"Gig-tripping"—the practice of planning an entire vacation around a concert or festival in a destination where you don't live—continues to grow in popularity, according to the trackers of trends.
Harmonizing with that approach to travel, a new mobile app is designed to help users orchestrate music-centric vacations in places across the United States.
Music Roadtrip—free to use and available for download in the App Store or Google Play—lets you search a detailed, interactive map as well as a multitude of other resources all centered on a destination's musical offerings and musical heritage.
So in addition to seeing where a city's concert venues, clubs, and festivals are, you'll also find pins for record stores, music museums, studios, radio stations, murals, memorials, and the birthplaces and grave sites of notable artists.
Each site has a profile page on the app with photos, a written description, and other useful info such as operating hours and user reviews. You can either make yourself an itinerary ahead of your visit to the area or turn on your phone's location tracking to show you musical spots nearby.
Additionally—and here's where the gig-tripping angle comes in—the app shows you upcoming concert info and links to purchase tickets for thousands of live music events in every conceivable genre and running the gamut of performers from headliners to cover bands. Filters can narrow the field by location, genre, and date range.
A collection of staff picks and curated itineraries in select cities can take you on a self-guided tour of the location's tuneful highlights.
Future plans for the app, which launched in January, include augmented reality games as well as more communal features such as user messaging and crowdsourced events.
For more information or to download the app for free, go to MusicRoadtrip.com.