Results from last month
Wetwerks actually appeared and left a message on my page. Looks like they're going to be locking themselves in the studio for the duration of the website problems, so hopefully something positive will come out of that in the form of new music.
I haven't actually finished the first post in my "vision" story yet, for those who were wondering. The reason being that I've been spending most of my limited spare time recently with the unofficial bug tracker. I made an initial set of postings in there, and have been drip-feeding a few ever since, meaning I'm currently maintaining a record of having made the initial post for roughly a quarter of the bugs in the database as a whole, even though others keep posting a few bugs as well. And OK, you can argue that under 150 in total isn't that many (yet), but I don't think we'll be done posting for a while, even though there may be a bit of calm while we wait for the promised update. Here's hoping it will fix at least some of those. And hopefully that comment last month about needing a full time job to collect and report bugs makes a bit more sense now as well.
This month's gainers and losers
There have been no gainers or losers this month due to the website problems. I'm going to give it one more month to see if things improve on the artist searching, because it's still a major issue to find artists in the first place. At the moment it looks more likely that artists will want out of the site themselves rather than me having to worry about them. It's also looking unclear from the "last visited" and "last updated" dates as to whether these are actually working or not, as these 2 dates now seem to be identical and quite often seem to be set to the current date when you visit the profile, even though I often can't see any change in the profile itself. Haven't yet spotted one where the dates are different but I'm still looking. It's therefore a completely unreliable method of finding out whether the artists are still around or not, and I'd have to go chasing round elsewhere as a result. Not something I really want to spend that much time on at present.
New investments
All new investments are on hold while the website is in such a dire state. I did get a part in Lip Service, but only as a result of winning a gift part for entering bug number 50 in the bug tracker. And even collecting that giftpart brought out some new bugs.
Watching
This month I'm mostly watching those artists I would probably have bought a part in if the site had been working properly.
Casee Wilson is the first of these. She's been lurking on my wishlist a while, and I had intended to buy a part last hatchet day, but as you know, the website got in the way.
The last Sixpack winner Lani Lewis is also on the list of those left waiting for a part since last hatchet day due to the website being in such a mess.
Finally on the waiting list we have Bermir, who I kind of remember listening to a while ago, but who I only really took a serious listen to when he hit the charts just before the website problems started.
There are also 2 new artists I'm interested in, where I had the opportunity and would probably have dived in as "first part" if things were working. The first of these is Taylor Horn who has worked with Tim from Civilised Tears, who I'm presuming is the reason she found this site. The music has a great sound to it already, given that she's only a teenager and it's quite possible to hear the CT influence in the two songs posted, so this is definitely one to check out if you like them.
The second looks to have come in on or near the "German publicity rush" about sellaband.de. I found them from a seemingly random showing on the artist page where they appeared in the "spotlight" box on the right hand side - I've more usually seen Kirt or Civilised Tears popping up in that one instead. The artist in question is called Poem and it seems they make some very nice easy-listening acoustic guitar style pop. Check them out, the music is well worth it.
Next in the list of artists I'm watching, there are two that have popped up as a result of the chaos on the website and are worth visiting if you want some entertainment. Kluklu makes the best "Sellaband song" I've heard in a while in the form of a tune called "What have you done?". One of these days, someone ought to gather up all the fun songs that have been posted for entertainment value and make an album of them. I mean, who can forget such gems as the "Sellaband rap" by Brian Taylor of Vegas Dragons, or even the "Sellaband Tribune" song by Spellbox. I'm pretty sure we're heading towards an album's worth already if people think about songs that have been around.
And of course, how can I forget MaWa - the artist who is the second of the two in question. The latest song, an epic called "White Noise" can probably fill an album all on its own. Though I'm not sure you'd want to listen to that much of it, if the truth were told. I'm just waiting for the first video to appear on this profile. Based on the songs posted and MaWa's sense of humour it would be an interesting choice for sure. There's a great "protest parts" feel to what's going on here, particularly given the list of believers so far, so it will be interesting to see how long this particular entertainment continues. So far it seems it's been worth $250 - maybe there's a lesson or two some artists can learn from this about involvement with the community.
It's also interesting to see what's been happening with artists in general since the chaos started. Whilst the majority seem to have lost parts, there are a few who continue to gain despite the website troubles. Sylvain Zebo is one of these and whilst I haven't heard anything I like yet, he has to be worth checking out for this fact alone.
Bugfest entertainment
With the lack of a Sixpack this month, I thought I'd give you a roundup of just a few of the more entertaining sights to be discovered as a result of the new website and bugs in it. Whilst this might be regarded by some as a rather irreverent thing to do, I'm of the opinion the state of the website is currently one of those cases where if you couldn't have the occasional laugh, you'd have to cry instead.
