Electronic music website Resident Advisor recently launched an app for its subscribers. The mobile app provides an easy way for electronic music fans to access the notoriously savvy publication’s listings for clubs, events and concerts.
This free RA Guide app currently works for iPhone platforms only, but an Android version is set to launch in coming weeks. The app provides listings for more than one million artists, venues and parties, and there is a built-in ticket-selling service. Users also have the option of ear-marking their favorite DJ’s and concerts on their mobile devices in order to optimize the app’s personal marketing algorithms. In addition, the app has the ability to scan the iTunes library of subscribers in order to identify what music files are present.
The RA Guide app is emerging into a niche market where players like the London-based Dice app are already active. Product developers expect some competition from these other apps, but the RA Guide is unique in that is focuses primarily on electronic music, and it is based primarily in the major American cities like New York and Chicago.
Paul Clement, co-founder of Resident Advisor, said to reporters from the Guardian that his company’s new app is designed to serve RA’s community of electronic aficionados and dance fans that is already in existence. In fact, this app’s most similar rival is the German app, BeatGuide. Clement also expects to get a lot of activity from users who are deciding to go out on the spur of the moment, rather than scheduling their weekends in advance.
“In some markets like London, maybe New York, for the big shows stuff sells out,” Clement said. “But in loads of markets you know you don’t ever need to pre-buy anything. You can see from our site traffic that by a certain point on a Friday night, the primary use for the site is event listings.”
And a lot of that traffic is mobile. The website has a highly effective interactive design, so this new app is only the logical extension of the website for mobile devices. Especially in urban centers where there is more overall internet traffic coming from mobile devices, not desktop computers. “This is a resource more than anything,” Clement said.
Another important feature of the RA Guide app is that users will be able to purchase tickets using Apple Pay, without needing to whip out their credit cards at all. The app also plans on featuring more social media connectivity, but this aspect is still in development phases.
“For now, the app needs to be refined to what’s going on, and the events. There’s potentially music, potentially editorial, potentially film content, that sort of stuff,” said Clement.
Resident Advisor boasts nearly 2.7 million unique monthly visitors. More than 10 million people have visited since the start of 2015 alone.