This New App Helps You Revisit Great Concerts

Enjoying live music can take a host of forms: maybe you’re a dedicated Coachella attendee, or perhaps your tastes lean more towards DIY venues or jazz clubs. Some things about a love of music differ considerably from person to person, but the intensity is a common element if ever there was one.

And if you’ve ever attended a memorable concert, you might want to revisit the experience sonically at a later date. In some cases, there are archives for that — places like NYCTaper that maintain an archive of live music recordings. In an article for The New York Times last year, Marc Hogan chronicled the growing popularity of Setlist.fm, which had — as of the article’s publication — records of over nine million performances.

What if there was a way to bring all of that information together? That’s what a new app called Gigs — from the creators of the music discovery app Now Playing — aims to do. As TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reports, Gigs can import data from services like the aforementioned Setlist.fm, along with photos and videos someone may have taken at the event itself.

The technology behind Gigs makes use of Apple’s Foundation Models to access data on artists and set lists from an image of a concert ticket. Gigs also includes some other features designed to appeal to frequent concertgoers, including a place to store venue memberships and notifications when artists you’ve seen before return to your area. As a longtime Android user, the fact that this app is — so far, anyway — iOS-only has me keeping my fingers crossed for its expansion to a new platform.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal.

At InsideHook, he has…