Sleeve Music is out for music lovers: Exclusive to Windows Phone, it’s a beautiful way to discover music

Back in early May we told you guys to join a beta for an app called Sleeve Music. A sleeve note (also known as a linear note or album note) are those pieces of paper you found with your vinyl records and CD cases back in the day. On them you’d find things like biographies, info about the album in your hand, and much more. These days we don’t really have an equivalent. Sure iTunes offers a “digital booklet” with some albums, but you’re probably not on iTunes and Sleeve Music for Windows Phone is so much more than that. Let’s check it out.

So by having an idea of what the term “sleeve note” means you can somewhat guess the functionality of Sleeve Music for Windows Phone. It’s an app that allows you to follow your favorite artists. You can grab biographies, check out their latest social media broadcasts, view tour dates, and more all in a beautiful designed app for Windows Phone.

When you first launch the app you’ll be able to quickly import your favorite music artists through either Facebook or Last.fm. It’s a pretty quick way to grab artists you’ve liked or followed in the past on those social networks. And as expected, you can just as easily unfollow an artist when it’s done importing. Useful for that random band you briefly liked for about 2 minutes a few years ago. And you can manually add artists to Sleeve.

So you’ve added all these artists. Now what? There’s a number of things to do with Sleeve Music and it really rocks.

You’ll see what’s new from your favorite artists. Here you get their latest updates from places like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Soundcloud, and more. Find similar artists to follow based off your preferences around artists you already follow. And dig into a specific artist.

What I really dig about the app is the playlist section. The playlist will bring in new tracks from the artists you follow and put them together into one giant playlist that acts as a discovery mechanism. It really clicked when I found some tracks from that Deadmau5 had just pushed to his Soundcloud account that I had missed, but really enjoy now. I also found a new Macklemore and Ryan Lewis track that had gone unnoticed by me. It’s the 21st century, I shouldn’t have to go out of my way to find brand new music from the artists I like. Sleeve makes it pretty easy to get that music.

Another cool feature is to check out upcoming shows around the artists you follow and your location. Our very own Daniel Rubino was impressed by Sleeve when it helped him discover that tickets were going on sale the next day to check out Deltron 3030 right in NYC. Do we need another Pandora or Spotify type service? Not at all, which is why it’s refreshing to see an app like Sleeve come along that helps to supplement the music discovery process for artists you really care about.

Sleeve has been out of beta for a little over two weeks and recently picked up a fresh update that ironed out a few issues from the initial version. Overall though, it’s an incredibly solid foundation for an app that has made it onto my Start screen.

Sleeve Music is free for Windows Phone 8 users. It’s a great app if you love music and you should download it right now. It’s also a graduate of App Campus!

Grab it in the Store, use the QR code below, or swipe to the right in our app.