays a penny per stream. As for Spotify, Business Insider reports that the payout falls anywhere between $.003 and $.005 per stream.
Neither platform is the highest-paying option for artists out there, Apple still has a sizeable advantage over the latter. Moreover, Spotify has lately drawn a lot of heat from artists demanding fair compensation for their music. With the latest Shazam move, Apple is ensuring that it is closer to artists than ever before, with Apple Music earning them streaming money while Shazam helps them hawk concert tickets.
Spotify also offers a similar feature that lets users discover concerts. Just head over to an artist’s profile page, locate the On Tour option and hit the See All Concerts button. Users can also narrow down the concert recommendations based on a city of their choice.
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