The ClubWiki.org Blog

About six months ago, I was reading a story in the Chronicle about a group of local independent bands who had formed a collective. The basic idea was that members of the collective went to each other’s shows, mentioned one another in interviews, and shared painstakingly-gathered spreadsheets of booking and press contacts. This approach spread out some of the burden that would normally be carried by a label, and reportedly gave the bands a bit more time to focus on their music. It all sounded great, but I remember thinking how goofy it was that they had to create and maintain those spreadsheets in the first place.

I poked around a bit, and found that the existing resources for venue booking information were indeed pretty lame. Offline, you have the Billboard Musician’s Guide to Touring and Promotion, the utility of which is limited by the fact that a) it’s a printed publication, meaning it’s difficult to search, often out of date (it’s published twice a year), and missing the sort of capacity and genre cross-referencing that would be useful to musicians in tour planning, and b) it relies on its editors for completeness. It also costs $16, which most bands would probably rather spend on stuff like strings, food or gas. Online, I found a few different sites offering the info as a subscription service, but they’re expensive (upwards of $100/year), and again, nowhere near complete because they rely on a handful of editors to maintain them (and at a hundred bucks a year, it seems unlikely there’d be enough takers to really motivate those editors).

It was clear by this point why bands would form a collective to share this information, but it was equally clear that that was eminently suboptimal, because the info should be online, free to everybody, and editable by the entire community that uses it. I mentioned the concept to a few of my working musician friends, all of whom were way too busy recording, performing, or not knowing how to program to program it themselves, and they were all over it. Well, around this time my coding friends and I were forming a company to build various web services for musicians, and we realized that wikifying venue information would make a great warm-up project. Sure, it was very unlikely to ever be a business for us, but the data the site would gather would be useful to our real business down the road, and it would give us a chance to get used to working together, test out some of our technology decisions, and coalesce as a team by quickly knocking out a real project. So that’s what we did, and today we cordially implore you to check out ClubWiki. We hope you find it useful. Of course, like any wiki, it’s only as good as the information the community puts into it. So if you’re a musician, we hope you’ll add your favorite clubs, and use it to help book your next show or plan your next tour. And if you’re a club owner, we hope you’ll take the time to add your venue, and subscribe to its entry so you can help keep it accurate. Thanks! We’re looking forward to hearing what you think.