What If… there was a concert app that could track your emotions at a show? Would that insight make your concert experience more meaningful? Would a concert mood app reveal things about yourself and your favorite concert experiences that you didn’t know before?
That’s what I started wondering about when I read this recent New Scientist article involving an iPhone app used to track the happiness of users throughout the day.
As New Scientist reports, the experiment being conducted is innovative because it blends mobile and psychological research allowing psychologists and researchers to do what they normally can’t, which is follow their subjects around during their normal everyday lives.
According to the organizers of the study at Track Your Happiness.org, the purpose of their study is “To understand what factors affect people’s happiness in their daily lives.”
They also explain that the research project involves participants providing:
“demographic information and complete survey questions about personality, recent life events, and physical health, and then begin recording your happiness on your iPhone throughout the day.”
The part that really gets me jazzed to adapt this for a live concert experience is that participants will:
“receive several notifications, at which time you will visit a webpage on your iPhone where you will report what you were doing, what situation you were in, and how you felt. You will decide when and how often you want to be notified. After 50 successful responses you will receive a report summarizing your responses and showing how your happiness varies.”
They also say that participating in the research takes about
“10 minutes to answer preliminary questions, and then approximately 60 seconds to provide each report on your iPhone, which you’ll do several times a day. You may continue to participate in this research as long as you desire.”
Why Is This Important For Concert Fans?
For starters, if we were to develop a similar mobile app to track the emotions of concert fans, it would allow us to connect our shared experiences like Layar’s Tweeps Around 3D mobile app does.
I know there are many different moods apps for iphone and android. But I haven’t seen any that are specifically for concert fans or designed to be used at a concert.
That said, having a mood app just for concert fans is a must because it would enable us to better understand why we are so addicted to going to concerts.
Like Recreate My Night, and Big Live, having a mood mobile app for concert fans would allow us to remember and share our concert experiences, but more specifically, a concert fan mood app would allow us to create a tangible record of our moods and track our emotional journey during the concert.
And when were able to gather mood data and emotional information, we can being to better understanding how our brains process external and internal stimuli and all the other stuff that makes us love the live music experience.
Just imagine if we took the best apps from our festival mobile app guide and added features like a “mood-based set list,” “a 30-second video journal,” or a “photo collage function” so you could record post-concert thoughts and memories?
Having those and similar features would create excellent fodder for a personalized and customized mobile and social experiment designed by you.
I know Wolfgang’s Vault mobile app and my current favorite the MOG mobile app would be even more amazing if versions were created with concert fans and their moods in mind.
And having something like that at your fingertips during and after a show would allow you to share, remember and learn from your own concert experiences in ways we haven’t before.
Would a concert fan mood app, help us improve Lollapalooza by dovetailing with what the Yellowbrick program is doing? I think so.
I know I would have loved to track the happiness and emotional journey of these concert fans during their Rocktober Challenge, and the fantasy campers who got to live their rock star dream at the House of Blues.
In my testing and experimenting with mobile apps, some are fun, some are helpful, and very few have changed my life.
And I know a concert fan mood app would definitely change the way I think about my concert experiences, and I know that would change my life.
I know it would also give me a better understanding of why we experience joy, grief and community with friends or perfect strangers at concerts.
There’s a lot more we’ll explore about mood apps and the Track Your Happiness app, but in the meantime, if you’re interested, I encourage you to go check it out and let me know what you think.
Currently, the app is only available for iPhone users, which is a bummer because, I’m on the Android system. But we’ll keep you updated if that changes.
What Say You?
What features would you put on a Track Your Happiness at a Concert App? How would you use an app like this?