How to get the most out of your phone at music festivals
A collection of applications to prepare for concerts, identify the songs playing, and remember them afterwards, in an era when we listen to more music than ever but it's increasingly difficult to truly listen to it.
BarcelonaSummer is the season for concerts and festivals, and your mobile phone has become the tool that accompanies the entire process: before, during, and after each performance. It's not just about taking photos or recording vertical videos for social media of questionable quality. There's an ecosystem of applications specifically designed for music lovers that allow you to prepare for a concert, identify an unknown song, or keep a record of what you've seen and heard. Most are available as web applications and facilitate blocking the tracking codes included in apps for Android and iOS.
Knowing what was played
The service most linked to concerts is Setlist.fm, a collaborative wiki that collects the actual setlists that artists play at each concert. It contains over 10 million setlists from over 465,000 artists, and allows you to create a personal profile to register which concerts you have attended; mine is at setlist.fm/concerts/albertcuesta. From this data, the application generates automatic statistics: which is the song an artist has played the most times or how many times you have seen them live. Before a concert, consulting a tour's setlist allows you to know if an artist plays their most well-known songs or risks new material, and comparing setlists from different cities allows you to anticipate surprises before they reach home. Music journalists use Setlist.fm to prepare reviews; fans, to decide if it's worth risking seeing an artist two nights in a row. My only objection to Setlist.fm is that since 2011 it has been owned by the giant Live Nation, which can thus show us promotions for future performances.
Knowing which song is playing
A second block of applications serves to resolve the doubt of which song is playing at a given moment. Shazam, owned by Apple since 2017, exceeds 300 million monthly active users and has already accumulated more than 100,000 million recognitions since its inception. It works by acoustic fingerprint: it compares the frequency peaks of the actual recording with a database, and for this reason it needs to hear the original song, even if it's playing with background noise. SoundHound does something similar but with a relevant technical difference: it can identify a hummed or sung song, not just the original recording, because it compares the abstract melody instead of the concrete audio. The Hum to Search function from Google does exactly the same, humming, whistling, or singing for 10 or 15 seconds to the web search engine, although its database for this use is much smaller than Shazam's. SoundHound has diverted a good part of its business towards voice artificial intelligence for cars and restaurants, and its revenue almost doubled in 2025, to 168.9 million dollars; music identification, which was born in 2007 under the name of Midomi, has remained as just another feature within a much broader product.
Understand the lyrics
A third group of tools serves to delve deeper into what we already listen to or have identified. Genius is a large collaborative collection of lyrics and annotated musical knowledge: users and artists add explanations about the meaning of verses, sound samples, and hidden references. It was born in 2009 under the name Rap Genius and continues to be very much alive, with milestones like the 17 million visits the page about the opening verse of Kendrick Lamar's Not like us received last year. Previously, there was already Songfacts, created in 1999 by a North American radio host to compile data about songs to prepare his own programs; since then, a team of journalists has interviewed thousands of authors to document who wrote each song, how it was recorded, and what it really means. In Catalan, ViaSona has covered the same ground for over a decade, with an encyclopedia that exceeds 100,000 indexed songs.
When it's time to sing, Spotify displays synchronized lyrics on the mobile screen, content that actually comes from Musixmatch, an Italian company that supplies the world's largest lyrics catalog (over 12 million songs in over 250 languages) to Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. It should be clarified that this synchronization is done manually for each recording, so a live version or a remix may not match the desired lyrics.
Follow the tour, catalog the collection
The ecosystem doesn't end here. Bandsintown, which syncs with Spotify or Apple Music to know which artists you follow, claims to have over 100 million registered fans and notifies you when any of them announce a tour nearby. Discogs is used to catalog vinyl and CD collections and calculates their market value. Apple Music Sing turns any song into a karaoke with adjustable vocals and, since the last update, allows you to turn your iPhone into a microphone connected to the Apple TV.
Keeping track of everything
If every December you wait for Spotify to give you your Wrapped listening history, you'll be interested in Last.fm. Active since 2002, it automatically records (a practice known as scrobbling) every song we listen to on any streaming service or player we link to it, and with this history it builds long-term statistics: most listened-to artists, evolution of musical tastes year after year, matches with other users. My profile can be consulted at last.fm/user/albertcuesta.
Feeling music or listening to it
Hearing music and listening to it are not the same. It is heard when the sound comes from the background, while doing something else; it is listened to when attention is paid to it. Today we hear more music than ever: according to the IFPI's "Engaging with music" report, the weekly average exposure to music has risen to 20.7 hours. But a good part of this exposure is passive. Industry analysts estimate that between 65% and 75% of all listening is background, and among the 16 to 24-year-old audience, short videos like TikTok are already the dominant daily way to engage with music, ahead of any strictly audio streaming service. Committed listeners, those of us who listen to it, are worth much more to the industry than those who only hear it: we are the ones who buy concert tickets and merchandise.
This is where services like Setlist.fm, Genius, or Last.fm make sense: they turn the act of hearing into the act of listening. Registering a concert, reading the explanation of a verse, or reviewing years of music statistics are small gestures, but they all require stopping for a moment and paying attention. Perhaps the difference is not marked by how much music reaches our ears, but by how much we manage to truly listen to.