Die-hard music fans are going to love what Relisir has to offer. Relisir is a fairly new start-up that offers users the chance to keep up with their favorite bands whether it’s when they announce a new album is on the way, or if a new album has been released.
What we like about Relisir:
- It could initially take some time to manually enter all of your favorite artists which would make using this service a bit of a chore. However, if you use Last.fm, you can import your favorite artists which will simplify the whole process. Nice touch.
- As you type in your favorite artists, a drop down list appears which again, helps speed up the process of getting started with Relisir.
- Once you add your favorite artists, it’s like you’re on auto-pilate and Relisir goes to work for you, keeping you informed with no additional effort on your end. You don’t even need to return to the website (unless you want to), because all of the important info will be sent to your email inbox.
What we don’t like about Relisir:
- Email is the main method of communication – Relisir relies heavily on email to let you know when your favorite artists have released anything new. Other communication options would be nice – perhaps an iPhone or Facebook app?
- One one hand, it’s nice that Relisir focuses simply on helping you keep up with your favorite artists. However, it might be nice to see a “music discovery” feature as well. If it knows you like OneRepublic, for example, it could suggest other artists similar to it with new releases and give you the opportunity to listen to it
- Someone who loves their music probably likes to see these artists live and in concert. It would great if they incorporated a tool to help you track when one of your favorite artists will be performing in your area and provide a link to purchase tickets.
MySpace used to be one of the key ways that music fans kept up with their favorite artists. These artists may still have pages, however, many people have moved away from MySpace and no longer use the service. If you’ve been hanging on to MySpace, simply for the purpose of keeping up with your favorite artists, Relisir might just be what you’re looking for.
I imported my LastFM library and it only registed one artist. There is no way I’m going to type in hundreds of artists so this is basically useless.
Hey dave, thanks for giving Relisir a try. Let me know your username and last.fm account name and we will look into the problem in artist import.
Thanks for the feedback.
- Serge
Relisir Team
Serge – kudos for trying to help out our readers!
Ashley, thanks a lot for the coverage and great comments. It’s great for us to see that everything that’s mentioned in the “Don’t Like” part are things that we are working on.
1. Notifications – we are working on creating a Facebook and later iPhone applications.
2. Discovery will be a big push later on, we will definitely suggest to users other upcoming releases from related bands.
3. We are currently working with Bandsintown.com to provide concert/show listings, expect to see this in very near future.
Once again thanks for comments, and we are still very early stage with big ideas and tons of exciting features coming soon.
- Serge
Relisir Team
I’ll definitely check out this service, nice to see the devs are reading the blogs about it. On that note I feel that some of the “Don’t Like” issues are a bit nit-picky. I won’t get into my dislike of closed platform applications, but email is far more immediate than either and if you want to check the site you can.
I don’t think the service needs to suggest bands or post information about gigs – whilst it may be prudent for them to incorporate these features for their revenue model in reality there are other services that do this, and will do them better. They are already taking data from Last.fm which is a good idea, and anyone who uses Last.fm already has all the suggested artists and gig notifications that they need.
Other services, such as Spotify, have failed to grasp the power of interacting properly with similar sites and have failed in crucial areas as a result (Spotify’s recommendations are terrible) so maybe sites should concentrate on doing what they do and make sure that’s as good as it can be, rather than copying other people in the field.
Edit: oh, but if I was to add a request it would be for use of single sign-on (OpenID, OAuth, Facebook, Google) and dropping the user name – we have to sign up with an email address, why can’t we use it to log in?