What's New
No Account Self-Service Band Signup
The majority of the content you see on Catberry today is curated. Typically, when an event partner submits a new concert, I set the artist or band in the lineup before publishing. In these early days that often means, researching them and creating a public profile first. That's time consuming and imperfect. It is now possible to create band profiles yourself, without an account. We still have a review process to make sure your band doesn't already have an internal non-public record and to make sure the content is suitable for our audience. If you want to have your band in our directory, go to https://catberry.io/band-signup! Circle HostsA driving goal behind Catberry is to tell the story of America though its music. That means creating an intricate graph of relationships between people, bands, events, venues, organization. This is quite challenging at times because y'all are busy. A missing piece was crediting a host of a jam or circle. Hosting is a critical part of successful jams. To acknowledge that effort we added the ability to assign a host to a circle. A good example is Whole Hog’s Ham Jam and their host Whole Hog. Per-Member Performance CreditsBands like Tuesday String Band sometimes have events where one or two of their members are not performing. We still want it credited to the band but we also want accuracy and we don't want events to show up for an artist that won't be at an event. See making things hard. Other Things• Changing a circle's handle will automatically redirect the old handle to the new one. At least, until someone claims the old handle! • Fixed a bug that was causing the name search for circles not to work. • We added two new organization categories, local business and church. Love!
Bands can have managers now
Most of the bands that I've had the pleasure of interacting with just do not have time to keep their online presence up to date. And the details can become obsolete, fast. It's vital that your online presence is strong, varied and accurate. Bands can now designate a non-performing member to manage their presence on Catberry. Find someone trustworthy as they will have full access to your band. (Actually, they'd only be able to read it ATM, but that's gonna change). Claim your accountThere are a few actions that you can take that will create anonymous accounts. If you've signed up for the newsletter, without first registering, you have such an account. If you then tried to register an account, you'd be met with an error because that email is already in our system. We fixed that this week. You can now claim that account during registration. Concert pages got a lot better lookingA lot of the concerts on Catberry, are being imported from other services, Oregon Bluegrass Association, Arizona Bluegrass Association, Bluegrass Music Association of Maine, Pinecone, and others. Sometimes these don't come in as complete listings. We started falling back to the performers information. As part of that we created a lineup ordering and now lineups can have headline acts.
Artists can take booking requests
Before the Marquee, we had been working on a EPK feature for bands and artists. We took inspiration from the many EPK pages on band websites. That meant it was a separate page, more visually customizable and with the ability for visitors to send a booking inquiry. The result wasn't fantastic. There was a lot of duplication and complexity. So the feature just sat unseen and unfinished. Over the past few days, we striped out most of what we built but kept the actually useful piece, booking inquiries. With it enabled, a booking form would appear at the bottom of your artist listing page and that would give folks the ability to contact you. It's opt-in only and still needs plenty of polish. If you do want to try it out, the setting is in your artists edit, accessible from the Backstage. Other Notable Updates• An organization directory that contains an alphabetical list of published organizations. • Fan clubs are now opt-in for both artists and bands. Prevents people becoming fans of unattended artists or bands. We also plan to expand this feature and this was the first step in doing that. • Type-ahead location filters for city and states. As our site grows, so does the number of cities and states. The goal here is to make it more manageable. • A Backstage dashboard, in preparation of improving this neglected part of the site. • We expanded the footer, with links to useful pages. Behind the ScenesThe main focus is working towards instructor profiles and expanding the our directory and adding more events.
The Marquee at Catberry
I came to this music late. When I met my partner a few years ago, we were sharing songs and music that we liked over text message. She shared an Avett Brother's song and I responded that it had too much banjo. She didn't take that well! Since then, I've grown to appreciate this music. I have the absolute joy of discovering something most people already know about. I even picked up the banjo. I don't play well and have never played in front of another human, but I enjoy it. The idea for Catberry stemmed from my background as a software engineer, a desire to be part of the community, an attempt at conquering my social anxiety, an homage to my muse, and to tell the story of America through its music. Over the last 9 months, we've been building Catberry, actively albeit quietly. That changes with the addition of the Marquee. We plan to use this space to introduce new features, changes, important notices or anything else that y'all might like to know, as we grow Catberry. Thank you for being part of this community. I love you all.