But your not.

I’ve been going through the band list for sxsw and it’s taking way too fucking long.  Why you ask?  Because bands did a bad job of promoting themselves.  I am currently using the SXSW music page, last.fm and myspace to listen to the bands.  Since M and I use the 3 song rule to determine whether or not we will go to a show, the sxsw website isn’t so helpful with their streaming media option.  That one song may or may not be representative of the bands set list.

Bands,think about what info you  display on the sxsw website.  Don’t give out your own website if it is going to take me more than 2 clicks to listen to your music.  My biggest dissappointment is when I click a few times only to get a link to your myspace page.  Just put the link to the myspace page on the sxsw site.

Another good option for bands is to use sonicbids and upload your songs to their streaming device.  That way I can listen to the songs while I read your bio.

Last.fm has proved useful for the bands that actually put their music on there.  Its not cool when you click to a band’s page and find that you can only listen to bands like them, not their actual music.  I like using last.fm over myspace because the pages are tagged with similar artists, reviews, bios and often a list of upcoming gigs so I can get a feel for who they tour with.

Back to the myspace pages.  Think about what you put on there. Some band sites look like web 2.0 puked all over them.  If you have 80k widgets on your page, 1) it slows down page loading and 2) many bands have forgotten to disable the autoplay feature (meaning the user needs to turn the apps off or be bombarded with every tune the band put up on the site).