ShowScoop launched its so-called ‘Yelp for live music’ online service last summer, serving up a Web app to help gig-goers assess which bands and artists can really cut it on stage.
Well, now it has officially landed on mobile too, in the form of an iOS app called ShowScoop Concerts.
How it works
While Songkick lets you find live music based on your music collection, ShowScoop fills in the gap afterwards, letting users rate how a band or artist performed. It also integrates with Instagram for users to illustrate with photos on both ShowScoop and Instagram simultaneously.
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You can either sign up with your Facebook credentials – which it evidently prefers – or opt for good old-fashioned email, which it calls “Old Skool”, thus making folk like me feel, well, old.
It’s really very easy to figure out – you can search by artist name, and scroll to a concert you’ve just been to and give them a rating out of five for Stage Presence, Crowd Interaction, Sound Quality and Visual Effects. It does invite you to upload a photo too, but it’s not mandatory.
It’s a pretty simple concept, and one that has been well executed, though as with any new initiative such as this, the real value is in the content…which requires lots of users and the reviews that they bring.
As things stand, the service on the whole suffers somewhat from a shortage of reviews, with global heavyweights such as Coldplay managing four reviews, Bruce Springsteen notching up one and Bob Dylan gaining zero.
That said, ShowScoop offers a sufficiently compelling product that should lure users on board, though when it reaches that hockey stick-growth tipping point remains to be seen. For now, live music-lovers can browse a pretty impressive back catalogue of gigs, dating from last month all the way back to whenever – so if you were at Springsteen’s 1978 Riverfront Coliseum gig in Cincinnati, well, now’s the time to tell the world what you thought.
Besides it serving as a potentially useful tool to know who’s hot and who’s not, it is also a social network of sorts, that lets you see what others thought of a gig you were at, and even ‘follow’ them on ShowScoop. Another great potential use case will also surely come at music festivals, when you’ve not heard of anyone on the bill beyond the headliners.
“There isn’t anything that taps into the wisdom of crowds and allows users to quantitatively assess a show,” explains Micah Smurthwaite, founder of ShowScoop. “Right now I can watch YouTube videos or read blogs to see if an artist puts on a good live show – that’s a lot of work if I am trying to make a festival schedule, or if I’m trying to decide wether to see the opening act. Once enough reviews get posted, it will be easy to lookup an artist profile and instantly know if the artist is a good live show or not.”
Based in San Diego, ShowScoop launched in beta for the Web last August, and in that time has added more than two million live events. The iOS app is free to download now.
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