How great would it be if, instead of sitting on your couch prepping for another super exciting night of putting back a bottle of Pinot Gris and skipping through tracks on an old Spotify playlist, you and your friends could go check out some real, live music at a local venue? How great would it be if you could discover that concert via your smartphone–without ever having to leave your couch?
Enter Timbre, a location-based music app that enables music lovers to find live bands. The Boston-based startup announced Thursday a huge update to the truly beautiful app that allows users to stay tuned into the tastes of fellow fans and friends, save their must-see shows, receive alerts for their very favorite artists and search for custom directions and maps to venues. And the best part? That's the just the beginning.
The update, which will be available today in the App Store, lets users easily star, or bookmark, shows they're interested in to create a personalized list and remember favorite past shows. Users can also see what future concerts their clique is eying.
"You don't go to concerts by yourself," shared Andrea Squitieri, director of marketing at Timbre. And now with the app, you can partake in your friends' excitement of discovering a sweet upcoming show just as you share in the joy of attending it with friends. "It's just as interesting to see what your friends are looking at as it is to just look through yourself," she said.
If you ever do get tired of thumbing through the list of upcoming bands (which is hard to do, given the update's mesmerizing, pretty paradox scroll), not to worry: the app is now able to make personalized recommendations based on your previously attended concerts and starred shows. Say you bookmarked the Lumineers, for example. The next time Of Monsters and Men–a similarly folky band–plans to come to town, Timbre [could] let you know. That way, you can nab seats early through the app's easy-to-use mobile ticket purchasing option.
The newest version also brands Timbre as more of a destination for music listening rather than simply exploring. Typically, when you click on a concert, the genre-free app brings up the show's location, date and time details, as well as a clip of the band's most popular song. Now if you log in to Spotify Premium, you'll be able to access the entire song to get more of a feel for the band's sound (you also still have the option to buy and download the song on iTunes, too.)
Squitieri also said that the Timbre team is currently working on building out custom city show recommendation lists. "We're bubbling up content by area," Squitieri explained. "For example, music bloggers and festivals. We'll give them better real estate and allow them to be editors in that city or region."
Today, a national list of concert recommendations will be available, but Dallas and New York City's custom lists are on their way, and Boston's not far behind.
"We plan to keep pushing on our road map and expanding on what we've just updated," Squitieri said of Timbre's future. She also hinted about a tastemaker program in top music areas, which would allow for users to follow their favorite big music people. "We have some really interesting partnerships coming into fruition."
Download Timbre and up your concert-going game, and you might even see Squitieri or CTO Matt Bridges out at a show one night. While Squitieri favors americana and indie like the Lumineers and Mumford and Sons, Bridges is "a huge Phish fan."
Well, I don't know about Phish...but I'm a huge Timbre fan. Coming from Nashville, where awesome live music is practically ubiquitous, I've certainly gone through a withdrawal period in Beantown (you can only listen to Ke$ha and Kanye for so many nights in a row, right? Boston's bar scene would disagree with me.) With its slick, simple interface and one-stop-shop show information, Timbre is the ideal fix.
Since its founding in September 2012, the startup has raised $360,000 in funding from Atlas Venture, Boston Seed Capital and Bantam Group. The app is available in 36 countries and in 22 different languages.
TIMBRE from Timbre App on Vimeo.
