Nokia Gig Finder beta – the best music app that isn't on the iPhone?

Out and about tonight, looking for a gig to pass the time? Then the Gig Finder app is just the ticket for you.

And for once, it’s not iPhone users getting all the app fun; Gig Finder is a Nokia exclusive.

Gig Finder is a very smart app for fans of live music, and perhaps one of the best music apps we’ve seen full-stop. By scrutinising the most-played tracks on your phone and using your phone’s GPS data, the Gig finder app sends you alerts for appropriate gigs in your locality, and links to buy tickets for them. Fully searchable, you can then use the app to invite your Facebook friends along to the show or preview tracks by whatever artist is playing through the Ovi Music store.

According to the dev team, over 8% of people who get a tip-off buy tickets, compared to the industry standard of 0.8% for similar services, which shows it’s obviously getting a lot of those recommendations right.

Key features of the app include:

* Gig recommendations based on your music taste and location.
* Search for concerts by artist, genre, city, venue and dates
* Add artists to your music profile to be notified when they play concerts near you
* Find where to buy tickets and compare prices
* Get directions to the venue using Ovi Maps
* Preview tracks from that artist or go through to Ovi Music to purchase songs
* Invite your friends using Facebook, SMS or e-mail
* Artist page with information about upcoming events & most popular music tracks
* Ability to manually change the location used to recommend gigs

Despite only being in the beta stages the Gig Finder app already has information for shows in the USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain.

As it’s still being developed there are still a few quirks with the application, but it’s showing real promise for Nokia-owning music fans. How long we wonder until an iPhone gig-hunting app with the same usability and functionality touches down?

Scroll down for some more shots of the app in action.