Solving the problem of online gig listings

I’ve been thinking about my quest to define the ultimate band website. It’s a huge topic, so let’s break it down. First up, gigs online: listings, tickets, RSVPs, sharing, feeds…

What are the choices?

• Facebook events
• Myspace gigs
• Upcoming
• Eventful
• Twitter tools like Twtvite and Schmap
• Hand-rolled (eg. WordPress plugin)

Facebook

Facebook events seems like a good place to start. The way Facebook handles events is great (mostly). It’s tempting to just use Facebook events and embed widgets everywhere else. But it’s not open. Facebook event listings are usually publicly accessible and show up in Google listings, but you need a Facebook account to interact.

Myspace

Unsurprisingly, Myspace gigs gig listings are shit. They look messy, they are annoying to update, you can’t share them easily and they don’t link in with anything useful. Also unsurprisingly, they are the most commonly used gig listings ever.

Upcoming

Upcoming is an event listing site that’s really clever about using hcal, RSS, Flickr machine tags, and other geeky stuff. It’s close to perfect as a solution for the online gig conundrum but non-geeks probably won’t use it, so we would need to feed listings from Upcoming out to other, more familiar, services.

Eventful

Eventful is pretty similar to Upcoming, but maybe not quite as slick. It seems to be a little more US-centric too. On the other hand, it has the “request a band to play in your town” feature, which is what Jonathan Coulton used to plan his early tours.

Twitter tools

Twtvite, Schmap and the rest are great single-use web apps. If your entire audience is on Twitter they are perfect. If not, they will only ever be part of the answer.

In the context of Twitter, I reckon you could do some great stuff with these tools. Something like Schmap is a lightweight layer between the ephemera of Twitter and the static info page. There’s a map built in for instant geographical context, a simple one-click RSVP, a short decsription, a single image and a link to a page with more info. For the Twitter part of the solution you could do a lot worse.

Hand-rolled

There are some good WordPress plugins and modules for other CMSs that let you post gig listings and make them look cool, link to ticket shops and so on. The problem with all of them is that they restrict the listings to your site. Great for fans, but not for everyone else. How many people look at your site to see who’s playing at their local venue?

The secret weapon

There’s a site called ArtistData that lets you update loads of services at once. You enter the gig details once and they get synced to Myspace, Facebook, etc. We still need to figure out where best to put the listings, but ArtistData will come in handy.

How do we put them together?

Let’s get technical. What are the fixed points?

1. We can’t ignore Facebook. People on Facebook will want to use it for events.
2. We only want to update gig details once.
3. A gig needs to be shareable on at least Facebook, Twitter and email.
4. We want people to be able to say they’re coming and ideally comment, but not necessarily all on the same platform.
5. Each gig needs a single canonical URL which acts as the digital address of the physical event.
6. We want to avoid automated or annoying tweets and status updates.

I think the trick is to separate out the functionality:

• Create one master page for each gig with all the details, links, pictures, flyers etc.
• Automate the creation of an entry on each platform you want to support that provides basic information and links back to the master page. This doesn’t include Twitter, unless there’s a very clever non-annoying natural language solution. Better to automate the creation of the Schmap and update Twitter by hand.
• As a bonus, it would be great if the master page could pull in some stats from the satellite pages (eg. how many Facebook RSVPs or Twtvite sign-ups) and reflect the conversation going on around the gig (which might tie in with Steve Lawson’s post about machine tagging gigs) UPDATE: Steve’s post was about machine tagging beta releases of music, but is still worth a read.

What do you reckon?

The question is, what do we use to create the master page? Facebook might be a contender. It’s tricky to feed stuff out from Facebook, but ArtistData could push the content to Facebook and the others.

What do you reckon? Any thoughts? What do you use?

UPDATE: @garrettc, @quitexander, @platform3, @Jazza_UK and @mondoagogo mentioned Last.fm, GigPress, Songkick and friends as good platforms for and/or sources of gig info. Thank you all. I’ll investigate and report back. ;)

Tagged with: band website, geek, gig listings, gigs, music, social media, web apps

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