Amen, brother! Tell it like it is!

Yo, Google Toolbar autocomplete doesn’t like these fields, Merlin…

Regarding MP3 metadata: hell, yeah. I’ve set up an auto-snarfing script for grabbing new music from Pitchfork and a few other sites, and it’s remarkable how lazy labels are with tagging their music. Would they release CD’s without a band name or address on them? (Maybe) This is going to be even more of an issue as Podcasting starts to take off.

Awesome. I knew you had a longer, more-detailed rant in you about this very topic.

Remember: people often download dozens or hundreds of songs at once, so it’s really unlikely they’ll remember where Track%2007.mp3 came from.

Also, I use iTunes’ “keep music folder organized” option, so even if you’ve cleverly named your mp3 as “Artist - Song.mp3” iTunes will obliterate this information when the mp3 is imported into the library. Filenames are not enough! Correctly tagged songs are the future!

I just thought of one more thing that irks me about a band site. For the bands that do provide a tour page, you might see something like this:

12/07 Bimbos - San Francisco 12/08 Neumos - Seattle

but not a single link to actually buy tickets online.

For indie bands, it’s especially hard because few of them make it to the level of showing up in a Ticketmaster search, so you have to run down the list of smaller ones. Ticketweb. Ticketswest. Brown Bag Tickets. Then you have try the venue’s website, if they have one.

Please bands, don’t make it harder for us to buy your tickets and see you live when we really want to.

Yes yes, amen. I went to a site of some band I curious about the other day, and it did that unforgivable thing where the whole site content is in a pop-up window. God I hate that. I didn’t go back to that site.

On MP3s: use them. Full songs. Downloadable. Not streaming; not clips; not RealAudio.

Give me something I can: link to; share; store on my iRiver and fall in love with; evangelize. One carefully-chosen song is going to get to me infinitely more than 50 snippets I can’t take with me.

I’m not linking to your 30-second sample - why bother? I’m certainly not buying your CD or a ticket based on it. If there’s value in sharing your music (and let’s take that as a given), that value increases with every offline location in which I can listen, every friend I can hand it off to, etc.

from someone who is preparing to set up a first website for my band - THANK YOU. this is just the reminder / tips list I needed.

Band websites are perhaps the most infuriating category of websites I’ve ever interacted with. I agree with all of the points made and the points in the comments so far.

One small addition: On their tour page, bands NEVER, EVER, list whether or not shows are All Ages or are 21/18+. While I’m finally old enough to booze it at shows, why oh why don’t bands think of the kids!?

And I know I‘ve bought tickets for shows only to find out I’m not old enough to get in the door….

One more thing: the music. Often those lovely Flash animations are accompanied by sound. If I visit a band’s site while at work (more likely than not), I don’t want to advertise that fact to everyone within a 25 foot radius of my cube. Make it easy for me to find the music, but let me choose when to play it.

I’ve made a lot of music websites for some very high-profile artists (and won a pair of VH1 Music Awards for that work). Here are a few points that I’ve picked up, in addition to the already-great list:

1. Make MP3s easy to get — that is, don’t disguise them behind some spiffy Flash interface or obfuscate the URL after some registration process. If a clean URL is available, I will link to your MP3 from my blog. If it’s not, I won’t. I may not even write up the blog entry, because it’s useless if readers can’t listen to the song.

2. Provide some straightforward pictures of the band that can be reproduced elsewhere, such as on blogs, personal websites, fan sites, niche news sites, etc. Articles with photos will draw people’s eye — if the publication has to run one without a picture, because you only have shots of the band that were taken in a spherical mirror, they’re going to skip the photo, and less people will read the article.

3. Separate out the contact methods, and have them go to the appropriate people. A webmaster address that goes to the person who maintains the website, a fan letters address that goes to the band, a booking address that goes to the agent, etc. This makes it possible to deal with the e-mail.

4. For the love of Christ, no splash screens.

5. Put news on the front page, and keep it updated. Provide permalinks for each story. It’s best to be smart about it, and just integrate Movable Type or WordPress into the site, so that the band (or whoever) can update the site with news, and not wait for the web kid to get around to updating it.

