What’s the point of a band website?

Most bands want a website that looks cool, in the same way that they want their album art to be cool and their gig posters to be cool. Album art and gig posters have a very simple purpose: the one-way communication of a small amount of information. A website has a complex purpose: it has to be a social object¹ around which people can gather and converse, a point of engagement between fan and band, and a shop (if not more). And it has to look cool.

As with all this internet stuff, there’s no single answer that will suit every band. I rarely find band websites that I think are good, but when I do it’s always because the site completely fits with the band. Pomplamoose‘s main internet presence is their YouTube channel, because they make Videosongs and that’s where their fans go to engage with them. BareNakedLadies have a full-featured website with multi-author blogs, behind-the-scenes videos, and shedloads of content², because their fans are geeks and enjoy getting involved with all that stuff.

What about bands that aren’t geeks?

There’s a problem when a band doesn’t use the internet in the same way as its fans. If a band only wants to use MySpace I’m never going to notice them. If a potential fan isn’t on Twitter they are unlikely to hear about me. If a band wants to communicate by post (I’m looking at you, Islet ;) they are going to have trouble engaging with the digital geeks who want to be involved.

There’s a part of me (the wannabe rock star) that sides with the stubborn bands. I stopped playing live gigs completely last year and just played online in various weird and wonderful ways. I love the two issues of The Isness that Islet have posted to me (in the actual post – on paper). I understand that as a band you want to define the rules of engagement and make your artistic statement. I understand that a lot of bands don’t spend all their time online. I understand that maintaining an element of mystery and theatre can make for an amazing magical live show.

But there’s another part of me (the music fan) that’s only ever had really deep positive experiences with bands when I’ve been able to get past the show and find out about the people and the story behind the music. At first it was from my Dad telling stories about records in his collection. As a teenager it was through books and films about rock stars and music scenes that I’d missed by decades, and endless conversations in record shops and issues of Record Collector. Then people started posting MP3 bootlegs on forums³ and making websites about otherwise mysterious legends. Now people recommend music on Posterous, tweet Spotify playlists and the conversations about music are easier to tap into than ever before.

Why not let the fans make all the content?

The old music industry model created social objects (records, magazine interviews, press releases, tabloid stories) to feed the conversation, so the artists didn’t have to. Now people want to engage with bands outside the mainstream press, and either the band creates the social objects or the fans do. A lot of bands are building websites that allow fans to create stuff, but it’s not that easy.

Jonathan Coulton fans make loads of videos, cover versions and remixes of his music, but he gave them loads of stuff first: he posted a song a week and blogged the whole thing. He also spent half his time answering email.

So why not let the fans make all the content? Because in almost all cases they won’t. Not unless the bands make way more first.

Why do fans go to band websites?

This may be the wrong question to ask, because I’m not sure they do. I certainly don’t (well, almost never), and in my straw poll of random people in pubs over the last few months nobody else did either. Let’s figure out the reasons why I very occasionally visit band websites:

• I visit Steve Lawson’s site for the blog. But only occasionally, because I read it in RSS and only ever click through to the site if there’s a funky embed that doesn’t show up in Google Reader.
• I went to Pomplamoose’s site after I’d watched all their YouTube videos to see whether they had anything else to offer. They don’t. Their site is just music players, the latest video, iTunes links and an about page.
• I follow links from Twitter to blog posts on bands’ or artists’ websites sometimes. If it’s an amazing blog post and I’m absolutely overwhelmed with respect for the author I might listen to a track or two.
• That’s it. I may not be a representative music fan, but I’ll bet that if you asked random music-liking people⁴ which band websites they visit regularly (or ever) you’d be met with blank stares. So…

Where do fans go to engage with music online?

Me first. Here’s what I’ve used recently to discover, share, research, listen to and talk about music (not counting my own music):

• @solobasssteve just recommended a band to me on Twitter, after I mentioned liking Pomplamoose.
• Earlier today I checked out Chris TT‘s tour schedule after seeing him talk about his upcoming gigs on Twitter. He doesn’t pimp his gigs often – I follow him because I enjoy reading his tweets – so when he does I’m interested.
• Also today I saw Richard Walters tweet about Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue, and sent him a link to the fan website where I originally read about it years ago (before it was reissued⁵).
• A few days ago I listened to some tunes by The Monroe Transfer on their Bandcamp page, after I had a conversation over Google Chat with Nick about releasing music online.
• I’ve watched a load of songs on YouTube that people have recommended, embedded, tweeted, Facebooked or emailed recently – maybe 30 this year.
• I’ve listened to Miriam Jones’ Solitary Songs on Bandcamp because I keep meaning to buy them but haven’t got round to it yet.
• I’ve embedded an occasional YouTube video of a song on my Tumblr blog.
• I’ve listened to maybe a dozen tracks that people I follow have posted on Tumblr, but only when there’s a story or at least a hearty recommendation to go with it. There’s nothing less appealing than a lonely Flash audio player.
• As I was editing this post I listened to three tracks by a band called Physical Education because they flattered me on Twitter.

