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Brian Dear on Touring 2.0
June 27, 2007 at 11:00 am

Brad, thanks for the constructive criticism of Eventful. I’d like to address each issue you raise in your blog post.

1. “It hassles people to sign up for Eventful accounts.”
We invite people to get a full Eventful account, for sure, but it’s not required to join a Demand nor use most of the Eventful site. Hence, most Demands have a majority of users who’ve not registered with full accounts, and their names don’t show up among the demanders, like you pointed out for Louisville, KY, simply because they didn’t provide names to show (and we’re certainly not gonna list out their email addresses, that wouldn’t last very long!)

2. “How am I supposed to contact these other ten people if I wind up in the area?”
The way you contact people is to use the Performer Dashboard. If you’re registered on the site as a Performer, and it appears you are for the “Brad Sucks” Performer, then just go to http://eventful.com/bradsucks, and if you’re signed in, you will see some options near the top of the page that let you get to your Performer Dashboard. Inside there are tools to let you send messages to ALL the people who have demanded you in a given city, or among multiple cities, whether they’re registered or not. You can also see Google maps of where you demands (and events) are, and lots of statistical graphs on how the demands are doing.

3. “The Eventful interface is cluttered as hell”
Yeah, it’s not perfect, we know. We’re actively working on cleaning it up, and we welcome specific feedback about where you think it is most cluttered — what pages would you most prefer us to address first? What is causing you the most difficulty?

- Brian Dear
Founder, Eventful, Inc.

Brad on Touring 2.0
June 27, 2007 at 12:14 pm

Hi Brian, thanks for the reply!

#1: Why would giving me the email addresses of my fans “not last long”? I understand that some bands get all spammy, but if someone’s signing up to demand me in their area, they should expect to hear from me again.

And while I figured out that users didn’t have to sign up based on the data, I got a bunch of complaints about it. I also got complaints that @hotmail and @gmail addresses didn’t work.

#2: I had been to the dashboard a number of times but didn’t notice the little balloon icons with “Msg.” at the top of the column. I had read the FAQ as well, which said I should “select the location”, which would then take me back to the location page, with no mention of the message. Maybe I’m a dummy, but I tried a bunch of times.

#3: I just took a tour through the site to find out what was bugging me:

- When I want to see what’s going on I go to http://www.eventful.com/bradsucks because it’s the easiest URL to remember. It doesn’t show me how many total demands, only the total demand _locations_ next to “Demands for Brad Sucks”. I have to click on that number to see the total overall (right now 99 in 50 — the 99 number is more important to me and changes more often than the 50 obviously).

- But this isn’t where you want me to go, you want me to go to my performer dashboard because that’s what it’s for, right? But if I click on that I go here: http://eventful.com/my/performer/P0-001-000045599-9 and I don’t see a total at all and I only see my Top 10 locations, so I get even less information than clicking that #50 once.

- Where I _really_ want to be (which I just discovered and I guess should bookmark) is the “Events and Demands” page: http://eventful.com/my/performer/P0-001-000045599-9/events-demands as that has my totals, a pretty map, my events, add event link, message center, etc. Put a list of recent comments/changes on there and it’d be perfect.

- So that’s four different pages and only one gives me most of the information I need. Two (the performer dashboards) are almost identical except the first one lacks a lot of information — what’s the point of it? Personally I’d think about making everything (demands, performer dashboard) work off of the Events and Demands dashboard that I like.

Other stuff:

- I have no idea how to set the level required for “critical mass”. I live two hours from Montreal so I’d probably go there for a small handful of people. Across the country? Probably takes a bit more.

- When I’m logged out and visit this page in IE 7:

http://eventful.com/performers/P0-001-000045599-9/demand

And I select a country as well as a city and click Go nothing happens.

- Also you might want to change that big “Join” button to a “Demand” button if it doesn’t force you to sign up for an account.

All right running out of steam here, time to get back to work. Hope that’s helpful.

Darg on Touring 2.0
June 27, 2007 at 4:26 pm

I would demand you to play in my town, but I don’t feel like signing up for something I’ll use once.

Brad on Touring 2.0
June 28, 2007 at 9:10 pm

Definitely a possibility.

I’d like to get the numbers up and I probably won’t be traveling anywhere far until I get my new record out (soon I tell you!), but I hope to do it. Just trying to prepare in advance a little bit (which is not normally my style).