6. No, you may not follow the above-outlined Flash rules by having people choose between the Flash and HTML versions of the site on a (there it is again) splash page. This leaves savvy readers wondering which of the two is more likely to be maintained, and which is the abandoned half of the site.

All obvious stuff to most of us, I expect, but these are among the things that I have to explain over and over again to clients.

MP3 metadata is huge (as demonstrated by all the “Amen!” responses already). I’ve just recently cleared out everything in my iTunes that doesn’t have proper artist or album data. It might have been something I loved, but screw it. I don’t need that kind of garbage in my life.

One point where I differ, though: I might could eat me a whole bowl of cilantro. Really.

I do think you’re overlooking the category of folks who’ve just heard about a band and want to get a sense for it. I know that I got sucked into buying the Dresden Dolls CD by their website which breaks almost every rule you list.

That said, it also works. Unlikely say the local Seattle band, Fading Collection who manage to not only have a 100% pure Flash site, but have it broken.

Radio stations are nearly as bad, probably because they look at mind-suckingly bad band sites all day long. How hard is it to publish your damn playlist so I can tell what that song was I heard five minutes ago when the DJ didn’t bother to identify it? I won’t even require you to make it a realtime list, as long as you post this week’s heavy rotation.

My big peeve: Flash-animated navigation. Christ on a piece of toast, people, if I have to chase a moving target around my screen, I’m not going to bother with whatever’s behind the link. Can you tell Dirty Vegas had a new album out last week? No one else could, either. (It’s not even in the news section… facepalm) Flash splashes are an evil I’ve come to terms with as long as I can click past them, but moving nav links… it is to weep.

Lack of show details is particularly bad, considering live shows are the lifeblood of a lot of indie musicians. Matt’s comments about ticket availabilty are spot on, as well as emmilliiee’s point about 21+ vs. all ages shows. This information is vital to someone making a deciscion whether to attend or not, and I can’t believe some bands leave this stuff out, along with details like:

• address and phone number of the venue
• cover/no cover charge
• smoking/nonsmoking (believe it: some people won’t come if they can’t smoke/have to endure smoke)

If you have the venue address, it’s not so hard to throw together a Yahoo! Map to the location, either. If you’re using a database for your tour dates, this can even be automated.

Great tips there :::: I only hope we pass the test…. audiobulb uses a flash header (no moving nav though!) and html main page content and links…. Would happily receive any comments and feedback about the site & would be happy to give some honest appraisal of other’s sites in return…

Best wishes,

David @ contact@audiobulb.com

For housepig, David, and anyone else working toward building a site for their band, you might want to check out D. Keith Robinson’s project for a fictional band. He complained about the same sort of uselessness Merlin notes, and then decided to do better.

It’s from a web-standards-and-design angle, but Keith’s ramblings might help people make better band sites.

This is exactly correct. I will be spreading this URL around.

I’d like to add (and I think I saw one other comment on this) that web designers should NEVER, EVER have music playing on the splash/front page. Let the visitor decide when they want to listen.

Most of us surf with music playing, and when your website starts spitting out more sound, it always collides.

Great post.

How timely! I work on the Statistics site and have been wondering about some of these issues this very morning.

Running a band site is fun yet taxing in a variety of ways. Tours change constantly while the artists are on the road, and in my case, they’ve been in Europe for the last few weeks!

What do people think of linking the tour dates through Google Local at the least? You’re all dead on about the issue of tickets, and that was what I was initially pondering today, so at least fans have quick access to call the venue.

We have been trying to listen to fans and responding (like with an overwhelming amount of people wanting lyrics, for example). We haven’t done mp3’s yet, but I will keep all that in mind with the metadata when we do (honestly wouldn’t have thought of it, so thanks). People have also been asking about a newsletter, which would be great also. Again, however, all of this is hard when the band is on the road and mostly incommunicado! :)

Another issue I’ve been grappling with is different album designs versus site design and how to incorporate them better. Style switcher? I’d be interested to hear what others think…

I’ll be watching this discussion closely for more likes and dislikes. Great stuff so far! I haven’t read through the Designing the Band articles before; I’m going to go through those tonight.