1. number 1 or number 2?
At the top of the community page, it's quite clear about the spotlight artist
As number one in the overall charts, Civilized Tears has rightly deserved to be the first to be put in the spotlight as featured spotlight Artist.
But it even now says "Civilised tears - number 2" in the title, despite this having been the case for a while after a large parts drop took them from just under 42K to back down below Lori Greco. Whilst there's more important things that need fixing, I still find this spotlight amusing as a result.
2. To promote or not to promote? That is the question.
We started chasing down some bugs with the "promo tools" link showing in the believer dashboard and reporting them in the bugtracker. Initially someone else brought up the fact there was a link on the wishlist tab to them and that didn't work. I brought up the fact there was no equivalent link on the dashboard for artists you hold parts in. The information in the bugtracker that came back from Sellaband says that to fix the problem they've removed the promo tools link from believer profiles because there are currently no promotion tools. Which then leaves the rather interesting question of that "promote" tab on artist pages, which tells you that in order to promote "you can use any of the following tools". My brain is fizzing at the logic of this. If there are no promo tools, then what is this tab still doing here? Alternatively, there's a "share to various places" in this tab, so doesn't that count as a promo tool? (in which case why remove the link from believer profiles in the first place). Hopefully my sanity on this one can get back to normal when they sort out the new promo tools, because the Sellaband logic and my logic feel currently incompatible.
3. Now you see it, now you don't.
The thing that can most easily get you to question your sanity at the moment is the number of things that appear (or indeed disappear), particularly on your own dashboard. Here's just one example. The "buy album" and "free track" buttons aren't there on your shop tab any more. Unless you have more than one page in that tab, when you'll find they're back on page 2. And then just to make you doubt your sanity, you'll find they're back when you go back to page 1. So if you think you've seen something, but it isn't there any more, or you can't see something and then suddenly it's back, there's a very good chance it's not you, but is in fact another bug. Just make sure you look twice at everything, because you definitely can't trust your eyes first time. It can make quite a game trying to work out what's what as a result.
Video of the month
Well I can't actually delete the old videos at the moment, but it seems I can upload a new one into my profile, which is an improvement on last month. So this month, I present to you a story about how the music industry can go badly wrong for some, in the form of a band called Protocol and the song "She Waits for Me". I originally picked up on them through another song of theirs ("Where's the Pleasure") being played on TV, and having visited their website, I found their debut album was due out a couple of months later. But when it didn't appear, I went looking and found out its release had been delayed. Several months later, a different story emerged. It seems that the record company were unhappy with the promotion of the artist and dropped them because the singles hadn't reached the chart positions they were hoping for. Despite the album having been recorded and mixed, it was never released. And as I haven't linked to the artist website, you've maybe guessed that it appears whatever exactly it was that happened, it seems it was too much of a strain on the band and they split shortly after being dropped.
Sellaband
It's hard to see at the moment how Sellaband is going to recover from this latest disaster. It's not a site I can recommend at the moment. There's just far too much wrong with it, but the biggest worry has to be the question of who is going to be left if/when things do settle down again and the website is mostly working properly. This time things have gone beyond what your average reasonable person is prepared to stand, and I have an increasing feeling Sellaband is going to have to rebuild its believer base from the ground up again once this is over if it wants to survive. And given the history, that's going to be a near impossible task. In the meantime, believers are left waiting for revenues that haven't been paid, and seemingly can't even be calculated, and I'm watching the parts of many artists in the mid-range slowly shrinking as believers either withdraw from the site completely or move money into people higher up the ladder.
Here's just some of the things you can experience today, more than a month after the site went live.
The data may still be in the database, but even deleted data is still in the database. For instance artists who have closed their profiles since the change still have songs available (Just visit my playlist and play one of the "unknowns" if you don't believe me). Even more interesting is the existence of artists who started signing up and never got all the way. One of my Myspace friends is among those. I tried to get him interested in Sellaband shortly after I joined the site, and I thought he hadn't bothered as his profile never appeared. He's there in the new site though the profile is an empty one with an initial signup date corresponding to when I first tried to get him interested. Maybe one day I'll get around to dropping him in "video of the month" and get you to discover some great music from an artist I thought would be able to really benefit from this site.
The new forum software is slightly better than the glorified message board we had as the incarnation before the last one, but like many I'm missing the PHP forum we had before the new site went live.
You still can't find artists. Or at least if you try searching for artists, it's pretty much impossible to tell if you've found a real one or a "ghost" profile that wasn't even there before the changes. The sorting (alphabetical by URL for those on the same budget) makes it impossible to know who has just signed up as well.
