Apple Music and Maps Add New Concert Discovery Tools

Apple is bringing new live music discovery features to Apple Music and Maps, the company announced on Tuesday, with Apple Maps launching city-specific music guides featuring curated concert venue lists, while Apple Music is now making playlists tied to artists’ ongoing set lists for their tours.

Apple Music’s new feature, called Set Lists, also provides upcoming dates for artists’ concerts with links to buy tickets. With Set Lists, Apple Music is looking to catch up with Spotify and its Live Events hub, which got an update last year and offers similar curation and ticket link features. (A few months after its update, Spotify tested its own ticketing service; Apple has made no indication it would be rolling out any similar plan.) TikTok launched a similar feature of its own last year, partnering with Ticketmaster to try and sell tickets directly on TikTok. As digital companies continue to capitalize on artist-fan interactions and commerce, features like these are growing increasingly more common.

Beyond Set Lists, users can also browse upcoming shows and buy tickets for specific venues through Apple Maps’ Music Guides. The Music Guides are available in more than a dozen cities around the world including Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. The lists can be broader and found for multiple cities such as for dance clubs, or more tailored to a city’s specific musical history, like New York’s hip-hop venues, Berlin’s classical music venues or Chicago’s jazz and blues clubs. This isn’t Apple’s first feature looking to get closer to music in individual cities: Apple Music launched city charts displaying the most streamed music in cities around the world in 2021.

Apple’s concert discovery features come as the live music business continues to bounce back since the pandemic. While ticketing remains a hot-button topic as fans air out frustrations with Ticketmaster and push for improvements, that hasn’t stopped them from buying as Live Nation posted a record-breaking $3.1 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2023, and there’s a flurry of demand for ongoing and upcoming tours this year from Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Drake, and Bruce Springsteen.