Myzbase, OneSheet and building your own stuff
Brendan Mulligan, the guy behind ArtistData has made a service called OneSheet that’s quite like Myzbase. It’s essentially a band-focussed version of Flavors.me.
It looks slick and cool in the same way that Flavors does. And I probably won’t use it for the same reasons I stopped using Flavors as an about page for me.
Aggregating all my Internet stuff in one place with no curation and no context was just confusing. I use Tumblr, Twitter, Google reader, Instagram, Pinboard, Flickr and the rest for different reasons, and I post different stuff to them for different audiences.
Having a “one sheet” is a great idea, but it should be a “Press” page on your website, and you should curate it carefully.
Mulligan said in one press release that having a website was “too much effort” for most small indie bands. Balls. If you can spare the effort to update sixteen different social networks and plug them into your one sheet, you can build yourself a simple website. If you don’t have a website, you don’t control anything.
Myzbase was built as a landing page for your website, to catch the people who were still googling “band name myspace” and give them useful information. OneSheet could serve the same purpose, but then most of the content is unnecessary. I limited Myzbase to gig listings and a music player for that very reason.
I’m not saying everyone should use Myzbase - it’s an interesting experiment that might even have run its course already. But I can’t help thinking of Jesse von Doom’s video for the #ampnms conference where he said that we should all be building our own stuff on the web and not relying on other people’s services. I think he’s right.
Myzbase will probably become an open source template that people can use to build their own one sheet. More on all of this soon…
Welcome, Fireworks Night!
Just added a new page for Fireworks Night, and made a few updates while I was there:
- There’s now room for a photo credit (like on the She Makes War page
- There’s a small link to this blog at the bottom of ech page (so people can find out what Myzbase is)
- I changed the page title from the Myspace rip-off text to “Myzbase (like Myspace but good)”
Little by little…
I’ve added the first few Myzbace pages:
They work across all browsers, but I’m sure I’ll find a few bugs here and there. If you spot any bugs, or have any suggestions, the best place to put them is the issues page on GitHub. If that’s confusing, just email me.
Why wouldn’t you have a Myzbase page?
Most bands I’ve talked to have been excited about having a Myzbase page, but some have decided they don’t want one. This is useful for me, because it gives me an opportunity to find out why bands really value their existing Myspace page.
Here are a couple of reasons bands have given for not having a Myzbase page, and my responses:
We have our band website set up in Wordpress.
Awesome. That’s exactly what you should have. Myzbase is there to complement your main website and to drive people to it. This may need to be made clearer in the design - maybe a short paragraph at the bottom which explains what Myzbase is and why you should visit the band’s website next.
The number of Myspace friends is quite a helpful piece of information for industry types to see when they visit our Myspace page.
I agree that the number of Myspace friends (and the play count) has been used by industry types for years to get a rough idea of a band’s popularity. But I have two problems with this argument. Firstly, there aren’t many industry types left who don’t understand that Myspace friends are basically just bands spamming each other. Second, the number of Myspace friends you have won’t mean a lot when Myspace closes down, and that’s kind of the point of Myzbase. It’s somewhere for bands to go now that Myspace is finally dying.