I don’t really know what other people get up to, but off the top of my head:

• People still seem to be using Spotify quite a lot. This year I’ve only opened it to get a couple of invites to send to people, but then I don’t listen to music radio either so let’s not read too much into that.
• I see quite a few links fly by on Twitter to blip.fm, last.fm and the like.
• Andrew Dubber is making Dubber’s Weekly Jazz (“Like a weekly specialist radio show – but on Spotify”), a weekly Spotify playlist posted to a Posterous blog.
• Steve Lawson is embedding Bandcamp players on a Posterous blog to recommend new music (he even recommended my album!)

Any conclusions?

I’ll let this lot compost for a while and see if I can come up with anything useful, but here are my initial thoughts:

1. I’m an edge case in the big picture of listening habits. But now that the homogenous glob of “audience” is fragmented into a whole load of individuals, I guess we’re dealing with an entire dataset of edge cases. I know that can’t exist (except maybe on a circular graph – anyone?), but you know what I mean.
2. Maybe a band website just needs to link to all the other stuff (sort of like flavors.me, which I used to set up benwalkersongwriter.com yesterday).
3. Maybe a band website needs to be a blog to be interesting. That’s certainly what draws me in to a band (and what I’m leaning towards with my own site).
4. Maybe a band doesn’t need a website at all.
5. Bands need to create shareable stuff. For me as a music fan that means blog posts, YouTube videos, music on Bandcamp or Spotify and MP3s for Tumblr.
6. Mysterious bands never appear on my radar. They may be getting great reviews or appearing in Sunday supplements or being on TV or making the best album ever, but I won’t know about it. And if I don’t know about it I won’t miss it.

I need to have at least half a dozen more pub conversations about this before it will start to make sense. If you can help clarify any of it, or just add an example to my painfully narrow data, please comment. I’m intrigued to know what you think. ;)

I should be in bed, cause I was out playing a club gig with Little Fish last night. Instead I’m seeing if I can blog from TextMate using Markdown¹. If you don’t know what I mean, you’re lucky. Your brain doesn’t make you geek out this much…

Article 19

The Royal Court Theatre (of which, until recently, I was completely unaware) commissions work from talented and underappreciated playwrights, and is therefore brilliant. This particular play was called Article 19, and was written by Juan Mayorga (one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, of whom I was also completely unaware). From the programme:

We asked four leading contemporary playwrights to write a 10 minute play in response to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Mayorga’s play is a single 15-minute scene in which a mapmaker is being interrogated by a pair of authority figures. He has been making maps of Madrid on commission, each one illustrating a dataset of the patron’s choosing. Some are seemingly innocent, with titles like “the places I’ve kissed my girlfriend” and some are suspicious, most notably the map that shows where all the judges live.

Online mapping is nothing without human interpretation

My mind was racing trying to think of the real-life equivalents of the mapmakers fantastic creations: the mashup that mapped all the BNP members’ addresses, The Guardian’s Open Platform that lets people map the news, Dopplr and the rest. People now have the power to create and publish visualisations of almost anything, and visual representations can communicate a dry dataset to us in a more understandable, even emotional way.

But there was something more about this mapmaker that was making his interrogators scared, and I felt it too. I didn’t imagine his hand-drawn maps as glorified Google Maps with little info bubbles. The way they were described, these maps could simply and quickly communicate everything you need to know about the data. He was interpreting the data and picking out high-level patterns. And it’s the human interpretation that makes them so valuable and dangerous.

I’ve come across some great examples of personal data visualization and mapping recently, and since Mayorga’s play I’ve been bookmarking them:

• Nicholas Felton created The Feltron Annual Report 2008, which shows exactly how far he travelled and how, and anything else he can attach a number to (sporting activities, temperature, birthday parties). It’s amazing how much I feel like I know Felton having read this 8-page report.
• Strange Maps is a blog that collects strange maps. Obviously. It’s incredible. The first one at the moment is What’s On Earth Tonight, a hand-drawn map of the galaxy that shows what alien life at different distances would see on TV signals from Earth (given the speed at which radio waves travel). It’s strange to think that the little green dudes on Mu Arae are intercepting episodes of Rawhide.
• This visualization of the total volume of water on Earth and of air in the Earth’s atmosphere shown as spheres (from the Science Photo Library) made me fall off my chair and realize the fragility of life. The numbers alone would never have had that effect.

