BTTV BLOG

We’ve partnered with Bands In Town to make it easier for you to pull in your tour dates. So instead of BTTV being another place to enter in show info, Bands In Town is doing it for us and you.

How It Works
When you set up a band profile, we’ll automatically pull in your tour dates from Bands In Town. You DON’T have to do anything on Bands In Town since they automatically collect tour dates from everywhere.

Daily / Weekly Show Notifications
This means that you can receive daily or weekly email notifications of bands touring near you. We’ve turned off the daily notifications for now BUT you can turn those back on by going into your profile, go to “Edit Profile” and turn them on/off under “System Notification Settings”.

Stay tuned. We’re making some tweeks to how SoundCloud works with BTTV as well as some other big ideas…maybe a Tour Planner feature?

Here’s a whole lot of confusion for you.

So when we switched over to the new site everyone’s profiles just kind of became HOST PROFILES. That means if you had your band set up as your profile on the old site, it is now a host profile. That totally makes sense right? I’m sure it doesn’t. Our bad.

Simply put: If you used BTTV in the past and have a band PLEASE log in and set up your band w/ a BAND PROFILE. This is different from a HOST PROFILE.

Yes, confusing but when someone searches for bands in another city YOUR BAND WON’T SHOW UP if you don’t set up a BAND PROFILE.

Ok, enough with the capital letters.

Thanks for dealing. Now go update some stuff.

Good god. That’s right. Now you can use the ole’ Facebook to start a new BTTV profile or log into your current profile (as long as the email address you use with Facebook is the SAME as the one you used with BTTV. If so, we merge that together and you can use your Facebook login INSTEAD of your BTTV username and password.)

Why you might ask? It’s simple. People trust Facebook and it speeds up the registration process. We DON’T pillage your data or post stuff to your wall. We just pull in some basic info to auto-fill your profile so you don’t have to do it. That’s about it. Don’t worry Zucks and Co. already know everything about you and if not them, then Google has you covered.

Go, log in. Dare yah. http://betterthanthevan.com

Heads up bands! This one’s for you…and also for hosts and music fans too.  We dug in and updated the site with one super simple but very cool feature. We are calling it “Shows Near Me”. Basically it’s a simple alert that will notify you daily, weekly or both of bands touring near you.

This is awesome for two reasons:

1. Hosts or music fans! You can keep tabs on bands coming through or near your city. You decide how far out (in miles) you want to be notified of shows happening and BTTV does the rest.

2. Bands! It works for you in 2 ways. First, you can enter in shows on your BTTV band profile and people in those cities will automatically get notified of your show. Second,  you can keep tabs on other bands coming through your city.

We turned it on for everyone to begin with, if you want to make changes or shut it off, it’s super easy.

Login to your BTTV profile and go to “Edit My Profile”.

Next, scroll down to “System Notification Settings” (yes, we know it sounds like Tron) and you’ll see “Shows Near Me Alert”. There you can set up which alerts you want to get, either Daily or Weekly or both and then pick how far away from you (in miles) the shows are you want to know about.

Hit “Update Profile” when you’ve got it dialed in and you’re good to go.

That’s it! We wanted to get this out before SXSW so bands can put in all of their shows (either tour dates or SXSW shows) and everyone can stay on top of all things happening during SXSW.

The My Shows page is your hub for entering show dates into BTTV. Show dates kind of act as a hub by which other people on BTTV can stay on top of shows you’re attending, playing or throwing.

There are 3 kinds of show dates:

1. Band Shows - These are shows your band (that you have set up a profile for on BTTV) are playing.

2. Venue Shows - These are shows at your venue (that you have set up a profile for on BTTV).

3. Personal Shows - These are shows that you are attending and are not associated with a Band of Venue profile you may have set up. So let’s say you are going to Bonarroo, want to invite other BTTV’ers to go with you and want it to show up in your Personal profile. You would enter that show in Personal Shows.

