By Carolyn Heneghan
With a plethora of artists and events, liner notes and memorabilia, the Concert Vault website and now iPad app aim to augment your experience of live music footage.
The idea began with all-things-music company Wolfgang’s Vault—“Where Live Music Lives”—and their idea to expand upon their Concert Vault website to reach users’ mobile devices. Beginning with Sonos, Android and iPhone apps, this endeavor eventually moved on to the iPad, where they’ve put together the most enveloping app yet.
“This idea was to give people a more robust experience than going to the site on the iPad,” said George Howard, COO and business developer for Wolfgang’s Vault. “It’s a very immersive experience of the product and website, from videos to artist info to photos to all the tracks. It’s the best music experience out there.”
In order to make this idea a reality, they partnered with Groovebug, who would provide them with an already successful platform that would work for their website. Known for their Blue Note app, which features an enormous catalog of jazz footage, Groovebug leapt at the chance to work with Concert Vault, and began their collaboration in October 2012.
“I came across Concert Vault, and they just had such an amazing catalog of music videos and memorabilia—perfect for our platform,” says Groovebug CEO and cofounder Jeremiah Seraphine. “I contacted the CEO of Wolfgang’s Vault and told him about the platform we were developing. They thought it was a great fit as well.”
“[Groovebug has] an approach that they’ve used with others, and we have our own ideas and goals,” says Howard. “But it was very collaborative and great in terms of taking our ideas as they had a fresh set of eyes. We worked well together toward getting the sum greater than the single part.”
The finished product is one that seamlessly blends the two companies’ products and services. From the moment you open the app, you know that you’re in for something unique and unlike any online music experience you’ve had before.
The homepage displays a selection of featured videos in a panel of squares on the left and a catalog of artists on the right. Across the top you’ll find a selection of channels that you can choose from to browse more specific videos to suit your tastes. These currently include rock, blues, jazz, country, folk & bluegrass and indie. Selecting one of these genres will pull up a more specific set of videos and artist catalog.
The amount of artists, streaming videos and curated playlists you’ll find—hundreds of thousands—is nearly overwhelming. You can search specifically for who or what you’re looking for, or you can spend hours skimming over every artist and video they have built in to this expansive app. Plus, once you’ve selected a performance to watch, additional features help to immerse you even more into each artist or video you’ve selected.
“We try to use our platform to build a really immersive experience around music that is 360 degrees,” says Seraphine. “You’re getting videos, really detailed liner notes, images, comments from users, memorabilia—all of which we pull together to take that to a different library of music.
“This app is not like Spotify where content is all the same across all sites,” says Howard. “We have our own content that you can’t get anywhere else for a truly unique experience.”
As an example of the type of video content they provide, classic rock aficionados will enjoy a deep catalog of performances, including one exclusive, historic performance of the Grateful Dead right after they changed their name featuring Ken Kesey on the microphone. Indie fans will appreciate plenty of their own performances such as Daytrotter, Bon Iver, Mumford and Sons and concerts from the recent 2013 South by Southwest. Even Paste magazine concerts will be included in the app, along with hundreds of thousands of others.
The app just launched in March of this year, and after a one-week free trial, membership is available for $3.99 per month or $39.99 per year. Members now get two free featured downloads per week, which are hand-picked by Concert Vault editors. You can also buy a gift membership for the music lovers in your life.
The app caters to both new users and to providing a better experience for current subscribers of Concert Vault. In addition, the app is continuously added to as time goes on.
“Like everything that we do, it will be continuously improving and adding features,” says Howard. We’re really at the very edge of technology between airplay function, the preference engine and a lot of things that I think a lot of iPad apps are just starting to get. We will continue to refine the experience and add more functionality as we evolve—but we come out of the gate really, really strongly.”
Concert Vault is now available for download on the iPad for a free week trial, followed by a monthly or annual membership. It is also available for download for the iPhone, Android and Sonos.
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