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I love this band. But this is actually a terrible idea. Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one. A

I love this band. But this is actually a terrible idea. Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one. Agents and venues looking for promo pictures. Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc., Artist websites have a variety of audiences. My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are...

leehuffman 3y ago
> But this is actually a terrible idea. A lot of people say that about a lot of art. 'Terrible ideas' can be very, very dope though. IMO mapping their primary domain to a fuckin' Google Sheet is banger hah. > Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one. Those are there, though? Also Google returns the 29 tour tracking/ticketing platforms in their trailing results behind the primary domain. I think the fans will be ok... > Agents and venues looking for promo pictures. > Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc. Bruh it's Portugal. The Man. There is one agent (theirs) and venues/festival "planners" (???) aren't "looking" for promo photos – they're delivered by their agent and/or management with restrictions, guidelines, and approval for promotional use only. They can't just pull random media off the internet for promo. Nobody is trying to determine their "style". That's been clearly defined for a minute (decade+) now. If anything these people are selling PTM, not the other way around. > My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are... I can guarantee you that's incorrect. You don't think they plot & plan & intelligently deploy their entire, well... everything? For months on months before we see it? Nobody fumbled about, tweaked the layout & styling, and toggled the Share function on the Google Sheet organically haha.
wodenokoto 3y ago
Band websites used to be very much about an art experience and very little about conveying any kinds of facts. Back in the early 2000s homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really.
- thfuran 3y ago
  That was a time before almost everyone got almost all their information about everything from the internet.
- cxr 3y ago
  > homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really You can shorten this by eliminating the "of artists like Radiohead" from the phrasing, and it will still be true of many businesses. You'd think that when an organization shells out money to someone so they'll grab a domain name and set up a site for them, it would be for the org to have a depository for their content just like TBL intended—and they can piggyback off the ubiquity of the Web so those resources are retrievable/accessible with pretty low friction. Weirdly, a whole industry of people specializing in e.g. Wordpress or CSS-framework-du-jour have managed to pull some sleight of hand so that the world at large doesn't have expectations that are anything like that in mind and instead thinks that the purpose should rather be little more than something like a visually stunning brochure (or billboard) that's already out of date the day it's published—and everything the business relies on to actually operate and communicate will happen either through Facebook or is created in a facsimile of a 90s-style office suite and gets shuttled around via email or Google Drive (or simply never leaves the machine where it was created). Pretty weird fuckin' milieu (and expensive), if we're being frank.
axlee 3y ago
PTM has won a Grammy, they don't need planners to get a sense of their style. If anything, GSheet might be their styles.
ashutoshbsathe 3y ago
Agents and venues can look at Instagram or other socials for promo pictures and styles etc.
- senthil_rajasek 3y ago
  Hmmmm ideally you want them to look for your best images not some random after show picture from a fan on social media. Websites make it easy for you to control your promo material ( EPK).
  - admax88qqq 3y ago
    They have their own instagram account.
smeyer 3y ago
My guess is that this is a funky artistic choice, and that they used to have a "normal" webpage. I checked with the wayback machine, and it looks like my guess is correct. I clicked randomly into an archive a few years old, and here's 2016 website looking a lot more like what you describe http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portugaltheman.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portuga... . I guess an audience that you left out in your description is people appreciating the experience of looking at the website or the artist themselves wanting to make a statement. I think the band has thoroughly "made it" so to speak, and doesn't have to worry too much about most of what you mentioned. They do list tour dates in their google sheet and also can sell out pretty large venues easily, and I don't think there are any festival planners who don't know who Portugal, the Man who have any chance of nabbing them for their festival.
- runeks 3y ago
  Maybe they got tired of paying some web dev money every time they needed to update their page. With Google Sheets they can do that themselves.
- senthil_rajasek 3y ago
