By Buck Edwards
With apologies to Wallace Shawn, I have a few things I need to get off my chest.
1. The music staff at North of Center will extol, to the point of embarrassment, the virtues of your band/club/venue/agency/label if you only tell us what you want us to say, and/or give us free stuff.
The defining characteristic of this department, as currently constituted, is laziness. While we twice monthly wade through a series of Myspace pages and event calendars to figure out what we want to write about, what we really want is to be handed the information we need—not to have to look for it. Scouring the web is drudgery, and we can hardly be bothered to, like, email anyone. Therefore, what we need is for somebody else to do the work for us, and that somebody is you, you band manager, booking agent, club owner, label rep, or bassist (who ended up having to do publicity because nobody else in the band could manage it without screwing it up).
Basically, if you tell us such-and-such band is playing such-and-such club and want us to say nice things about them so more people come to the show, get drunk, and buy things, that’s exactly what we’ll do. Likewise, if you send us a CD or a download link, we’ll tell people how great the new album is, and to rush right out and get their copies today. Put us on the guest list, and we’ll tell everybody what a wonderful performance you gave. And if you’re a fit, athletic female between the ages of 18 and 35 and you send us a pair of your [Deleted. —Ed.] rendezvous anytime, with no strings attached.
2. Speaking of Myspace, would you please get rid of it and switch to something else?
Facebook is fine, Bandcamp is nifty, and of course your own web site is the way to go, if you do a decent job with it, but please lose the Myspace page for good. Even with the recent redesign, it’s the most unpleasant browsing experience the web has to offer; after the update the site went from unstable, slow, and outrageously outdated to even-less stable, yet slower, and marginally more contemporary. I have twice witnessed Myspace pages not only crash the browser, but take down the entire operating system. It’s just…it’s just horrible, man.
And no, you don’t have to have one anymore.
3. Whatever web presence you choose, keep the damned thing updated.
The phrase “web presence” seems very last-decade, but I can’t think of anything better, and anyway, the point is that since your band or venue found the wherewithal to establish your little corner of the internet, you ought to find it in you to keep it current. I know it’s a pain in the ass, but how seriously are you taking your enterprise? I don’t care if you’re a slave to the dream; if your home page has a splash graphic of an album you released three years ago and the show dates stop last August, everybody’s gonna think you’re defunct, or at least heading that way.
It’s even worse for venues, especially those that nobody really likes to visit (you know who you are) unless somebody good’s playing there. Right now, in fact, there are two established clubs in town whose online calendars suggest that nobody is playing there in the month of March. Hence one can only assume that these venues are closing for good. No? Still alive and well? Then update the calendar, dummy! I mean, I don’t want to tell you how to run your business, but…well, yeah–yeah I do. Run it better.
Thanks for listening.
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