New DMB Site
By Waldo Jaquith[Note: As Waldo was looking at a pre-release version of the dmband.com site, there are no links to described sections.]
The Dave Matthews Band has always been a bit ahead over the curve, Internet-wise. Some of you may recall the September-November 1994 Dave Matthews Band Newsletter, Red Light Management's USPS-mailed promo one-pager, which carried a piece on minaret.net, the precursor to the Nancies mailing list.
"Pull off the information superhighway at the DMB reststop, the minaret.net, for tangy mental refreshments and zesty low-cal snacks for the cerebrum."
I'm not sure what that means, but it seems like a sign of endorsement of the mailing list on the part of the band and their management.
DMB was an early adopter of an official Internet presence. In 1995 they had dmband.com up, one of the first band-run promotional sites on the Web. And, of course, the fans responded to this support, using the Internet as their primary platform for tape-trading, spreading the increasingly-popular music across the globe.
Recently, Red Light has started a new company, called musictoday.com. Red Light is making use of their relationship with artists and their reputation as an Internet-savvy organization to turn themselves into on-line marketers for bands. musictoday.com offers everything from website design to e-commerce, inventory management to CD duplication, fan mailing lists to running contests. And the draw for all of this, of course, is "we're the company that made Dave Matthews Band what they are today." With clients like Cheap Trick, Blues Traveler, and Insane Clown Posse, that line must be working wonders.
With all of this development, they need the official Dave Matthews Band site to continue to be a flagship, of sorts. So they're replacing their year-and-a-half-old site, most easily identified by the cork, twine, and paper compass that occupied the majority of the front page. As that site has grown, and the amount of content increased, it has become increasingly disorganized.
After what must have been a great deal of work, the new DMB site is ready to burst forth. Upon seeing it, there's no question that it's been created entirely from scratch, borrowing nothing from the previous incarnation of dmband.com.
The site takes a design cue from musictoday.com, which no doubt stands to gain from the more obvious association between the band and themselves. (There's even a prominent "powered by musictoday.com" graphic on the main page.) At first glance, it doesn't feel like a Dave Matthews Band site. It's darker, tighter, smaller, more uniform. Almost drab.
But it doesn't take long to find small things to take pleasure in. The pictures of every band member in the upper-left-hand corner. The "time in Charlottesville, VA" on the front page. The quality of the photographs; there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, throughout the site.
One of the most exciting new features is the setlist archive, which has contains every setlist from the past 8 years. (First listing: Trax, 8/21/91. "Hey Joe," "You Won't See Me," "Cry Freedom," "Sympathy For The Devil".) Although there are a great many setlist archives on the Internet, dmbta.nancies.org prime among them, but there's nothing like an official set list to settle arguments.
Another welcome addition is an official MP3 statement. This is something long awaited by sites such as nancies.org that didn't want to stand on unsure footing by distributing MP3s. The new policy is quite clear: "Dave Matthews Band supports the trading of MP3's recordings from live shows." That settles that.
Happily, former DMB keyboardist Peter Griesar is further acknowledged throughout the new site. His photograph even appears on the DMB timeline. (It's not one of the better photos that I've seen of Peter, but it's a start. Here's an even worse one that I snapped a couple of years ago.)
The only real interface problem with the site is the large number of popup windows that appear throughout the site. Even some main menu pages are popups, such as the store and the "On The Road" section. There's no obvious reason why these couldn't load in the main window.
Another a minor inconvenience is that of the filenames used for the sections of the site. Ideally, one could go to http://www.dmband.com/news to get the news page, but, instead, it's http://www.dmband.com/news.asp. Also, as of this writing, the link colors were the same as the background color. This made a bit difficult to figure out where to click.
But these problems are really just nitpicking. It's a great-looking site.
So, is all of this a step forward for the Dave Matthews Band's on-line presence? Absolutely. Increased consistency, scalability, and added data to help satisfy the fans' desires. This site will keep people coming back, and should meet the needs of the band for a good amount of time to come. And, of course, it's not a half-bad promotion for musictoday.com.
Let's just hope that the official DMB site doesn't get too good. After all, what would that leave for us fan sites?