Shazam can now suggest that you leave your house to listen to music. The song-identification app that Apple bought in 2017 is listing nearby concerts from artists whose work it identifies.
The feature announced Tuesday uses the database of Bandsintown, a New York tour-promotion service that says it tracks shows at more than 24,000 music venues. Tap Shazam’s big, light-blue button to identify a song, and Shazam will list matching concerts at nearby places.
Since Apple hasn’t updated Shazam’s online help to document how this new feature works, I tried it with a copy of Shazam running on an iPad mini 5 and limited to accessing only my approximate location.
Playing Foo Fighters’ “Times Like These” on my Mac led Shazam to inform me that Dave Grohl’s band is playing Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, on May 16 and May 18, and Superchunk’s “Detroit Has A Skyline” yielded a suggestion about that indie-rock group’s April 12 show at the Black Cat in D.C.
But there are temporal and geographic limits to these tips. For example, Shazam recognized the D.C. indie-rock band Jawbox’s “Motorist” and provided a list of upcoming shows that stopped at July 22—one day before this group is scheduled to play the Black Cat.
And Shazam identifying Shawn Colvin’s “Sunny Came Home” did not yield a tip about the singer-songwriter’s April 23 appearance at the Rams Head in Annapolis, even though that’s about the same distance as Columbia from much of the D.C. area.
Shazam’s new feature doesn’t have a counterpart to Google’s “Now Playing” music-identification feature, which only suggests other apps in which you can buy or stream the song in question.
Among other major streaming music services, Spotify will list upcoming concerts for artists you’re listening to but reserves this feature for paying subscribers.