Why I’m not allowed to talk about Article 19

I only have one complaint about this play. Why can’t I access it online? Am I crazy to think that publishing the script online would encourage more people to engage with it? I don’t mind if it’s only the Spanish version (assuming it was written originally in Spanish). I would love to be able to read the play again, and explore some of Mayorga’s other work. I would also have liked to use a couple of quotes, and included full attribution with a link so you could read it too. I tried to take a photo of the set before the actors arrived to give you an idea of how it looked. A member of the theatre staff blocked my view and told me photos weren’t allowed.

The Royal Court commissioned a play about the ‘freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’. The play was a wonderful interpretation of this idea that not only entertained but also provoked discussion, thought and argument in the theatre bar. But frontiers were regarded, and media filtered. Presumably if I had a badge of some sort I would be allowed, even encouraged, to write a review of the play and publish it in a newspaper or magazine. But as a member of the audience note- and picture-taking was frowned upon, and I have no access to the script.

I love what the Royal Court is doing to support and encourage new writing. I think they could do so much more by supporting and encouraging online conversation about their work. Sometimes the artists are already engaged in this way (like Nick blogging about the writing process for Thrown) and just need to be amplified. For those that aren’t (and I realize that there is a generation of playwrights who are loath to use a computer, never mind a blog), there’s a lot the theatre could do on their behalf.

For the conversation to happen, the audience needs a social object around which to gather. For the short time they are in the theatre the performance fulfils that role. But you can’t hyperlink to a performance, so there needs to be something online: a recording of the performance, a script, photos, even a blog post. And better still, why not let the audience create some of that. Let me take a picture. I’ll be happy to tag it #royalcourt, release it under a Creative Commons license and let the theatre use it as part of the online performance.

It’s only been a couple of days since I launched the revamped ihatemornings.com but already I’ve made some serious changes, and am planning several more. I want to document the progress so that once it’s all perfect I can collate all the hints, tips and experience in a handy guide. For now I’ll just link from one article to the next. If you haven’t already read my plan for the ultimate musician’s blog, you should. ;o)

h3. Eventful gig listings

Having booked a last minute gig at the weekend, I needed to get some gig listings happening pretty quickly. I already had an account with Eventful, and they handily provide their widget as an XHTML Microformat, so I could easily style it to match the theme of the site. I set up an ‘Upcoming gigs’ calendar on Eventful, and now if I need to add a gig to the listing on my website I just add it to that calendar. Sometimes the events will have been created already, and sometimes I will have to create them. Most of the venues in Oxford already have profiles on Eventful, so it’s pretty easy to add a gig. The advantage over manually entering the gigs on my site is that the Eventful listings can sync with Upcoming.org and other event sites and I can subscribe to my ‘Upcoming gigs’ calendar in iCal, saving me more redundant data entry.

h3. Google Analytics

I realised that I had lost my Google Analytics reporting with the new WordPress install. After a bit of hunting I found the Google Analytics For WordPress plugin, which gave me back my stats and more. It also allows you to use Analytics to track outbound links and downloads. The setup was pretty easy, and I’ll see how it works out after a couple of weeks of data collection.

h3. Google Sitemap

My old site also had a Google sitemap that made sure that Google was indexing all the pages properly. Another WP plugin sorted that out for me, with only a couple of permission tweaks to get it working.

h3. META tags

The Google work reminded me that I needed to sort out my META tags (keywords, description, page titles etc.), and luckily there’s a plugin that does all that too! All in One SEO Pack rewrites all your page titles, creates page descriptions from your article extracts and creates keywords from your tags. A one-click install that saved hours of fiddling, now and in the future.

h3. WordPress comment spam

Feeling very pleased with myself I went to check my email, only to discover 3 spam comments had been posted on my shiny new blog. Damn. I read WordPress’ useful page on Combating comment spam, and opted for the WP-SpamFree plugin, which claims to shoot down >95% of spam ‘at the door’. That sounds pretty exciting. I’ll let you know how it goes…

h3. FeedBurner

Not long after that, I was catching up on my RSS feeds in Google Reader, and came across my latest article. Or at least a 3 line excerpt with some ugly image tags in it. Blast. I logged in to FeedBurner and changed the feed address to “ihatemornings.com/feed” instead of “ihatemornings.com/rss” (the Textpattern default) and updated the WordPress settings to include the full text of each article in the feed. I hate feeds of article excerpts. I never bother the click the ‘read more…’ links. Too much hassle.

h3. ShareThis

The ShareThis plugin neatly added social bookmarking and sharing links to the end of each post without any configuration. And that’s probably enough tweaking for one day… ;o)

h3. Still to come

Next up I need to:

• Update my Myspace page
• Create a Facebook Page
• Write a new About page for ihatemornings.com
• Figure out which songs to feature and where
• Populate ReverbNation with some useful stuff
• Migrate my mailing list from CampaignMonitor to ReverbNation
• Book some more gigs
• Write 40 more songs

Easy, eh? Watch this space, and feel free to give me any tips in the comments… ;o)

Girl with guitar and laptop

The latest redesign of ihatemornings.com incorporated some fundamental changes under the hood, most obviously a switch from “Textpattern”:http://www.textpattern.com (a trusted friend) to “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.com (the popular kid in the class). WordPress is fast becoming the standard blogging platform for music types (and many others), so the switch had to be made. I have built a dozen sites on Textpattern over the last 5 years and it’s a beautifully versatile piece of software (once you get to know it), so it’s with a heavy heart that I let it go.

You might be wondering why I want to adopt the same technology everyone else is using. Doesn’t that make me a sheep? Where’s my character, my backbone? Don’t worry. As I’ll explain, I am infusing this blog design with just as much hand-drawn character as the old, brown Playschool version. But I want to lead by example. I want to build the ultimate musician’s blog. I want to figure out how to integrate social media widgets, music players, links, archives and videos in the best possible way. And I reckon that once I’ve managed that it will be something that musicians can copy. The copies won’t look the same because part of the ultimate musician’s blog is a very personal surface design. It doesn’t matter if the structure is similar to somebody else’s blog. Blogs are all the same anyway…

h3. The redesign that never ends

I see this as the beginning of a research process that may well last a year or so. I am getting involved with new services (“ReverbNation”:http://www.reverbnation.com/benwalker, “Last.fm”:http://last.fm/music/JB+Walker) that take a while to build up. I also plan to build an audience from almost scratch. So this is no overnight success scheme. That’s the point. I want to show how best to build an online presence as a musician over time and with plenty of hard work. A one-click template isn’t going to do you any good.

Along the way I’m going to use and evaluate all sorts of advice from “blogging”:http://www.problogger.com “gurus”:http://www.skelliewag.org, “music”:http://www.stevelawson.net “gurus”:http://www.soulofsongwriting.com/, “web”:http://www.happycog.com/ “gurus”:http://webtypography.net/ and any other “gurus”:http://www.netblogsrocknroll.com I can get my hands on. I’m also going to harness as much of the power of Social Media as is possible without spending 24 hours a day with a webcam strapped to my head talking in hyperlinks while playing the guitar.

h3. What am I doing right now?

WordPress. Importing all my old articles and comments from Textpattern was super-simple, and I’m up and running on my new favourite blogging platform.

Template. My old site template was built from scratch, and it showed. I’m no designer… For this one, I’ve kept the style (hand-drawn doodles), but used the popular Grid Focus template to make the content much more attractive and readable.

ReverbNation. The old site used embedded Flash MP3 players to play each song. They were great, but didn’t do anything but play. The ReverbNation player is just a small part of a huge web backend that encompasses mailing lists, community, reporting, tactical marketing and all sorts of fun stuff. So far I’ve used none of it, so this will be a big learning curve for me. If it works out, I will end up using ReverbNation to host and play (and maybe even sell ;o) all of my tracks.

Twitter. It was on the old site and it’s here too, with a sexier plugin. I use Twitter a lot, and it’s central to my conversations with the Social Media crowd (and lately more musicians).

RSS. It’s amazing, and I love it. But very few people I know use it. I’m going to create a perfect RSS feed, with exactly the right amount of functionality, then I’m going to convert everyone on my mailing list to news feeds. It may take some time…

Integration. I’m going to try, as far as possible, to integrate my blog, Myspace, Facebook, Reverbnation, Twitter, Last.fm and the rest so I don’t have to spend my life updating 16 profiles and uploading every new song to 4 different servers. I want to streamline all of that so I can spend my time creating and communicating.

Interaction. I want people to be able to interact with me through my website. The comments on the new WordPress install are vastly easier and sexier than the old ones, so that should encourage some more conversation. Twitter should help. I’m also working on a “Suggest a song title” feature to give me some good ideas for the 50/90 Challenge.

Content. I’m going to carry on with the “Ben Walker updates” style of content, and commenting on relevant blog posts. I’m also going to post a couple of article series on songwriting technique as I write the chapters for my songwriting eBook. And my medium-term plan is to guest post on some good blogs, both songwriting-specific and more general lifestyle sites.

Songs. I’ll be writing pretty much one a day until October for the 50/90 Challenge, so I needn’t worry about pumping out the material! I’m keeping the 50/90 songs separate from the rest for the moment. When it’s over I’ll pick out the favourites and rewrite them until they are ready to join the canon of JB Walker classics. ;o)

Gigs. The old site pulled a gig feed from Eventful, which was quite handy. It didn’t help with updating listings on Reverbnation, Facebook, Myspace etc. I’ll hopefully figure out the simplest way of keeping the gigs lists up to date by the time I start playing some more gigs…

So have a look around, enjoy the new design and why not “leave me a comment”:http://www.ihatemornings.com/2008/08/10/the-ultimate-musicians-blog/#respond to get us started? ;o)