Here’s a pic of what it all looks like now (click on it to enlarge):

NOTE: Band and Venue sections WILL NOT show up on the My Shows page UNLESS you have a created a Band or Venue profile.

Eventually we are going to roll out the ability for alerts to be sent to hosts and bands in the cities your band is playing or the cities where you’re attending shows.

So be sure to keep things up to date. It’s a really easy way to connect with bands and music fans in other cities.

That’s it. Hit us up with questions here.

It’s for real. It’s taken around a year to get to this place but the new and improved BTTV is now live.

There are lots of new features and things current BTTV’ers need to do with their new profiles.

PLEASE, PLEASE read this stuff below.

Yes, it’s a little long BUT It will get you started using the new BTTV!

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General/Host Profiles

- You now login with the email address you used when your first signed up. Your password has stayed the same. If you forgot, just reset your password.

- Your first time logging in you’ll be asked to update your location info. PLEASE do so it keeps things current and people can find you.

- All profiles (regardless if you were a host or a band on the old BTTV) have been converted to a “General/Host Profile”. Under that “General/Host Profile” you can create a “Band Profile” and/or a “Venue Profile”. Think of the Band and Venue profiles like Facebook Pages that you’d run from your personal Facebook profile.

- All of your old messages should be in your inbox. Some of your pictures may have not made it over from the old site. Likewise any comments or guest book entries did not make it either. Sorry about this, but we couldn’t make it work.

- In your General/Host Profile you can input show dates for shows that you are attending. DO NOT put dates for your band here. You need to do that in your Band Profile

Band Profiles

- You MUST create a Band Profile for your band in order for your band to be found. It is there that you enter your tour dates and all your band info.

- Each band member can create their own General/Personal profile on BTTV then have that profile “join” the Band Profile. All members who have “joined” their Band’s profile can edit info / add tour dates to the Band Profile.

- You can embed a SoundCloud player in your Band Profile.

- The more current you keep your show dates in your Band Profile the more often you’ll come up in searches for “Bands on Tour”.

- Yes we know it’s a little tedious to enter in tour dates on yet another site but doing it on BTTV automatically connects you with hosts in those cities. They are automatically notified that you are coming through on tour.

Venue Profiles

This is a new feature for BTTV. We thought there needed to be a place for people who throw shows, whether they are an established venue, coffee shop, basement, house, backyard, warehouse or whatever. These places needed a hub for bands and music fans to connect. Thus we created Venue Pages.

PLEASE, PLEASE only set up a Venue Page if you can actually book the bands and put on a show that a band would be willing to drive a few hours to play. All of us at BTTV have played in very random places and usually had amazing shows. The point of Venue Pages is to make it easy for bands to find venues they may not know of or are “not on the radar” as they say.

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If you have any ideas on what we could do better or differently please us this support forum. It will help us out a lot and get you all the features/fixes you need.

BTTV SUPPORT FORUM

or

GO SEE THE NEW BTTV!

You may have noticed that BTTV is down. Don’t panic, this was planned and has been planned for a long time. We are switching things over to our new platform. Originally slated to take a few hours, things are going to take a bit longer. Like any good open heart surgery, it’s best to get things right the first time. Hang in there, we’ll be back up as soon as possible.

If you have issues or needs tweet at us @bettrthanthevan.com or email todd (at) betterthanthevan (dot) com

Good times if your band has a Sonicbids profile. Now you can port all your info to a handy tab on your Facebook Page. Pretty neato.

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Members are getting notified later today. “We realized that we were helping people get gigs but not cultivating their audiences,” Sonicbids founder Panos Panay told Digital Music News at Midem this week. “We needed to do more.”

That was the impetus behind the recent acquisition of ArtistData, and now, the push into Facebook. And, at first blush, this looks pretty slick. At the onset, bands can quickly get started by linking their Sonicbids and Facebook accounts, and subsequently porting Sonicbids EPK information. So, within seconds, Sonicbids profile details are loaded onto a Facebook tab.

Read more @ Digital Music News.