I didn’t expect ChatGPT to be good at finding live music, but it turns out it’s better than some apps designed for it, like Apple Music’s new Concert feature.
The recent iOS 26.4 update added a feature to Apple Music that shows you upcoming concerts in your area. It’s not bad and has the advantage that Apple Music knows exactly what you listen to regularly, so it can recommend your favorite bands.
Essentially, Apple Music already knows what you like. What it’s not great at is showing you what you don’t know yet. That’s where ChatGPT excels. Using it, I’ve found two great new bands that have made it into my regular rotation.
How to use ChatGPT as your gig buddy
I live in a pretty big city in the UK, but when it comes to finding bands that are playing here, I’m pretty useless. I normally find out too late that a band I like is playing and they’re sold out, or I’ve never heard of them and only discover I like them a couple of weeks after they’ve visited here as part of a country-wide tour.
Using ChatGPT as your gig-finding buddy is actually surprisingly easy. Just make sure it knows where you are (you can always turn on Location in Settings for this as well) and tell it the kind of music you like, and see what it recommends.
I used the following prompt, which I now think of as my ‘gig finder’ template. You can easily amend it to meet your needs, which probably don’t exactly match those of a Gen X grunge obsessive like me:
“I like bands like Deftones, Die Spitz, Sleep Token and Nirvana. Are there any bands playing in [my city] in the next couple of months I should be aware of?”
ChatGPT does an excellent job of breaking down the bands playing locally that it thinks I might like into categories like ‘Worth knowing (next ~6–10 weeks)’, ‘Slightly left-field but relevant’, and ‘Scene / vibe nights (honestly underrated).’
Thanks to ChatGPT, I’ve discovered two new bands with upcoming gigs in my area, and both have been added to my regular music rotation. And I’ve even got tickets to their gigs!
A new way to discover music
We all know that AI is really a process of very clever pattern matching — it's not actually thinking, in the traditional sense, about what bands I might enjoy based on what I’ve told it, but that pattern matching it does is so effective it feels like it is.
The recommendations ChatGPT gave me were actually spot on. It feels like it knows exactly what sort of music I like, and I can go on to discuss the nuances of my music taste with it ad infinitum.
It also suggested a couple of bands that completely missed the mark, but I could use them as examples to refine my choices, and it got even more precise. I can also ask for more details about any band it mentions and discuss the pros and cons of the different venues. It’s endless.
In contrast, Apple Music just throws a few upcoming concerts at you, and that’s where the story ends.
I’ve already got tickets to two gigs I wouldn’t have even known about a week ago — and I don’t think I’ll go back to finding live music any other way.
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