Tips on how to get essentially the most out of your cellphone at music festivals

BarcelonaSummer is the season for concert events and festivals, and your cell phone has grow to be the software that accompanies your complete course of: earlier than, throughout, and after every efficiency. It’s not nearly taking pictures or recording vertical movies for social media of questionable high quality. There’s an ecosystem of functions particularly designed for music lovers that permit you to put together for a live performance, establish an unknown track, or hold a report of what you have seen and heard. Most can be found as internet functions and facilitate blocking the monitoring codes included in apps for Android and iOS.

Knowing what was performed

The service most linked to concert events is Setlist.fm, a collaborative wiki that collects the precise setlists that artists play at every live performance. It incorporates over 10 million setlists from over 465,000 artists, and lets you create a private profile to register which concert events you will have attended; mine is at setlist.fm/concert events/albertcuesta. From this information, the applying generates computerized statistics: which is the track an artist has performed essentially the most occasions or what number of occasions you will have seen them dwell. Before a live performance, consulting a tour’s setlist lets you know if an artist performs their most well-known songs or dangers new materials, and evaluating setlists from totally different cities lets you anticipate surprises earlier than they attain dwelling. Music journalists use Setlist.fm to arrange evaluations; followers, to resolve if it is price risking seeing an artist two nights in a row. My solely objection to Setlist.fm is that since 2011 it has been owned by the large Live Nation, which may thus present us promotions for future performances.

Knowing which track is taking part in

A second block of functions serves to resolve the doubt of which track is taking part in at a given second. Shazam, owned by Apple since 2017, exceeds 300 million month-to-month energetic customers and has already amassed greater than 100,000 million recognitions since its inception. It works by acoustic fingerprint: it compares the frequency peaks of the particular recording with a database, and for that reason it wants to listen to the unique track, even when it is taking part in with background noise. SoundHound does one thing related however with a related technical distinction: it could possibly establish a hummed or sung track, not simply the unique recording, as a result of it compares the summary melody as a substitute of the concrete audio. The Hum to Search operate from Google does precisely the identical, buzzing, whistling, or singing for 10 or 15 seconds to the net search engine, though its database for this use is way smaller than Shazam’s. SoundHound has diverted a great a part of its enterprise in the direction of voice synthetic intelligence for vehicles and eating places, and its income virtually doubled in 2025, to 168.9 million {dollars}; music identification, which was born in 2007 below the title of Midomi, has remained as simply one other characteristic inside a much wider product.

Understand the lyrics

A 3rd group of instruments serves to delve deeper into what we already take heed to or have recognized. Genius is a big collaborative assortment of lyrics and annotated musical information: customers and artists add explanations in regards to the that means of verses, sound samples, and hidden references. It was born in 2009 below the title Rap Genius and continues to be very a lot alive, with milestones just like the 17 million visits the web page in regards to the opening verse of Kendrick Lamar’s Not like us obtained final 12 months. Previously, there was already Songfacts, created in 1999 by a North American radio host to compile information about songs to arrange his personal applications; since then, a crew of journalists has interviewed hundreds of authors to doc who wrote every track, the way it was recorded, and what it actually means. In Catalan, ViaSona has coated the identical floor for over a decade, with an encyclopedia that exceeds 100,000 listed songs.

When it is time to sing, Spotify shows synchronized lyrics on the cellular display, content material that truly comes from Musixmatch, an Italian firm that provides the world’s largest lyrics catalog (over 12 million songs in over 250 languages) to Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. It needs to be clarified that this synchronization is completed manually for every recording, so a dwell model or a remix could not match the specified lyrics.

Follow the tour, catalog the gathering

The ecosystem would not finish right here. Bandsintown, which syncs with Spotify or Apple Music to know which artists you comply with, claims to have over 100 million registered followers and notifies you when any of them announce a tour close by. Discogs is used to catalog vinyl and CD collections and calculates their market worth. Apple Music Sing turns any track right into a karaoke with adjustable vocals and, because the final replace, lets you flip your iPhone right into a microphone related to the Apple TV.

Keeping monitor of the whole lot

If each December you watch for Spotify to offer you your Wrapped listening historical past, you may be desirous about Last.fm. Active since 2002, it robotically data (a follow referred to as scrobbling) each track we take heed to on any streaming service or participant we hyperlink to it, and with this historical past it builds long-term statistics: most listened-to artists, evolution of musical tastes 12 months after 12 months, matches with different customers. My profile might be consulted ultimately.fm/person/albertcuesta.

Feeling music or listening to it

Hearing music and listening to it aren’t the identical. It is heard when the sound comes from the background, whereas doing one thing else; it’s listened to when consideration is paid to it. Today we hear extra music than ever: in response to the IFPI’s “Engaging with music” report, the weekly common publicity to music has risen to twenty.7 hours. But a great a part of this publicity is passive. Industry analysts estimate that between 65% and 75% of all listening is background, and among the many 16 to 24-year-old viewers, quick movies like TikTok are already the dominant every day option to interact with music, forward of any strictly audio streaming service. Committed listeners, these of us who take heed to it, are price rather more to the trade than those that solely hear it: we’re those who purchase live performance tickets and merchandise.

This is the place companies like Setlist.fm, Genius, or Last.fm make sense: they flip the act of listening to into the act of listening. Registering a live performance, studying the reason of a verse, or reviewing years of music statistics are small gestures, however all of them require stopping for a second and paying consideration. Perhaps the distinction just isn’t marked by how a lot music reaches our ears, however by how a lot we handle to really take heed to.