Electronic music website Resident Advisor takes its club listings mobile

Electronic music site Resident Advisor has launched its first app for its community of fans, taking its listings for clubs and concerts mobile.

The free RA Guide app has been launched for iPhone, with an Android version to follow at a later point, and will provide listings for more than one million artists, venues and events, and provide a ticket-selling service.

Users will be able to mark their favourite musicians and DJs, with the app also scanning their iTunes library to identify artists whose music they own – a feature also used by existing music-event apps like Songkick and Bandsintown.

Those – along with London-focused Dice – are one obvious branch of competition for RA Guide, although they focus on all genres of music. Other apps like Yplan cast their net wider to include theatre, comedy and other events.

Resident Advisor co-founder Paul Clement told the Guardian that his app’s narrower music-genre focus will better serve its community of dance fans – the most direct rival is German startup Beatguide’s app – and particularly people deciding to go out on the spur of the moment.

“In some markets like London, maybe New York, for the big shows stuff sells out. But in loads of markets you know you don’t ever need to pre-buy anything: ‘if we feel like going there at two in the morning and we’re up for it, we’ll go’. You can see from our site traffic that by a certain point on a Friday night, the primary use for the site is event listings,” he said.

“And a lot of that traffic is mobile as well, because the site is responsive design. In cities like London, especially, there’s now more overall traffic on mobile than there is on desktop. It was resource more than anything, which was why we didn’t get something like this done sooner. There’s no point building an app if your site isn’t doing what it needs to. The app will just suck if so.”

For now, people buy tickets via an in-app web browser using their credit cards, but Clement said Resident Advisor is planning to add the Apple Pay mobile payments system as Apple rolls it out around the world.

Also missing at launch are the social networking features from the website. “We thought it was better to go out now than in two months with some social stuff involved. The same goes for push notifications: we’re launching without it, but within the next couple of releases some of those will be in there too,” said Clement.

The ability to comment on events will also make the leap from website to app in a forthcoming update, although for now Resident Advisor is not bringing across the other key part of its existing community: its magazine-style editorial.

There is also no integration of streaming services like SoundCloud, Spotify or YouTube to provide streams of music by the DJs and artists whose events are listed in the app – one of the most prominent features in Beatguide.

“For now, the app needs to be refined to what’s going on, and the events. There’s potentially music, potentially editorial, potentially film content, that sort of stuff,” said Clement.

For now, Resident Advisor will be promoting the app to its community of electronic-music fans. The site currently attracts nearly 2.7 million unique monthly visitors, with more than 10 million people having visited since the start of 2015.