Well, Wayne Hancock passed through San Francisco two days ago, unbeknownced to me. Again. I try to check the calendar as regularly as humanly possible for me to remember, but again something went up between that day and this morning with a date scheduled right in my back yard for last Sunday. To any professional musicians out there who may be reading this, people who like your music want to know only two things of you at any given time:

1. Do you have anything new out?
2. When are you playing next?

Everything else is filler. With the power of the internet behind you, these two items have never been easier to continually put in front of your fans. In fact, thanks to most online music stores, you don't even need to be responsible for item one. Online music store features such as iTunes' Artist Alert will do it for you.

Item two, however, needs serious attention. The internet is filled with amazig things. Life in general provides hundreds of millions of distractions every day. It's simply too much to ask of your fans to continually check your MySpace page or your website for current tour dates. You need to broadcast them.

A simple RSS feed of your calendar, and a periodic email to a mailing list will help ensure that the people who want to see you, know about your shows. Put an email list sign-up form on every page of your site, and send out a list of upcoming shows every month.

Let's take, for example, the website of my band. See the email list sign-up form on the left side of the page? Now click around a little... See how the form is still in the left hand side of the page? No matter which page a Bottom Dwellers visitor lands on, it's super easy for them to sign up for our mailing list.

Do you know what RSS is? No? That's okay. Chances are some of your fans do. An RSS feed is an XML formatted file that all modern browsers, news readers, and thousands of Yahoo! Widgets/Google/Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets/Windows Sidebar Gadgets can read. It's a broadcast of site content that your fans can subscribe to, and it's perfectly suited for tour dates.

Let me direct your attention back to the Bottom Dwellers website. When visiting the site in FireFox, Safari or Internet Explorer 7, visitors are alerted to the existance of an RSS feed by the presence of an icon in the address bar or other tool bar like so:

This is accomplished by placing a link to the RSS feed within a link element in the head of each page of the site. When a visitor clicks one of these icons, they are presented with a formatted Bottom Dwellers calendar they can save as a book mark or subscription feed that will continually update each time an event is added to the calendar. Please note that there are currently no Bottom Dwellers shows on the calendar. Any dates that show up here will be past.

The Bottom Dwellers calendar is powered by a custom content management system. Any member of the band can log in to add an event to the calendar. This updates the normal calendar page, the mini calendar in the sidebar of every page, and the RSS feed.

It gets better. Not only can the RSS feed be read by browsers, news readers, and various widgets, but any website can also display the content. This article about the Bottom Dwellers was published in July of 2005, and includes our RSS feed. Thanks to the savvy developer of this site, readers who stumble onto this old article will always see a current list of upcoming performances (when there are performances to display).

I am continually dumbfounded by the level of neglect of artists, managers and record lables pay to the gods of usability. I am tired of missing shows. They Might Be Giants, Hank III, Clutch, and Wayne! Get off your asses and pay attention to your mailing lists and update to the 21st century.