Hi Hi,
The Band Bios and Tags are awesome and are a huge step forward in the coolness and usefulness of this site. They are also, on occasion, the source of some WTF?! confusion:

"Why is my show tagged 'dubstep'? I'm not dubtep or reggae!"
"The listing for my band shows the wrong bio - what's up?"

Let it be known that we don't actually host any of the band bios or tags at this moment in time. All of the band bios come from user submitted data from Last.Fm. That means that we have access to every stupid ass band bio ever posted - even your third cousins shitty ska-revival band that practices in your grandmas garage out in Deluth. ..this is a mixed blessing:

  It's great because we don't have to write and maintain bios and tags for every single band in the universe. -That way when a touring band comes from Reno, there's a good chance we can find a bio and some tags for them - it would be blank if we had to host that info ourselves.

  It isn't the best in the world because sometimes there are multiple bands with the same name and it doesn't always do wonders for our local bands. If the bands are wildly different sounding, this throws a kink in the Tagging system for sure.

The incorrect Bio

HEPSIThis is a great example of where the last.fm system fails us: Hepsi is a snotty-punker band here in PDX. Hepsi is also a very popular pop/r&b girl group from Istanbul, Turkey.


Granted the girl group from Turkey is a hell of a lot more sexy, -you're probably more interested in the PDX version of the band. Problem is, currently, there is no way for us to separate the two.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Yes, there are tons of bands with the same name. Since Last.Fm is a wiki just like the Show-Guide, you can update the bios - there is an "Edit this bio" link on each bands page. CULL,for example, is a name with multiple bands attached. The format is usually:

"There are two bands named Cull. 1) Rad Riot-Girl Metal from Portland. 2.) Noise/Power electronics band from LA"

The Incorrect Tags

REPORTER:Everybody in Portland knows this band, they're fucking great.
Shitty thing is that Reporter is also some dude from Scotland that doesn't sound nearly as awesome as our pdx locals. The thing is that the Scottish version of the name has way more listeners than does the portland band - that means his tags win - just by sheer volume / frequency. We know that our Reporter is not "Electronica", "Ambient", or "Downtempo" but these words appear in the tags way more often than do the words applicable to tag the pdx band ("awesome").

So, when you're posting a show for the band Typhoon and you see it get tagged hip-hop, it's because there's a Dutch rapper that has 50,000 listeners and that's why his tags show up instead of those you might be expecting.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:
When you're editing a show - you can update the tags if they're are totally whacked out of reality. Just use real/helpful tags like "indie-pop", "thrash", "alt. country" and NOT useless crap like "you're gonna like this". -The idea is to help describe the type of show. Opinions can always be entered in the comment section of each show.

The Nerd Stuff

The Tags get associated with shows and bands by taking all of the tags associated with a show and breaking them into individual words ["technical speed thrash metal"] becaomes ["technical"], ["speed'], ["thrash"], ["metal"]. The five most common words then float to the top - stuff like ["punk"] and ["indie"] while, as the idea goes, is that other, crap words like ["bomdiggi"] fall off. Indeed there are times when a band doesn't have that many tags to drop off the weird stuffs. Our good friends Absent Minds have the following tags: " berkshire cello-punk iwasrecommendedthis pdx playmoreonlastfm ".

We've really taken a lot of time thinking about making the tags as functional as possible and have spent a lot of time getting them in as good of shape as they are. That being said, there is still room for improvement and we're open to any suggestion you might have -Please send them in! This site only progresses as you come up with cool ideas (show-map!), if you don't send us ideas, they will never be built.