So Many Event Listing Sites, So Little Time!

Howdy folks,
This is my first real post on the subject of indie band marketing and today I'm covering a topic that hopefully will be helpful to a lot of bands and artists that manage their own promotion.

In my quest to update our own website I've been looking for a solution to do a single update for online databases and also simultaneously update an embedded concert calendar for our website. As we do 250+ dates a year you can image how long it would take to fill in every online database such as reverberation, All About Jazz and Jazz Near You, ARTISTdirect, BandLoop, BandsInTown, BlueHaze, Eventful, Eviesays, FindEvent, JamBase, Livetapp, ShowClix, SongKick, SonicLiving, TourVolume aaaaaaaand (pause for breath) Zvents. Plus create FaceBook events for every gig and then also keep your own website updated. (and yeah, I'd never heard of most of these until I started using Artistdata either so I'm not sure how many prospective punters have either BUT as it auto syncs, it won't hurt to have your tour info discoverable in more places!)

I came across a great website a while ago which I started using called Artistdata.com. I only casually used it in the hope it was doing some good spreading through the interwebs until I recently came across this blog post by Alex Scammon (although his name could be "Alex S Cammon" so apologies if I butchered it there…) talking about the very problem I was trying to solve:

http://alexscammon.com/2011/03/artistdata-reverbnation/

I won't repeat every thing he said, you can and should read Alex's post first and I recommend following his instructions to get all your accounts hooked up together so the correct artists profiles are being updated in all the other various websites. I will add the following additional experiences and observations for your benefit though...

Artistdata, bought relatively recently by Sonicbids, another band promotion website/online tool, is basically a gig listing website but it also has a ton of back end tools for travelling musicians, band members, tour managers and crew to keep everyone in sync. It also publishes your event dates to several other gig listing sites including the ones mentioned above (although some have varying success on accuracy of details and especially time zones). It even auto creates Facebook events and updates them if you change the info inside Artistdata.

You can also generate an embedable gig list for your website which updates as you update your show list. Import and reexport blog feeds, social media posts (although I haven't bothered as I have blogger and othe things set up for those yada yada...).

Some of the behind the scenes features are particularly useful such as generating a calendar feed for programs on your desktop of mobile device such as iCal. It generates two feeds, one for public consumption with relevant details for a punter and one with additional info for band members and crew such as arrival/sound check times, fees and other logistical info.

One downside is the interface is a little clunky and occasionally unresponsive. It is also a little bit unintuitive in its flow. For example when entering show data, it presents you with a screen of limited data which you fill in and then save with a choice to publish externally or not (ie to other sites). Either one you choose it takes you to a second screen where you are presented with more optional data to enter. It took me a while to figure out that the website field for the venue you fill in on the first screen was not the website you buy tickets from (which is the one that gets synced to the Facebook event page), that one is only displayed on the second screen. This isn't explained anywhere either, I only learned through trial and error. It is also not explained that the "other info" box on the second screen is the field which populates the "additional info" box on the Facebook event page.

Another caveat is that if you add additional artists in the artistdata fields, it bolts them on to the end of the Facebook event title which makes them a bit unwieldy and less readable at a glance to the punter. I chose to add this info in the "other info" box which adds the data to the additional info box, as explained above, in the FB event instead of the title of the event, much more reader friendly!

One more downside is that for the UK, instead of having a list of counties which your event is held, you only get to choose from a list of generic regions such as "South", "Northeast" or "London and Southeast". If that wasn't irritating enough (where do, say, gigs in Hertfordshire or Yarmouth fit?), it also insists on labelling all your events with a two letter abbreviation of that generic region which nobody who actually lives in the UK knows or understands. I even had one fan wrote and ask where exactly Michigan the town of Bromsgrove was as it was labelled "Bromsgrove, MI" for Midlands. I have written several requests to get this updated to counties.

One last complaint is the "venue type" field which lists "club/casino/arena" as one venue. They couldn't be three more different types of venue with wildly different average capacities! This doesn't help the punter identify anything useful about the venue at all. It also misses some key venue types such as theatre, dancehall, arts centre etc. it does however include "folk club" as a venue because, you know, they are different from other clubs...(?).

To their credit the support have responded very quickly to several of my requests and answered every issue or query I have had satisfactorily which is a big plus. Some other large faceless tech companies (not naming Facebook here) are murder to get an answer out of when there is a problem.

UPDATE: The "Compensation/Deal" field would only accept the $ symbol and no over currency. I wrote in to support and they fixed it within 24 hours so now it accepts all currency symbols.

On the whole it's an easy way to publish your tour dates to multiple websites and platforms and only have to enter the info once. It will take you setting up accounts on all the partner sites it publishes to but at least you only have to do that once.

Check it out and let me know what you think, I'd love to hear if this has helped. 

Cheers, Alex

Welcome to my new independent music promo and marketing blog!

Hi everyone,
My name is Alex and apart from playing the trombone, washboard, bongos, kazoo and blues harp in the the Jive Aces, I do the promotion and marketing of the band, CDs, gigs and everything else.

I'm self taught in all these aspects and continuously learning new things and tricks and encountering pitfalls and (hopefully) learning how to avoid them.

I'll be posting every so often about anything and everything to do with promotion and marketing of an independent band and music.

What this blog will NOT be is a "how to get a million social media subscribers in five minutes" type blog. Social media is incredibly wide reaching and effective but by no means the only way to reach your audience. It will include everything from online, to promotion of different types of gigs, to distribution of music, to writing, production and distribution of music videos to any interesting tidbits that could be of use to the independent musician or artist.

I have learned a lot from other people generously sharing info online but have also over the last 15 years of doing this job, learned a lot myself and think it may come in useful to someone. I hope it does!

If there are any aspects you'd like to know about that you think would make a good post I may know about then please let me know.

Cheers, Alex