The act of keeping up with musical artists used to entail road-tripping around the country and following bands to their shows. Today, however, the Internet allows fans to exert much less energy when looking for a concert. Simply checking the touring schedule of individual bands’ websites seems tedious, as in this era, people are used to instant information. Bandsintown, an increasingly popular phone app, has made it even easier to follow bands.

The app, symbolized by a geometrically shaped hand clenched into a rock n’ roll sign, is perhaps the most convenient method of staying up to date on upcoming music shows in a certain area. When downloaded on a phone, the app imports all of the artist names in the phone’s music library. Through this process, the phone owner automatically “follows” each of the bands in his or her music library. Bands and artists not in a user’s library can also be manually added. The user then enters a zip code and selects the radius within which he or she wants to view upcoming concerts. Every time the app is opened, the selection of future concerts is updated.

The app has a feature that allows users to select a view of either strictly the performances of “tracked artists” from their music library, or of recommended shows as well. This feature is helpful for people in musical ruts, and for those whose favorite bands rarely visit their area.

When a show is selected, an information window appears displaying the date, city and venue of the concert. This feature saves much time, as users can avoid researching each individual event to decide if it is worthwhile. In some cases, tickets are available to be bought through the app with a credit card.

The only conflict users may experience with Bandsintown arises if they download their music from a website that does not name the artist in the artist slot of Itunes. For instance, songs downloaded from Youtube to MP3 converter websites often list the song name as its full title on Youtube. Therefore, the artist or band is listed in the name slot rather than the artist slot, and the artist slot is left blank. In this case, users have to manually enter all of the artists they want to see in concert into Bandsintown in order to follow them. This task, however, is still far less time consuming than searching for individual concerts online.

Bandsintown is perhaps one of the most helpful recent innovations for concert fanatics and music lovers. It is user-friendly, informative and convenient. It has essentially consolidated every musical event-related website into one app, completely eliminating the need for searching online to find shows.