Manatee Web Site and MySpace Page Update

I just published new web site and MySpace page updates for Manatee. Their previous web site was based off of their first, self-titled album. It's been almost a year since the album came out, so it was time to update everything while they continue to write, record and play gigs.

Web Site: http://www.manateetheband.com
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/teammanatee

If you're going to SXSW this year, Manatee should be there. Stop by and check them out.

Show Dates Not Showing Up In MySpace Music Pages

I received an email from one of my clients that I designed a page for regarding their MySpace page telling me that they had just added some show dates to their MySpace Music page and they were not showing up. When I visited the page and turned off all style sheets I noticed the upcoming shows section of the profile did not show up anymore. After poking around in the profile, I noticed that they had changed how the music page pulls show data to your profile. The old form in the "Edit Profile" section (see images below) no longer populates show data to your music profile. Why MySpace left this form active form in your profile, I have no idea.  If they wanted to allow you to go see past shows in this section, they could have just disabled the form and put a notice regarding the change.

Old MySpace show form

Here's the new location of the new form to post shows to your MySpace Music page:

1. Go to your home page
2. Scroll down to the bottom of your friend activity stream
3. Use the section called Shows & Events to post shows to your profile
4. You can link other bands who are playing the show via this module plus provide a link to purchase tickets

New MySpace show form

The new area to enter shows into your music profile has been there for a while, but the old location where many musicians are used to entering their gigs has worked until very recently. I hope this post was helpful to some, as I have yet to see any info on this yet via a quick Google search.

Update on May 5, 2010 by Brian Espinosa

It appears that MySpace has now removed the old form to enter shows, so at least there will be no more confusion as to where to enter your upcoming show dates. They have also enabled the shows from the old form to show back up on your list of upcoming shows. This now creates a new problem. Any of the shows you have previously entered into this form will remain on your profile and there is no way to access them through the new upcoming shows area (in case you wanted to change the time, date, bands playing, cover charge). Some may also have the problem that they entered the shows in both areas because the old area did not work, and now they are showing duplicates of all upcoming shows.

Unless MySpace ports this old data to the new area where you manage events, I see no way for anyone to remove these shows from their profile until the dates of the events have passed.  If you are experiencing duplicate show dates on your music page, you could go in and delete the show dates that you have posted through the new interface and hope that MySpace does not disable the old data again.  Or, you can just wait for the dates of the shows entered in the old form to pass and let them drop off your list of upcoming shows.

You would think that a service as large as MySpace would have had much better logistics in place to implement this change, considering that IMO, MySpace Music is the only thing that has kept anyone even using MySpace.

Manatee Photo Shoot & MySpace Design

I just completed a MySpace page design for my friends Manatee, a great new band out of Oakland, CA who happen to also be playing a new years eve show tomorrow night in Oakland at The Uptown with three other cool bands.  I will be there shooting photos of the whole thing.

MySpace is a horrible place to design for, but if you're a musician, you almost can't get away from it.  In order to make a clean looking design, I had to cut through a majority of the underlying content fields and place everything myself.  The result is a fairly clean design I think they are pretty happy with.

For the design, I also took the time to head out and shoot some photos of the band at their practice space in Oakland.  On my way, it started raining pretty hard... but by the time we were ready to head out, the rain had subsided enough to move around and not get too wet.  I am pretty happy with what we were able to capture with such little time to work with.

I also just recovered from a hard drive failure in my iMac.  I use Backblaze for backing up my computer and my external drive, so I was not worried about losing any files, except for my most recent stuff.  I do, however, keep pretty good on-site backups of my work too, so I did not have to use my online backup this time.  I've learned my lesson over the years so this was my least stressful hard drive failure since I have so much data redundancy.  I did also take the opportunity to put a 10,000RPM hard drive inside of my 24" aluminum iMac and I am noticing a significant performance boost.  Too bad I didn't have the money lying around for an SSD instead, but by the time I need a new drive I probably won't be using this computer anymore or they will be twice the size and speed and half the price.