A few days ago http://artistdata.com launched a complete revamp of their website. Fo those of you who don't know about ArtistData it's a REALLY awesome service for musicians and performers who need to enter their performances onto calendars all over the web, I mean, it ROCKS. I've been using the beta for months and have been telling anyone who will listen to go use it too. Look at my Tour calendar and MySpace page as examples of what it can do.

So I have to admit I was a little nervous when they announced they had cut-over to the new version... and got even more nervous when I went to the site that very morning to see how it looked. Being a good netizen I took the time to view all of their snazzy new tutorial videos and was perplexed by the language the narrator was using... there were a lot of references to "this will really help us" and "this looks different now because it's a better way for us to do this" and very little language saying how good it was going to be for me or my musician friends, know what I mean?

As a long time system developer I shudder when I start hearing sentences like that from other developers. Rule number one is to provide value for the people who use your product... not value for you or your sales partners. So when the tutorials kept repeating how much it was going to help *them*, well, you understand my concern, right? And then the site crashed from too much traffic. Uggh.

But let me say something right now. ArtistData is still AWESOME.

I went back in to my account several times in the past few days and the site is still doing GREAT things, with a very easy-to-use interface. And the majority of stuff I could do for free before is STILL free.

Last week I mused on Twitter that they may have "pulled a Facebook" by dramatically changing the interface for corporate reasons... and could piss off most of the people who actually used the site everyday. But I'm glad to report my first impressions were wrong. The site is still one of the best tools on the web for promoting your shows, performances, and appearances. And it looks like they have a sound business model to back it up with some pay-to-use services added on.

Big congrats to ArtistData on this jump into the Pro world, it's great to see them making big moves. I'd already built a way to integrate the upcoming Indie band Manager 6 with their site and I will continue to, ArtistData is a great tool for musicians and appears to have solid footing for a great future.