Apple’s local commerce efforts continue to expand. Beyond its ongoing improvements and upgrades to Apple Maps, its latest play is local event discovery. Specifically, it’s bringing music festival and concert listings and notifications to two fitting places: Apple Music and Apple Maps.
Taking those one at a time, Apple Music has a new feature called Set Lists. This lets users check out the set lists for artists that are currently on tour. That includes the set lists themselves, as well as some recorded audio content. The idea is to get fans excited about a band’s upcoming local show.
Beyond music, the Set Lists feature will include content meant to evoke that same excitement, including articles and information about bands and tours. Altogether, it’s meant to be a one-stop shop for content about a given tour, with calls to action or ticketing app integrations to come in the future.
Moving on to the Apple Maps integration, there’s a new concert discovery feature. This is built around “Guides” that are curated by Apple music editors, highlighting music venues and their upcoming shows. This will be powered by Shazam’s concert discovery function and launch initially for 10 cities.
Launchpad
Going deeper on Shazam’s underlying functionality, the company launched its concert discovery capabilities last Spring with the acquisition of artist discovery platform Bandsintown. Now that investment is paying off through Apple’s launchpad to greater scale (financial terms unknown).
Back to Apple, all the above pits it against growing rivals like Spotify. The latter has been assembling functionality over the past few years for concert discovery. This includes its redesign last year that positioned a new Events Feed front and center. Its selling point so far has been personalization.
Notably, Apple is taking a different approach and making its “Guides” less personalized and more curated (very Apple). There are pros and cons of this approach – the pros being greater lean-back discovery, while cons include less user control. It will be for the market to decide which is better.
Meanwhile, we expect more features in the future such as calls to action, transactions, band merch, and other revenue-generating functions (more on that in a bit). Meanwhile, Guides will start rolling out this week in Apple Maps in cities that include Chicago, Detroit, LA, Nashville, NYC, Berlin, London, and Paris.
Strong Foundation.
As for the why?, this move traces back to the reason we often cite when tech giants move into new functional areas: growth. As tech giants mature, it gets harder and harder to find revenue growth. This happens for several reasons, including market saturation, as well as simple math.
For the former, mature companies’ tenure in the market usually mean that their core products are supply-saturated. So growth naturally decelerates as market headroom shrinks. For the latter, percentage growth naturally diminishes when a previous period’s revenue (denominator) grows.
This all points to one thing: revenue diversification. Amazon is the king of this phenomenon, finding new revenue streams in everything from server capacity to advertising to healthcare – big swings. Apple is doing similar as its core revenue stream – iThings – matures and reaches market saturation.
So expect more of the same from Apple (and Google, Amazon, and Meta), including lots of products that relate to local media and commerce. For Apple, it’s already sitting on a strong foundation with the constantly-improving Apple Maps. Look for it to build on that foundation rapidly in the near term.
