Discovr is a new music discovery app for iPad that shows connections between bands, and with a quick double tap, you can see the musicians’ videos on YouTube and a lot more.
Launched today, the $2.99 app is described as “interactive map of the world of music for iPad,” and we took it for a spin. Take a look at the video above, and you’ll see the graceful graphics showing connections of the bands that you can drag around the screen.
Discovr is like a visual version of Pandora radio, where you can read about all your favorite artists and study the relationships between them. Search for a band or artist, and you’re presented with a diagram of that band or artist depicted as a hub, with related artists connected as circular pics resembling spokes to that hub.
By double-tapping on one of the bands, you’re presented with a wealth of information about each one, including a biography, links to blog posts, places to buy the music, and a variety of YouTube videos of the band (if it’s popular enough). As you get down to third-tier bands and musicians, biographies and videos are not quite as frequent, but even so, the depth of this application is remarkable.
Staying in its diagram mode, it’s surprisingly smart, able to make connections between different hubs, and letting you continue to drill down as the bands get more and more obscure. As I continued exploring, I was able to create a huge tangled web of musicians, with the app often making connections between them that surprised me.
I tried looking up lesser-known jazz musicians, and it was interesting to see the relationships between various soloists. Who played with who? You can often find the answer, and the results were accurate.
Another nice touch is the way Discovr finds songs you have loaded on your iPad, and includes a strip of pictures of them across the bottom of the application, inviting you to start searching your favorite musicians right away.
The application crashed a couple of times when I taxed it too much, and I’m hoping the developers will get to the root of that and fix it as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, I found this to be a fascinating application that helped me understand the relationships between bands, and assisted me in finding new music according to bands that I already like. Fix the instability, and it would be an A-list app.
Find out more about Discovr here.
More About: bands, discovr, hands-on, ipad apps, music discovery, reviews, youtube
