Ben Walker

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. ;)

In a bizarre twist of fate I’ve ended up playing Hammond organ for Little Fish. This is a good thing. Little Fish rocks, I love playing the Hammond and I get to play the Royal Albert Hall.

The backstory is rather convoluted, so I’ll try to keep it short. It begins at the Zodiac in 2001…

I went to see the Roadworks Songwriters Tour at the Zodiac. There was a guy called Jont who was great and wore no shoes. I went to his monthly gig at the 12-Bar Club a few times and drank a lot of tequila.

Over the next five years I went to loads of his gigs. Some of them were UNLIT (a mixture of a house party and a gig), and eventually I put on an UNLIT of my own at the Gardeners Arms in January 2008. Jont played, I did a set at the piano and Stornoway played acoustic. Jont noticed that I could actually play, and I started to play piano at some of his gigs. We played a load of house concerts, small gigs and festivals around England (and a couple in Paris) through 2008/9.

Last year Jont put together a band he likes to call The Infinite Possibility (a 7-piece with bass, electric guitar, pedal steel, piano, backing vocals, percussion and my brother on drums) and we recorded an album, produced by Nigel of Bermondsey. A couple of weeks ago we were down at Rotator rehearsing for a final recording session (Jont wrote a new song that’s going on the album). JuJu from Little Fish turned up to sing some vocals on the new track. It turns out she had been looking for a Hammond player for almost a year, and I’m a Hammond player.

And now we’re supporting Them Crooked Vultures

It’s slightly insane. In a couple of weeks I’ll be sitting behind a beautiful Hammond VK-3 and staring wide-eyed past JuJu with her 50s Gibson and Nez with his immaculately tuned drum kit, into a 3-storey sea of Them Crooked Vultures fans. Not bad for a Monday night.

Unfortunately it’s all sold out (in – like – 0.3 seconds), but we’re playing another half dozen gigs around the country in the next couple of weeks (Bristol tomorrow, then Portsmouth, Oxford, London, Nottingham, Manchester). You should come and see us!

I’m going back to an old topic from a new perspective: the ultimate band website. Having thought about it for a year I have a load of random ideas, but I haven’t yet put them together into a coherent structure. This is an attempt to find out what I think about band websites – an essay in the true sense.

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. ;)

What a geek. Seriously.

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…

Can’t stop – I’m on my way to play at George’s Jamboree at the Chester Arms. But I just wanted to let you know that I released a new album yesterday!

It’s called Troubadork after the imaginary genre of music that Nick labelled me with last year, and I’m really happy with it. You’ll know some of the songs (You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall spring to mind, and others will be completely new (Putting Your Hand In The Blender Again, Candy’s On Fire).

Go and listen to Troubadork on my music page. I’ve written about all the songs, so you can really explore. And of course it’s free to download if you like it enough to take home.

Ok, ok. I’m coming. Gotta run. Bye. ;)

New Year’s Day, as always, was a day of hangovers and resolutions. I was sitting in a café with Nick Gill slowly and quietly exploring the potential of the new year and the new decade. Both of us had the usual resolutions about becoming successful without being famous, never drinking again and seeing more of our friends. Experience had showed us that the no drinking resolution was doomed from the start, so we thought about the other two.

Creative people are always busy

Although I’ve known Nick since the early nineties and enjoy his company immensely, we consistently fail to see much of each other. It may be because he doesn’t really like me, but I doubt it. I’m optimistic like that. It’s probably because we’re both creators of stuff, writers and musicians. We both go through life with a neverending mental list of projects, plans and ideas that will get us one step closer to being creatively successful. Creative success is a ridiculous goal, because it has no end. If you were ever to reach it (and you’d have to have a narrow definition of success to get there), you would be inspired, forced and driven to do more. So it’s not a goal at all. We don’t want to waste valuable creative time until we’ve finished, but there’s no end. So we don’t really have time for each other.

The solution to this antisocial quandary wasn’t difficult to find. We want to see each other more and we want to create stuff. So let’s see each other and create stuff. But what kind of stuff? Music doesn’t work. Nick creates beautiful music that makes you sink into a melancholy thoughtful state and I create geeky music that makes you smile. The last time Nick and I collaborated on a musical project was back in 1999 when we made an album called Groove On, which stands as the singular most embarrassing record either of us have ever made.

We’re making a videocast

All we really wanted to do was meet up and chat. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re making a videocast called The Peoples Princess (after a Diana commemorative mug with a missing apostrophe that I took to the session) in which we chat. We made a theme tune with a ukulele and an autoharp that Nick had lying around, and we filmed some short clips of toys being pushed over to break up the talking.

The Peoples Princess isn’t supposed to be funny (which is lucky, because we’re generally not). It’s just two self-involved but loveable chaps catching up for a chat. With beer. And a sofa. The wonderful and talented Daley Walton is editing it, so if it ends up being funny it’s his fault. Daley is also the special guest in the first episode. He doesn’t really say much or appear on camera, but he’s pretty special.

