News feeds and notifications tailored to users’ favorite bands and authors

Germany's Artist radar lets fans pick the artists, actors and authors they like to receive an entertainment news and info feed personalized to their taste.

Today’s generation have taken fandom to the next level thanks to technology that enables the to tweet their favorite bands and even build communities to share fanfics with. While platforms such as Phonio are aiming to bring celebrities even closer with recorded phone call updates, another startup is taking a different approach. Germany’s Artist Radar lets fans pick the artists, actors and authors they like to receive an entertainment news and info feed personalized to their taste.

Available as both a web and iOS app, Artist Radar lets users create a library of famous names they want to hear about. In order to populate their feed, they can either search for their favorite artists or simply scan their existing music or ebook libraries on their device. The startup already has a database of 6 million musicians, actors and authors with 200,000 planned events, and the app notifies users when their favorite ones release a new album, announce a concert, have confirmed a film appearance or are doing a book signing. The news feed also offers more general news about the users’ chosen celebrities.

While liking a page on Facebook already lets fans subscribe to updates in their news feed, Artist Radar wants to separate it from the slew of other posts that the social network offers, becoming a hub for personalized entertainment news. Could this kind of service become more intelligent, using last.fm-style real-time metrics to tailor which content appears based on the week’s listening habits, for example?