Is SuperGlued The Answer To Smartphone Use At Concerts?
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Going to concerts these days can mean staring at either your smartphone, or the one held aloft by the person in front of you, to the point that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs recently issued an edict commanding their fans to watch the show, not those screens.
However, the band’s singer, Karen O, carved out a few minutes of the band’s set where she said it was okay for people to shoot photos and videos, because, come on. People are excited to be at the show, and they take photographic evidence of the things they are excited about, and then they share those with other people, and the band can’t really be too upset about that, right?
We applaud the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s balanced approach, because as much as it sucks when people ruin the immediacy shows with their smartphones, there’s no point in getting all “punk purist” about at at this point. This is the world we live in.
With that out of the way, how do we effectively share this stuff with other people who actually do care about the photos? To do otherwise would be to take one faux pas (smartphoning a show) and turn it into another (spamming your Facebook and Twitter friends with stuff they don’t care about).
Perhaps the answer is SuperGlued, a concert experience sharing app that does a great job connecting you with fellow concert-goers, adding another layer of tact to the act of documenting live music. The latest iOS version of the app adds a location-based photo stream for seeing photos from people near you; Instagram integration; automatic show calendars based on your location or favorites; push notifications; in-app ticket buying; and a new contest feature that lets you post photos for a chance to win objects, the way Afghan Whigs recently did.
It starts with you, the user, finding a show to attend. The SuperGlued calendar shows your favorite artists’ tour dates six to eight months in advance based on a scan of your iTunes artists and Facebook likes. Yes, you can edit this list. Are you unsure of what the headliner sounds like, even though you’ve heard their name bandied about? You can play sample tracks within the calendar, buy a ticket, and see who else is going, all within the app.
If you’re at a show with multiple SuperGlued users, you’ll see photos appear from them automatically, in the location-based photo stream. The app also plays nice with more popular networks; you can share directly to Facebook, FourSquare, Twitter, and now Instagram too.
Like it or not, people are always going to raise their smartphones at shows (and it’s a violation of U.S. free speech laws for venues to jam phones, the way they do in some other countries at movie theaters and the like). Smartphones are with us at concerts now, and even the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are cool with you using one, if only for a few minutes. If you do, SuperGlued offers a solid option for sharing the photos you’re not going to be able to resist taking.
