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5 Essential Apps for the Summer Music Festival Season

Zuzanna Blaszkiewicz

Zuzanna Blaszkiewicz

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With the summer music festival season upon us, there are a few essential apps for iOS and Android that will help you maximize the experience, from choosing which festival to attend, to preparing for the weather, to capturing and sharing all the memories. Here’s our list of must-have apps for this summer’s music festival season:

1. Bandsintown

5 Essential Apps for the Summer Music Festival Season

Before committing to one festival or another, it might be worth checking whether or not your favorite artists will be there. Apps like Bandsintown or Songkick Concerts for iPhone and Android can definitely help you make that choice. Both apps scan your phone’s music library and other linked music streaming accounts like last.fm and Spotify to give you notifications when your favorite artist or band will be closest to you. You can also search by location, artist or date, so you can plan your festival experience based on who you want to see or when you want to go. With so many music festivals out there, chances are someone you’re dying to see will be at more than one of them, and these apps make it easier to see who’s playing where, and when, without having to go to every website of every music festival to check out the line-up.

2. Shazam

Having said that, music festivals aren’t only for seeing artists you love. They’re also a great opportunity to discover new acts. So what happens when you hear a song, fall in love with it, and have no idea who the band is or what the song is called? You open Shazam! Shazam works when you hold your phone’s microphone to the speaker, where it scans a massive online music database for similar sounds. Standing next to a speaker at a music festival may not be possible (or recommended), but if the music is loud enough (which it should be), the app shouldn’t have a problem recognizing the song. The song will be saved to your tags so that you can look it up later.

3. Weathermob

You’re either going to be baking in the sun, or trudging through the mud, but either way, you want to prepared for any and all sorts of festival weather. There are a ton of great weather apps out there like Weatherbug for iOS and Android, but Weathermob, a new app for iOS, stands out because it uses crowdsourcing to predict the weather. Similar to real-time traffic predictions offered by apps like Waze, Weatherbug has over 100,000 active users reporting on weather conditions, giving a ton of data and a more accurate picture of what weather conditions are (and will most likely be). Plus, it allows users to add photos, share their mood, and suggest weather-appropriate attire. And, what better place to have crowdsourced weather predictions than in the middle of a crowd? Sadly, it’s only available for iOS at the moment.

4. WhatsApp

The hoards of people that attend some of the bigger music festivals means that losing your friends is almost inevitable, and trying to describe that weird art installation you’re standing next to to find your way won’t always cut it. Thankfully, messenger application WhatsApp for iOS and Android has a built-in feature that lets you ‘Share your Location‘ with friends. If you’re the one most likely to drift off into the middle of large crowd, your friend can share his or her location with you. Using GPS location and the in-app map to make your way towards the blue pin will reunite you with your friends.

5. Instagram

The photo filters on photo-sharing app Instagram make it the perfect app to capture and recreate that 1960s free-loving festival feel. With the recent addition of video, you can capture the atmosphere even more viscerally, and of course, put filters on it to make it look cool.

Zuzanna Blaszkiewicz

Zuzanna Blaszkiewicz

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