Spotify now recommends live concerts based on your listening history

Spotify’s flexing its algorithmic muscles today with the news that it’s launching a new music-recommendation tool … for live concerts.

Launching today for Android and iOS users, the new Concerts feature analyzes your listening history and tells you when your favorite artists are playing at a venue nearby, with tour date information provided by Songkick.

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If this all sounds familiar, well, you’re probably thinking about Spotify’s existing tie-in with Songkick, the London-based startup that delivers live tour dates by analyzing your entire music collection (both offline and online). Songkick already let you connect your Spotify account on both iPhone and the Web so it could access your online library. But today’s news sees Spotify tap Songkick’s arsenal of live concert data and sidestep the need for users to interact directly with Songkick.

Moreover, the new Concerts feature doesn’t just give you tour date information for every artist you’ve saved to your account, or listened to just once. It’s more about personalizing suggestions based on what you actively listen to, which includes artists that are similar to what you listen to. Recommendations should improve over time, too.

To access the new Concerts area, open the Browse tab in the Spotify app and hit “Concerts.” It will default to your current location, but if you’re on the move, you can change the search-area manually. If you see a concert you’d like to attend, you can click through and buy tickets directly from Songkick on the Web.

Music + Data

Today’s news is consistent with Spotify’s big push to help its users discover new music, and it comes just a few months after it introduced a weekly playlist of recommended songs based on your listening habits. Spotify’s music-recommendation initiatives are powered by the Echo Nest, a music-intelligence and data company it acquired last year. This has led Spotify to introduce a number of experimental tools such as Found Them First and Mix Mates.

Concert recommendations could also be Spotify’s way of sweetening up artists, given that the music-streaming service has been on the receiving end of some harsh criticism over how much it pays in royalties to artists. By encouraging music fans to buy tickets for gigs, it can perhaps claim that it’s working to boost revenues for bands and performers through other means.