wax&wires

Bandloop iPhone App

One of the more prominent show finders, Bandloop, has released an iPhone app for use on the go. Unlike it’s standard computer-based counterpart, the iPhone rendition does not load up your user profile to access your favorite bands or show you concerts that are more than a day or two out. The truth is, that’s not what it’s intended for. Bandloop created the app to show you what bands were playing around your current location around the time that you found yourself there. To show you dates the distant future would be pointless, since your location would undoubtedly change before then. The same is true for listing only your favorite bands, who aren’t likely to be playing right around the corner at any given moment.

Where I could see the app picking up some steam would be if they built in a recommendation engine. They could then load your profile from your standard Bandloop account, and find local shows that have similar styles to your favorite music. You could even have some sort of “tolerance” filter to force the app to stick more closely to bands you like, or show any band if you open the filter up all the way. I talked about that a bit in my article on Squeakerbox. Basically, users need a way to find music that they’ll actually like, not just the random 100 bands that are playing in your city at any given moment (which quickly proves a problem in busy music cities like SF, NY, Chicago, etc). Filtering by genre would even be a step towards a better product.

The Bandloop App is still worth it though, as it’s free. You can download it from the iTunes App Store here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 11:00 pm. It is filed under wires and tagged with app, bandloop, iphone, local, show finder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.