Artists themselves are struggling to get to grips with the fact they have a believer profile and an artist profile now - even if they had a believer profile before. Talk about poor implementation! They should have been given the choice when they logged into their artist profile for the first time since the change as to whether they wanted to link the project with an existing believer profile (in the case of no, then the "default" believer profile could be created). As it is now, we have scenarios such as Brian from Vegas Dragons with a Vegas Dragons believer profile, a believer profile for Vegas Dragons 2.0, artist profiles for both of these and his own believer "Brian Taylor" profile. That's 5 different profiles, without counting any other believer profiles he's set up in the past, whereas it should be one believer profile linked to two different projects if the system had been set up right.
So in short, it feels like the place is a man with both legs broken who is still trying to walk. I haven't even covered everything that's wrong in this blog because it would take too long. But in fairness there has been some progress in the time since the site went live. At the moment it doesn't feel like anything significant for the amount of time involved though, so I guess we'll have to wait and see how the promised update (and any others over the next month) changes that view.
I can also guess you're itching to discover the "issue" that had me growling on the forum about a week ago. I have to warn you at this point that what follows contains information of an adult nature, so if this kind of thing worries you, then I'd suggest this is probably the end of this month's blog reading for you and I'll see you next month with your innocence still intact. It was a difficult decision to include this story in the first place, but as you'll hopefully realise by the end, there's still potentially reason to inform, and on balance, I decided that I thought most would actually want to know what had happened.
For those with the will to carry on despite that warning, here's the story. I was quite innocently traversing the new site when I hit the community page and got a bit of a shock. As you've probably realised there are 4 photos on this page and they are taken at random from believer profiles. They don't have to be the main profile photo, they're actually taken from any photo you have uploaded which appears in your "photos" section. And there, staring at me as one of these four photos, was a young lady laying on her back, "flashing the gash".
After a bit of investigation, I determined that my browser had definitely not been hijacked and that the picture in question did genuinely appear on the Sellaband website. Interestingly, the believer profile with this picture contained a number of mud-wrestling pictures and also a series of links to websites which were described in the profile info as "naturist". One link even pointed you to a website where you could "make money from your naturist photos". I didn't investigate any further to determine how true that assertion was, but I kind of get the feeling pornography might have been a more accurate word to use than naturist, given what I'd actually seen.
So the e-mail went off to Sellaband about what I'd found and for the first time ever I actually got an auto-responder reply. An actual response to my e-mail was to come approximately 24hrs after the original sending, assuring me the problem would be dealt with as soon as possible.
Three days later, having been checking the profile on a regular basis, it was obvious nothing had been done. That's about the time I started making noises on the forum. The "spam e-mail virus" story hadn't long appeared, so I'm willing to bet a "Hey look I found some porn on the site" on top of that would have really made for a storm. There's nothing quite like waiting to see if someone else manages to make the same discovery, when you know it's still there waiting to be found. Don't get me wrong, I haven't got any problem with nudity in general, it's just the last I looked Sellaband was mostly family friendly as a site, and not an X-rated one, and some things are most definitely inappropriate images as a result. Despite the other problems going on, I therefore view this as something which I shouldn't still have been wondering if/when action was going to be taken, three days after it being acknowledged by Sellaband themselves - it should have been sorted by then!
Was it a hijacked profile or had I just been (un?)lucky enough to pick up on something that had actually been there for a while. As viruses and "adult" pictures quite often go hand in hand, had this provided some way into the Sellaband system for the e-mail addresses to be taken that were then sent spam mails containing viruses? It's all speculation, and I figure we'll never know whether the two were related or not. A couple of days after I started making noises on the forum, the profile was finally cleaned up. Whether that was coincidence, or the "growling" had been taken as fair warning, I have no idea. I mean, can you just imagine me having to write this story as a case of "Hey I found some porn and guess what.. it's still there!" That would have meant they hadn't looked at it after the best part of a fortnight, and would surely have made for some red faces if I'd published this blog with that being the case.
But for those of you feeling sorry that you actually missed out, there could be a glimmer of hope on the horizon in the form of bug number 0000045 in the unofficial bug tracker. I find myself asking how well Sellaband have actually cleaned up, or whether this bug applies and there's a very slim chance you can still view any of the photos as a result. Good luck finding out though, because four pictures at random out of a few tens of thousands means you might be looking for a while. And if it is in fact fixed properly, you'll be looking in vain anyway. On the one hand, things that are deleted are still showing up in Sellaband, so it's perhaps wise to use some caution if you have younger family members who normally see you accessing the site. On the other, I personally haven't seen any of the images again so far, but then again it was pure luck beating those odds to find out in the first place. Here's hoping they have got this one right, but I've no doubt there'll now be several people looking to find out. (Hi Pieps!)
That's all for this month. I'll see anyone that's still left in the madhouse next month, when I hope even this blog can get back to its normal self.
