In the era of near-infinite entertainment choices, personalization is the key to convenience. There’s just so much to choose from, and so little time. A new iOS app called Artist Radar offers a solution to the content conundrum, allowing users to curate their own personalized feed of the latest updates from their favorite musicians, actors, and writers, notifying the user whenever their artist of choice releases something new.
Artist Radar’s database consists of over six million artists worldwide and over 200,000 events. The database is fully automated, ensuring that once an artist releases a piece of work on iTunes or Amazon its database is immediately updated — and so are you. Independent artists and publishers who have not released music through iTunes or Amazon will be able to sign up for the Artist Radar service beginning early next year.
“We have globally, pretty much, every artist that has ever officially released an album, an eBook or a movie,” says Artist Radar founder Jörg Fehlinger, who recently spoke with DigitalTrends.
Artist Radar’s website claims the service can offer users access to a crazy 28 million media items, arranged in separate tabs linking Music, Videos, TV Shows, Concerts, Ebooks, and Audiobooks. The service also offers updates about DVD and Blu-ray releases, with the intent of adding theatrical movie releases and traditional books to its database down the line, according to Fehlinger.
The user interface for the app is streamlined, and the management of the entertainers’ releases is intuitive. The app allows users to scan their music library to find artists to follow. Users will be able to stream short previews of songs via the built-in iTunes player on Artist Radar’s web app, which is currently in beta form, but not on the iOS app. The song preview functionality will be available in the near future on the app, according to Fehlinger. No Android version of the Artist Radar app is available yet but that is soon to change. “We have started to develop an Android app,” says Fehlinger “It will be released early next year.”
Artist Radar also connects users with ticket reseller Viagogo, the largest ticket reseller in the world, and Eventim, the largest ticket seller in Europe. Similar to new product releases, announcements of concerts will be integrated into the app and users will be notified prior to ticket sale date. Don’t want to travel 1,000 miles to see Drake perform? Artist Radar allows users to select which concert areas they are interested in getting updates on, and their feed will reflect the choice. Fehlinger also confirmed that Ticketmaster and other ticket sellers will be available for Artist Radar users in the next few weeks.
While personalized curation is at the heart of Artist Radar’s appeal, the company also provides a grid of artists other users recently subscribed to in order to promote artist discovery. Fehlinger informed DigitalTrends of Artist Radar’s plans for expanding artist discovery by offering artist recommendations based on users’ interests in the future.
Artist Radar will soon venture into artist partnerships, though Fehlinger is not going to spoil the surprise. “We can say that the artists we are working together have more than half a million Facebook fans and the record label is one of the largest in the world,” according to Fehlinger. Artist Radar is currently available in the Apple App Store and online at the company’s official website.
