The Nokia Music app has been updated to version 3.11.25, adding support for receiving notifications about new releases and upcoming gig events for your favourite artists. The idea is that you'll be among the first to hear about a new tune or must-attend event, furthering underlining Nokia Music's strong music discovery ethos.

The notifications appear within the app (favourites section), and, optionally, on the phone's lockscreen and the app's Live Tile. Favourite artists can be added mannualy (via search), from the artist information screen (swipe left when listening to music), or automatically based on your listening behaviour and the contents of your music library.

As Nokia note in their blog post about the new version the pay-off from "liking" artists is receiving personalised music news alerts. It's a logical addition to a music app, extending the existing artist information feature, but no one will miss the fact that getting users to manually "like" artists will also give Nokia extra data about people's music preferences, something that can be used to further refine the creation of mixes by Nokia's mix masters and, perhaps, in the future for other purposes.

The favourites section of the Nokia Music app is accessible from the menu list in the app's opening panorama. A speech bubble, at the top of the menu list, shows when there are new notifications available. Nokia Music's Live Tile, when a new notifictaion is available, will display a notification number in the top right hand corner of the tile (see bottom Live Tile example in second screenshot).

Windows Phone Store description:

Discover a world of music and local gigs with Nokia Music. With hours of online listening choose mixes from our music experts, recommendations based on artists you love, or created from your personal music profile. You can even choose mixes to listen to offline. Play your own music, download new mp3s or find the latest gigs nearby.

New features in this version:

• Like your favourite artists and be the first to hear about their new gigs and releases
• Notifications appear in-app, and optionally on the Live Tile and Lock Screen
• Bug fixes

Nokia Music is a free download from the Windows Phone Store. It is exclusive to Nokia's Lumia devices.

Here's a video, from Nokia, that explains some of the updates in the latest release of Nokia Music: