I Hate Mornings

I’m still trying to solve the problem of online gig listings, and I’m using the new Little Fish site as a guinea pig. The problem isn’t that the listings are bad, it’s that there are lots of them, and musicians don’t want to spend much time filling in forms on the web.

I’m going with ArtistData, which promises a solution to exactly this problem, but I have to say it’s not running quite as smoothly as planned. I need to get decent gig listings up onto these sites:

• Myspace
• Facebook
• Last.fm
• littlefishmusic.com

The idea is that I put the gig info into ArtistData once, and it spews it out to the rest. Turns out it’s not so easy…

Facebook

Let’s start with the good news. It works for Facebook. The listing isn’t fancy but it uses the image I uploaded and gets the date right, which is fine for now.

Myspace

Myspace/ArtistData sync is not working at the moment, because Myspace just updated their event system. This is annoying but understandable. What’s more annoying is that Myspace’s new event editing interface is a fucking nightmare. They’ve managed to improve bits of it while making the rest impossible. Imagine having mandatory address and postcode fields and a picky band name autocomplete on a sluggish form and trying to enter data for ten gigs in a row. Not fun. At all. Can’t wait for ArtistData to catch up on this one…

Last.fm

Last.fm syncing died sometime last year and hasn’t been reinstated. A quick glance at the API suggests that it doesn’t support adding events, and it seems that the issue has been dropped on ArtistData’s end.

littlefishmusic.com

ArtistData supplies an <iframe>-based gig calendar widget to embed on your site. You can change some colours, but ultimately the layout is ugly. And it’s an <iframe>. So I’ve stumped up the extra $3.99/month for XML access to the listings (this also includes RSS feeds for gigs, blogs and news but I’m not planning on using them). When I get round to it I’ll be able to pull in the XML and display it on the site how I like. I’ll probably do it in straight Javascript to start with, then implement some sort of cache later so it’s not relying on the ArtistData site being up (they had some serious downtime today).

So far, so mediocre

At the moment, ArtistData is saving me precisely zero keystrokes. I know some of it the crap is temporary, and they do generally seem like nice people. But I do seem to be paying for very little at the moment.

I’m going to stick it out for a few months while the Myspace thing gets sorted and I get the Tumblr site working well. Hopefully I’ll be able to feed into the process at ArtistData and let them know how it feels from the ground. I’ve been signed up since beta, so I guess it’s time I gave them some useful feedback, eh?

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, I’m thankful for all the downtime in the van. There’s nothing like a bit of rock’n'roll data entry to liven up a 5 hour drive.

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. ;)

I’ve thinking about a web application for songwriters. Something that could ease the process of finding songwriters, pitching songs to record companies and collaborating.

One option is to design a full web app from the ground up and try to get everyone to use it. The alternative is to create a lightweight framework that uses a load of existing services and integrates with all the existing social media apps. Songwriters need to use every network they have to get songs into the right hands, and most aren’t the best natural marketers.

So Songwritr.com would work mostly for the songwriter, allowing him/her to collaborate with other songwriters using easy mp3 sharing (and maybe more – session files?), easily create attractive pages to pitch songs and a public profile that would allow song hunters to audition loads of songs by different writers on one site.

On the industry side (maybe industry would have to pay to search?), the database of songs could be tagged, reviewed, rated, favourited and featured. Leads could be posted for songwriters to respond to directly. In theory this could be a service that the songwriters pay for (like Songlink), but I think keeping the service free for songwriters is important.

Are there any simalar sites for other creative industries? I saw a site recently for film/TV composers that had a peer-review barrier to entry. I’m sure there are more (including lots of offline directories, email lists and older listing style sites). But pitching for creative work is all about networks, and I don’t think anybody has yet really made the most of the existing social networking apps.

Of course, somebody already has the domain, but you have to start somewhere, right?