We’re surrounded by more music than ever these days. It’s easy to get lost.

Luckily, maps exist — most recently, Discovr for iPad ($3), which displays the relationships between millions of artists in a sort of “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” sort of way. Start with any band or artist, and wend your way through the world of music. We’ve seen web apps that do more or less the same thing (LivePlasma in particular springs to mind).

But with Discovr, released by Jammbox on Thursday, much of the magic happens after you double-tap an artist. This brings up a comprehensive dashboard of sorts where you can hear their songs, see their videos, read their bio, find out what the blogs are saying about them, take in their official reviews, and visit them on MySpace, Last.fm, iTunes and Amazon:

Discovr’s interface is slick and easy to grasp, though it carries a heavy payload of information. You can scroll through each section separately, swiping YouTube videos horizontally and each of the individual text sections below vertically. (Disclosure: Discovr is powered by 7Digital, YouTube, and The Echo Nest, publisher of Evolver.fm.)

Of course, an app like this wouldn’t be worth much without the ability to listen to music, because one can only take so much dancing about architecture in a single sitting. Discovr comes through in that regard by embedding YouTube videos — a solution that is better than it might sound.

YouTube is by far the most comprehensive free source of music on the planet — a fact not lost on listeners. Neilsen released a study this week finding that YouTube accounts for approximately three times as much music listening as the “legal” downloads purchased from iTunes and other music stores). And because the YouTube videos play in little windows within Discovr’s artist page, your iPad won’t have to load the videos separately in its own YouTube app, which would have been a major drag.

The Discovr app combines many things that are freely available into a supremely digestible package, which lives up to its name by introducing the user to all sorts of bands they should know, but don’t.

On one hand, $3 might be considered a lot to pay for that. On the other, we’re hard pressed to think of another music discovery tool that makes learning about and listening to bands ranging from the obscure to well-known this easy — and fun.

The world of music is simply too large and bewildering to tackle without a map, and this is a good one.

Update: New details emerged after an email conversation with Jammbox’s David McKinney. Future versions of the app will include a music module powered by 7Digital, augmenting the music in the YouTube videos, and the ability to scan your iTunes library in order to automatically populate the Favorites bar with your most-frequently-played artists.

★ Number 1 music app in 52 countries including US, Japan, Australia & across Europe ★

Featured worldwide by Apple. As seen in Techcrunch, Mashable, Billboard Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Venture Beat, and Wired Magazine. Discovr Music makes it easy to discover new music.

With more than 15 million songs and 3 million artists in the world of music how do you find the music you like? We built Discovr Music to make it easy to find and explore new music. Enter an artist you like and you'll discover artists you love. 

• Discover new bands and artists
• Listen to their song samples
• Watch their band videos
• Read their artist biographies 
• Read reviews and blogs about their music. 
• Save your favorite bands to your favorites. 
• Buy their music direct from the app
• Share with your friends via Twitter or Facebook 

“Beautiful and dynamic, ideally suited to tactile interaction on the spacious iPad screen.”

- Courtney Banks (Wall Street Journal)

“Fascinating interactive maps of music”

- Charlie White (Mashable)

“Discovr elegantly delivers the world of music to iPad”

- Eliot Van Buskirk ([Evolver.fm, syndicated to] Wired Magazine)

Discovr lets you see how the music you love is connected, and makes it easy to find great new bands and artists that are similar to what you like. 

To get started simply type in the name of a band or artist that you love and we'll show you some similar music to check out. Bands or artists that are similar are connected. Just click on one you like and the music map will grow to show other similar artists. You can double click on a band or artist to see more info about them.

The app uses data visualization and music recommendations to provide an interactive map of the entire world of music. You can navigate through the musical ecosystem and discover new music based on what you like. The app is built from the ground up to make the most of iOS5 and is also backward compatible to previous iOS versions.

Discovr is brought to you by Filter Squad. We're a little startup from Australia. We also make Discovr Apps to help you find new apps. Discovr Music is powered by The Echo Nest. [Disclosure: The Echo Nest is publisher of Evolver.fm]

What's New in Version 2.0

This is a major update. Many new features! 

* Recommended artists tab

* Trending artists tab

* Favorite artists tab

* Global music player

* Global music queue

* Link to songs in Spotify

* Tap and Hold on the map for special features

* Play songs from the map page (Tap & Hold)

* Queue songs from the map page (Tap & Hold)

* iOS5 native Twitter integration

* Improved artist biographies

* Interactive help walkthrough

* New Help pages

* New About page

* Updated menu icons

* Improved retina support

* New navigation menu (iPhone)

* Improved iTunes country support

* Performance updates

* Also available for your Mac.

* Discovr Movies coming soon!