Ever wonder what people are saying about your band or who’s listening to your music (um, of course you do!)?  Promoters do too, and will often search for bands online to check out their buzz.  Well, we just made it a little easier for artists and promoters to track buzz all in one place – on Sonicbids – by integrating Last.fm listens and GoogleBlog and Twitter search results into artist and promoter accounts.

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We’re excited to tell you about the changes we made to improve your experience searching for gigs on Sonicbids.  We’ve heard a lot of feedback over the past few months, and, yes, we really listen! Below are some of the highlights based on that feedback: (more…)

Just a quick note about a tiny feature we added recently.  If you haven’t noticed, you can now check a box called “Remember me” when logging into your account to stay logged into Sonicbids for the next 2 weeks.

Admittedly not the most exciting feature, but hopefully it will make accessing your account on a regular basis a bit easier.

Stay tuned for some much cooler updates coming soon.

Starting today artist members will be able to rate and review gig listings. Here’s how it works:

· Only artists that submit to gigs are able to leave reviews on gig listings.

· Only artists that were selected are able to rate gig listings.

o Artists can assign a 1-5 star rating based on their overall experience with the gig.

o Artists will also be asked some questions about the gig which will help to identify it’s strengths and areas for improvement. (example below)

o Lastly, we’ll ask selected artists to let us know if they made any money on the gig. This part isn’t displayed publicly, but will help us get a better sense of what kinds of gigs are generating money for our artists (so we can find more of them).

All ratings and reviews are aggregated from past listings so when you look at a gig we’ve worked with before, you’ll see ratings and reviews from artists that have played it in the past. Each review includes the artist’s name, a link to their profile and EPK, the name of the gig they’re commenting on, and if they were selected for it or just submitted. Selected artists will also have the star rating they gave the listing posted with their review:

Artists can get started now by going to their “My Submissions” tab and clicking on the gig’s name to get to view it’s listing. From there click the “Rate/Review this Gig” link and follow the instructions.

As always, let us know what you think of the new review/rating system by commenting here.

Look forward to your thoughts.

Lou

One thing we’re hearing consistently from our members is that they’d like to know which bands are being selected for specific gigs. Who’s having success? Which gigs are they going after? How are they presenting themselves? How many/which Sonicbids bands did a promoter end up booking when all’s said and done? Every gig booked can be a learning opportunity for other bands on the site. Good news – we’ve been working on a new site area called “It Works” that shares this information: band-by-band and gig-by-gig. It’s in Beta, which means we’re still making some tweaks based on usability and feedback from all of you.  Check it out here:

http://www.sonicbids.com/itworks

Here’s how “It Works”…works

When an artist is selected for a gig through the Submission Tracker or manually adds a date they booked using their EPK to their Sonicbids calendar, this information will now appear on their “artist profile.” Here’s an artist example: http://www.sonicbids.com/profile/gretchenwitt. Promoters will also have a profile which will display all of their gig listings and who was selected for what. (Promoter example: http://www.sonicbids.com/Profile/summerfest) By sharing this information, we hope to open a window on how Sonicbids is working, with a timeline going all the way back to the beginning of the company – 120,000 booked gigs ago.

Other “It Works” features are coming; we’ll post more about them in the coming weeks. Take a look at it here and be sure to tell us what you think, and what you’d like to see in the next release by commenting here.

Thank you for your continued feedback and support – it’s helping us build a better Sonicbids. And stay tuned for more enhancements to both gig listings and “It Works” over the next few weeks. We’ve got some cool things coming, so bookmark the Builder’s Blog and check back often!

As promised we’ve built upon the new look for gig listings by adding the ability for any logged in user to upload photos.  For example, if you’ve played CMJ before you can now head over to the gig listing for CMJ 2009 and add photos of your band’s performance.

You’ll also notice a new rating on each gig listing called the “Pick-O-Meter.”  This will display the “pickiness” of each promoter.  Promoters that are pickier about who they select will have a higher rating on the pick-o-meter.

How we determine the Pick-O-Meter rating for a listing.

We calculate a pick-o-meter rating for a listing based on that event’s past activity (which is why some events don’t have a pick-o-meter rating).  Lets say a promoter opens a listing each year for a festival.  To calculate the pick-o-meter rating for this year’s festival, we’ll look at the number of selections the promoter made for the festival last year and divide it by the total number of submissions they received.  This will tell us the percentage of submissions that were selected.  We take that percentage and rank it against every other gig listing in the same category (gig categories are: Live Gigs, Competitions/Contests, A&R/Publicity/Licensing).  Their ranking against other gigs in their category is what determines their pick-o-meter rating.  So gigs that select a lower percentage of their submissions compared to other gigs of the same type will have a higher pick-o-meter rating and vice versa.

We’re not done improving gig listings just yet.  Take this quick survey to let us know what additional information you’d like to see about gigs before submitting.

There’s still more to come over the next few weeks so stay tuned.

Hey all,

If you poked around the Promoter Drop Box at all today you probably noticed some changes to the way gig listings look.

First we updated the “Gig Listing At A Glance” section to include a bit more info.  You used to have to scroll to the bottom of the page to see stuff like Compensation and Artist Attendance, but all of that is now right at the top.

We also brought the Submission Tracker Date up to the top of the page so you can take that into consideration before submitting. Listings that aren’t using Submission Tracker will have a different icon to make them easy to spot.

You can see the real thing here.

This is just the first in a number of cool new things we’re going to be rolling out over the next few weeks.  Inclucing more improvements to the Gig Listings to allow for community interaction, an easy way to see who’s having success on Sonicbids, and a couple other things I don’t want to hint at yet, but trust me you’ll like them.

Rock on,

Lou

PS – Thanks to all the artists that answered Panos’ survey.  It provided us with a lot of good information about what artists are looking for from Sonicbids which we’ll be using to guide our decisions about the new features coming round the bend.