BandPage Everywhere

[Lunkhead]

I work at a music tech startup called BandPage. For two years the company has provided the closest thing you could get to a MySpace style musician page (with songs, videos, photos, tour dates, etc.) on Facebook. Facebook made some big changes earlier this year so we had to broaden our horizons. Today we released "BandPage Everywhere" which is a set of embeddable widgets you can put anywhere on the Web, and also a super easy way to generate a really beautiful Web site for your band if you don't already have one. It's a step toward becoming the central content management system for bands and musicians. Sorry if this is spammy sounding, but I really do believe we've built some cool stuff. Check out for example this Berkeley Social Scene Web site I whipped up in a few seconds:

http://berkeleysocialscene.bandpage.com/
(soon to be http://www.berkeleysocialscene.com/ )

Company blog post here:

http://blog.bandpage.com/2012/07/24/ban ... verywhere/

[Billy's Little Trip]

Cool! I have no idea how this will help Paco and myself to become porn stars. But I'm sure Dee will know how to use this technology to help us all to propel as Psychotics.

[roymond]

Looks nice. It seems it only works via Facebook, is that true? I don't see how to sign up without installing a FB app. What if I don't want to use FB?

[Lunkhead]

Yes, you still need to sign up with your FB account, have an FB page, and grant the app access. For now.

[jb]

Looks awesome, Sam! Definitely will try it out, to see about replacing my crusty old site.

Is there any way to add metadata around a song, like lyrics or a chord sheet or a "what it's all about" page? And can I group the songs into albums or collections, or tag them somehow so people can find all my dumb Guy n' Guitar recordings or not have to hear the ones about fucking dolphins?

[Lunkhead]

JB, as far as I can tell you can only set up buy and download URLs for the songs. Song metadata is a good idea, though.

[Caravan Ray]

the ones about fucking dolphins?

Are there videos to go with those ones? I am over 18 and have a valid credit card.

[Lunkhead]

Just an FYI, BandPage now supports signing up just using an email address and password. No Facebook account required anymore.

Also, you don't have to have a Facebook fan page for your band in order to use their product anymore.

So at this point I would actually suggest BandPage as the way to go if you want to have a very nice looking Web site with relatively little effort. You still need to host your mp3s on SoundCloud, though, unfortunately. It's kind of annoying, but after you sign up on SoundCloud you can actually upload mp3s to it via BandPage, so you can more or less stick within one content management system at that point.

[fluffy]

http://sockpuppet.bandpage.com/

yet another thing for me to never update

[Lunkhead]

Ooh, nice background, and font choice.

I am noticing annoying little inconsistencies/oddities:

- until the background image loads you see "Upload a background image (***x*** recommended), wtf?
- if you have no photos, videos, or shows, you just get a blank screen for photos, but for videos and shows you get a message "There are no videos/shows", wtf?
- unfortunately that message is vertically centered for videos but aligned top for shows, wtf?
- there is still an "f" Facebook icon link to a Facebook page, even though it appears you don't have a Facebook page, wtf?

Seems like quality control has really hit the skids over there since I left.

[fluffy]

So at this point I would actually suggest BandPage as the way to go if you want to have a very nice looking Web site with relatively little effort. You still need to host your mp3s on SoundCloud, though, unfortunately. It's kind of annoying, but after you sign up on SoundCloud you can actually upload mp3s to it via BandPage, so you can more or less stick within one content management system at that point.

I'd actually say that Bandcamp is a better choice; you don't have to deal with Soundcloud or social network integration at all, you have a store ready-to-go, and so on. The only downside to BandCamp is that it isn't really suitable for sharing unfinished demo tracks, and their model for singles is a little obnoxious. Also they don't have any built-in blogging/upcoming-shows/etc. functionality, and instead you have to do stuff through other sites that it sometimes manages to pick up but often doesn't.

I suppose I could just upload everything to BandCamp (except then cover songs get questionable) and use the "about this song" section as a blog entry, for the rare times I even post anything to sockpuppet.us anyway. That doesn't give me a very good way of providing my remix stems, but it's not like anyone grabs them from there either. I should just put stems on ccMixter... last time I checked that site there were a bunch of remixes of my songs I didn't even know about, for instance.

[Lunkhead]

BandCamp still seems to me to be very focused on album/track sales. I haven't explored it in that much depth but I think every time I go to somebody's BandCamp page the general layout is organized around tracks and albums. It's not really a "full" Web site for a band, is it? How do bands provide access to their non-audio data (videos, photos, tour dates, etc.) on BandCamp?

Beside that functional/focus difference, I personally think BandPage's graphic design is way better looking than BandCamp's, but that's just my opinion. I think the BandPage sites look very professionally designed, without the band having to do very much to make them look good.

I wish BandPage would get rid of their "premium" service level though and make its few extra features part of the free service. Specifically they should make the Twitter "tab" and custom link "tabs" on the standalone Web site free features. I also think they should provide a free RSS tab, the way they offer RSS integration with their Facebook app. But if they didn't listen to me when I worked there they sure aren't going to listen to me now.

[fluffy]

No, that's an accurate assessment - BandCamp is very much designed around music sales. There are ways of adding sidebar content for shows and stuff and you can link to a blog and they provide an RSS feed for any content you add but it's definitely focused on being a storefront. The thing is, how often do you go to a band's site to do anything other than

1) listen to their music
2) buy their music
3) see what shows they're playing?

BandCamp also provides a bonus:

4) discover other music you might like

From BandCamp you can still link to a blog, if people really give a shit about what kind of cheese you had on your sandwich that day, but I actually like that it distills everything about the music experience down to what people actually give a crap about, and not all the other effluvium. And if you want to provide remix material, you can do that as a stems-and-seeds album or you can link to ccMixter/SoundCloud/etc. as well.

It would be nice to have a bit more control over layout, but what options they do provide are pretty useful. Also, you can change the default entry page such that it shows your discography and other crap instead of going to the latest release. If I were to make my bandcamp my entry page for sockpuppet.us that's probably what I'd do.