I offer our site up for critique, I know there are several problems with the site and we don’t have enough content to warrant a search in my opinion.

But anything you can recommend or suggest to make our site better, please do.

www.popuprecords.com

From past experience doing these things during the music dotcom glory days, the key thing is to remember what that set of fans of that particular are after. Example - a certain once hugely popular boy band’s site I put together focused on new photos, TV appearance dates, tour information (great point about all age shows and other venue information) and useless facts about the “Boys”. No need for heaps of audio, discography and so on - you didn’t need to sell the band to them!

Similarly, I eschewed the obligatory Flash intro’s so prevalent at the time; these sites had core teenage audiences that visited daily and just bookmarked past them anyway to where the real news was.

Basically - look to your audience and fanbase and find out what they really want, and not what the label thinks they want (although if designers are stil landed with a press release, a faxed list of tour dates and half a dozen photo’s from the label that count as “content”, I can sympathise to an extent).

Last but not least, keep talking with management, not so much the labels and inevitably you’ll find there’s one ‘geek’ in most bands who will do their bit and help champion your ideas.

Oh, with regard to radio web sites - Virgin Radio have my utmost respect simply by letting me search for a song they played at some point as well as the last few tracks aired. (Perfect for those “What was that song they played when I was on my way to blah the other evening?” questions).

Excellent post and comments. Most bands I come across usually update their own website or have a family member or close friend update their website. Some of them do not even know you can ‘tag’ a mp3 file with relevant information. Another thing that bands (or the people they hire to make their websites) do is their use of newsletter systems that sell your e-mail address. Others link to non-existant mp3 files. As I only post to legal mp3s, the one band genre that hasn’t embraced the mp3 are jazz bands. 99% of jazz artists use windows media files, which is quite annoying. And one more annoying ‘feature’ on many band and label websites are use of the new browser window everytime you click a link. Thanks for letting me vent :)

Good tips, especially considering that one of the stylistic themes of the band website genre is foregoing typical website usability conventions for the sake of originality.

I’d say: make your website as funky and “original” as you want, but the trick is doing that and not letting that get in the way of folks listening to your music, getting info on your live gigs, and having an easy way to stay in touch with your band news.

This is all well and good… except the Labels and Artists will not listen to any of this advice. They want the huge flash files, artistic navigation, and music blaring from the moment you hit the site. My company does 90% of it’s work for labels/artists, and they require you to do this stuff. Not to mention that they hate mp3. We can’t even use mp3’s streaming in flash. It’s in their freaking contracts!

Snap.

http://www.zipworld.com.au/~kashum/blog/1101611873

My comments turned into an article – http://justinfrench.com/index.php?id=82

Very insightful. I’ve made a few band sites now and can say that many of these topics must be addressed in order for fans to have a better overall experience.

That said, some of the topics you’ve mentioned would rule out most of kurt nobel’s portfolio yet they do a wonderful and tasteful job of producing band sites. The new Lenny Kravitz site is just a great example of creating a good experience using flash and sound.

http://www.lennykravitz.com/

Something tells me you’re talking about more “indie band” developers though. They do need to pay attention to your points.

The wrens need a new website too!

Uh, dumb band guy here, editing my own web site: How exactly does one edit the metadata for an mp3 file? Itunes? Text editor?

Thanks.

To play the devil’s advocate, I think there is a place for flash sites. Check out: http://www.billyharveymusic.com/

I spent at least 20 minutes at this site, whereas if it was just a boring blog layout or whatever I wouldn’t have spent more than 10 seconds there. Of course, the flash site has to be well designed and interesting. The same could be said for a simple HTML site.

I agree with you regarding label and venue sites. I think the best thing to do is for bands to have a site at the record label that is simple and goes by your rules. This is the site you go to if you just want simple info. But I think there is a place for the crazy experimental site that is actually interesting and can work to get people’s attention and links.

I think a boring looking site might loose you as many visitors as one that is difficult to use.