The “Submit News” link and the will to use it.

This week, Adam had a salient point about bands like T.S.O.L. breaking up and not really telling anyone about it, while I ranted about people complaining about our coverage of smaller bands breaking up.

Both cases illustrate a pretty interesting (yet basic) point: bands need to learn to use the internet. How hard is to assemble a list of email addresses of zine editors and connected bloggers and shoot out an email to them when something big happens?

In the case of the smaller bands that break up, I often wonder if that breakup would have been delayed or avoided had the members of the bands taken the time to tell people what was going on. I’m not so presumptuous as to assume I know the internal workings of every breakup of every small band but from conversations I’ve had, it’s obvious that a little more exposure and success wouldn’t have hurt in most cases.

In the case of T.S.O.L. I am just kind of blown away. I wonder how it is that a band of their stature and longevity just “forgets” to update their website and inform their label of their demise? I can see having lost access to said website, things happen when a band is dissolving, but to ignore their label? It’s sadly beyond me. What about their publicist? Anyone? And to add insult to injury, utilizing MySpace to disseminate the news. Bizarre.

Maybe MySpace is making news sites such as ours (extremely) slowly irrelevant though. Lord knows I scalp enough news from my “bulletin board” for the Org. Or maybe MySpace is replacing the publicist?

I guess my point is that if you are a band, be it big or small, get a list of people that you want to know about your news that can tell others. Use MySpace, Facebook, Lala or carrier pigeons, it doesn’t matter. But make sure that you put in the effort to tell people about what’s going on in your band. A project like Bomb The Music Industry! hasn’t made the progress it has all by Jeff’s lonesome. He’s utilized the hell out of sites like ours and it seems to be working fairly well. DIY or PSE*, just do it.

*: Pay Someone Else