The Peoples Princess #1: Twenty-Ben. Nerve tonics. Sleeves. Television.

Here it is. Share it with anyone you think might like it. You can fave it on YouTube or subscribe to the peoplesprincesstv YouTube channel, share it on Facebook, tweet it, follow it on Tumblr or just email the link to your friends. Hope you enjoy it. ;)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re recording a live album on the Man (hat on) tour. Nothing fancy, just unedited live gigs in houses and offices recorded with an iPhone mic and maybe a line out of the back of my amp. Recording it is the easy bit. The difficult thing is deciding how to present it, how to publish it. It’s not really an album. Albums are industry-centric marketable products. What we’re doing is both more and less than that.

We still love albums

What does everyone love about albums? They give the listener a context in which to appreciate and enjoy the music. You know the band put the album together (track order, artwork and the recordings themselves) in a certain way, and that knowledge lets you relax and enjoy.

The thing we’re missing with online albums (I’m going to call them albums because there isn’t a better word for them yet) is the artwork. The physical presence. The exploration of the related material.

Let’s make internet-native artwork

So the plan is to use a Flickr group as the artwork. Not just to use the photos, but to integrate the album with the Flickr group in a more dynamic way. I’ve asked the Oxford Flickr Group (some of whom know my music already) to contribute meaningful photos to replace the physical album art. Why try to recreate physical artwork (booklets, sleeves, inserts) online when there are already amazing ways of presenting images online in an explorable and native way? We’re on the internet now. It’s not paper. Get over it. ;)

I’ve set up a Man (hat on) Flickr group. I’ve posted the track listing of the album we haven’t made yet, and each of the Oxford Flickr people have three weeks to submit photos to the group that match individual songs. They might just respond to the title, or they might read the lyrics, listen to the song and submit a photo that captures the vibe of the song in a deeper way. They might use photos they already have or they might use the three weeks to take new photos.

The important thing is that we use Flickr in the way it is already used rather than try to crowbar some silly competition into it. Flickr’s all about community, conversation and sharing, and the Oxford Flickr Group is a perfect example of a working Flickr community. Where it gets interesting is linking the Flickr experience to the not-an-album experience.

Flickr as album art

Here’s my thinking so far: The Flickr group pool acts as the artwork for the album. I link to it from the album. I choose one photo for each track that becomes the photo for that song. It’s embedded in the MP3 so when people listen to the track on their iPod or on their computer they see the photo. In the metadata for the MP3 I link directly to the photo on Flickr (thus inextricably linking the photographer with the recording). On the Bandcamp page for the album I embed a Flickr slideshow of all the photos I’ve chosen for songs, and on each song page I embed all the photos that were submitted for that song.

What do you think? Genius? Madness? I’m interested. It seems like a good experiment that might open up some new ways of thinking about the album package of which we’re all loathe to let go.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ll know that I’ve been planning a New York Tour around the 2nd Beatles Complete On Ukulele festival on 5/6 December. Xander, Miranda and I are forming a crack team of creative geeks and booking a week’s worth of house concerts and office gigs.

It’s called Man (hat on). I won’t tell you much more about it, because it’s all on the Man (hat on) blog! But I will show you this video, which is the best explanation we’ve come up with so far:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’re going to be in New York in the first week of December, leave a comment or tweet me and I’ll keep you posted with the plans…

Steve Lawson came up with a(nother) great idea recently: Office Gigs. They are like house concerts but in an office. Company X books one or more of the Office Gigs artists (Steve, Lobelia, Lloyd Davis, Miriam Jones and me), and we turn up at lunch time to play songs, tell stories and otherwise entertain the workers.

I won’t try to convince you that it’s a great idea, because Steve has made an educational video that does exactly that. I dare you to watch this and not want to book us to play in your office:

Check out the Office Gigs website for more about how it works, and if you work in a hipster kind of office why not get us to come and amuse you? ;)

When you find yourself watching videos about procrastination rather than getting on with stuff you start to worry. And when you start to worry the only way forward is to get off your arse and do your thing, whatever that may be. Doing my thing means setting up a mic, firing up Garageband or Logic or ProTools and playing some music. Sometimes I’ll sing a tweet. Sometimes I’ll start writing a song. Today I recorded a chilled out cover of a Little Feat classic, 20 Million Things To Do. It seemed kind of appropriate.

And you know what? I feel better. I’ve done something today. I’ve put another recording out there into the ether and that counts. I’ve also arranged to screen print some tshirts for my New York tour, so I’m pretty much over-achieving now. I’ll make sure not to do anything too useful for the rest of the day.

Enjoy the song. And if you’ve never spent a Sunday morning listening to Little Feat, I suggest you address that pronto. The greatest hits (As Time Goes By) is a good start, and Waiting For Columbus is their definitive live album. If you’ve already been there and done that, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll hook you up with a wonderful 1974 radio session bootleg that you will LOVE. ;)

20 Million Things by ihatemornings

View at audioboo.fm

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