Find venues, concerts, and set lists with Apple Music Guides

In addition to the release of iOS/iPadOS 16.5 and macOS Ventura 13.4, Apple has also launched new concert discovery features on Apple Maps and Apple Music to encourage music lovers to get out and support live music. Maps has added more than 40 new guides, curated by Apple Music editors, highlighting some of the best places to hear live music in ten major cities around the world.

Within these guides, it’s possible to surface the upcoming shows from these venues through Apple’s Shazam app, which itself debuted the concert listings feature last spring through a connection to another live music discovery app, Bandsintown. The problem is that it’s rather tricky to find the guides that focus on music and their concert listings – and because this is a new feature, the number of artists mentioned so far is quite small.

In addition to the Guides, Apple Music now has a new semi-hidden feature called Set Lists, which shows the songs certain artists are playing on their latest tour and playlists of the official versions of those songs. From there, users can also browse the schedule for upcoming shows – but again, upon its debut, the Set Lists feature has a very small list of artists.

For those who have never used the Guides feature in Apple Maps, you can find them on Mac by clicking in the search box and then scrolling down. Depending on where you are, you may see a guide for your city or a nearby major city, and from there you can click “See All” to access all currently available guides.

On iOS or iPadOS, the Guide feature is a little more hidden. Type the name of a major city in the search box, scroll down and the guide for that city and the option to see more guides will appear.

Most Maps guides cover major landmarks, cultural features, and the history of a particular city, including many major cities and capitals around the world. You can also create your own personal guide with your favorite places for every city you’ve been to, including your own reviews.

There are two quick ways to find the Apple Music guides. The first is to go to the Apple Music app, scroll down until you see a section called “Explore more from Apple Music” and tap “Live Music Guides on Apple Maps”, which will redirect you to the Maps app and the Music Guides opens .

You can also open any web browser and go to apple.co/MusicVenues – yes, .co not .com – which will open Maps and take you directly to the music guides. It’s possible that iOS 17, which is preparing to launch later this year, will make it easier to pop up these guides in Maps.

The new feature originally debuted with just ten cities as guides, but Apple has already added a few. The current list includes Berlin, Chicago, Detroit, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Mexico City, Nashville, New York City, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, and Vienna, along with a list of notable locations in California and New York.

Some music guides are dedicated to specific music genres in certain cities (classical, acoustic, jazz and blues, alternative, queer, hip-hop). There are also some essential site guides, dance clubs, DIY spaces, and some historical site guides.

The classical music guide to Berlin on iPhone

Again, Apple hasn’t yet found a way to make this new feature more obvious in the Apple Music app, but this may change in iOS/iPadOS 17 and macOS 14. So far, the only way we’ve found is to get it within the Apple Music app itself is to search for “Set List” – two words, no “s” at the end – and it eventually shows up as a category in the top results, alongside some of the specific set lists from the artists mentioned.

You can also use the feature indirectly by opening a web browser and typing in apple.co/setlists and then bookmarking it. This will open the Music app and take you to the Set Lists category page.

Currently there are only eight artists in Set Lists, but they are all quite popular: Blink 182, Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Taylor Swift, Peso Pluma, BlackPink, Kane Brown, and Beyonce. Clicking on their name takes you to a list of songs performed on the current tour.

To be clear, these are not live recordings of songs from recent concerts; they are the standard studio versions of songs on Apple Music known to have been performed on the current tour. Each given version may differ slightly or contain different numbers.

The main Set Lists page also has a button under each artist’s Set List link that allows fans to browse upcoming shows. These are the same lists that appear in the Shazam or Bandsintown apps.

Set lists can also show where upcoming shows are taking place.

Instead, if you want to see a list of upcoming shows by location, you can do so through the music guides in Apple Maps for a specific location. You can also use the Bandsintown app.

These new features are still in their infancy at this point, but if Apple can figure out a way to make them more obvious and include a wider range of artists on tour, they could prove very useful to fans who want to experience live concerts of their favorite artists. Hopefully, upcoming OS updates this fall will make them more visible and useful to fans of all tastes and ages.