  Ahhh that totally makes sense. Thanks for researching and sharing. Portugal The Man is "made" but my concern was that the new bands that are still struggling to make it should not take inspiration from this and create a google sheets website. That would be terrible for their career.
  - al_borland 3y ago
    I would hope that a website wouldn’t make or break an artist. It’s about the music after all. Outside of looking at this post, I don’t think I could tell you what a single musician’s webpage looks like. It’s not something I ever look at. For concerts, I tend to look for who is coming to venues near me, rather than looking at 200 band websites and hoping they are both on tour and near me. Do most people go to the band’s actual site to learn this stuff?
roywashere 3y ago
They are not the only band to do this. My fav small Dutch band Woezels do the same, just for lolz https://woezels.nl/ https://woezels.nl/
- pests 3y ago
  That's even better because it seems to allow anyone to edit.
jareklupinski 3y ago
brutalism through free corporate spreadsheets could you _get_ more indie than that?
- IAmGraydon 3y ago
  >indie You misspelled “pretentious”.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
Most ways of putting up a conventional website don't make updates easy, unless you buy into some whole system, or pay someone. If Sheets is familiar and works, why not? Arguably the fact that the website is more likely to be accurate and up to date this way makes it more user friendly.
- cl3misch 3y ago
  Sure, but there are a lot of options these days which are much nicer to look at. For example you can easily share Notion documents as websites.
  - runeks 3y ago
    Why should they care whether it’s nice to look at? Hacker News isn’t exactly pretty, and I hope it never will be.
- lagt_t 3y ago
  My 75 year old mother who struggles with the remote still can update her church wordpress.
  - seattle_spring 3y ago
    Funny related story: I have nearly 2 decades professional webdev experience, including a cumulative decade at a FAANG and a "decacorn". My HOA was looking for someone to take over maintenance of their website for events and photos and other super basic stuff. I volunteered along with some other lady who only had experience maintaining her church website in WordPress. The board chose the other lady without even talking to me "because she had deeper WordPress experience." The site still looks and functions like it's 1998 /shrug
afavour 3y ago
Sadly these days social media fulfills that requirement.
- senthil_rajasek 3y ago
  Not really. Social media is feed based. Finding "on demand" info such as "when are they playing in my town?" is a nightmare even with pinned posts.
  - leehuffman 3y ago
    First result for "when is portugal the man playing in my town?" via Google. https://www.google.com/search?q=when+is+portugal+the+man+playing+in+my+town https://www.google.com/search?q=when+is+portugal+the+man+pla... https://www.songkick.com/artists/400418-portugal-the-man https://www.songkick.com/artists/400418-portugal-the-man The "Track Artist" button at the top of the page will let you subscribe to all future dates inside a radius of your town. Nightmare avoided. :)
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
All of your stated purposes are effectively communicated via this spreadsheet.
omginternets 3y ago
I don’t understand. It seems to be doing exactly the job you specified.
tantalor 3y ago
> tour dates... pictures All that stuff is here
tracerbulletx 3y ago
Nah, this is 100% an artistic choice.
smcleod 3y ago
I think it's awesome, just the kind of fun thing they'd do.
kevinmchugh 3y ago
I saw them live last year and they had the stage lights off the whole show, you couldn't see them at all. They closed with their big hit and played the Beavis and Butthead clip making fun of it first. I think they're a little (playfully) antagonistic
asdfman123 3y ago
But all that information is on the website

leehuffman 3y ago

> But this is actually a terrible idea. A lot of people say that about a lot of art. 'Terrible ideas' can be very, very dope though. IMO mapping their primary domain to a fuckin' Google Sheet is banger hah. > Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one. Those are there, though? Also Google returns the 29 tour tracking/ticketing platforms in their trailing results behind the primary domain. I think the fans will be ok... > Agents and venues looking for promo pictures. > Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc. Bruh it's Portugal. The Man. There is one agent (theirs) and venues/festival "planners" (???) aren't "looking" for promo photos – they're delivered by their agent and/or management with restrictions, guidelines, and approval for promotional use only. They can't just pull random media off the internet for promo. Nobody is trying to determine their "style". That's been clearly defined for a minute (decade+) now. If anything these people are selling PTM, not the other way around. > My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are... I can guarantee you that's incorrect. You don't think they plot & plan & intelligently deploy their entire, well... everything? For months on months before we see it? Nobody fumbled about, tweaked the layout & styling, and toggled the Share function on the Google Sheet organically haha.

wodenokoto 3y ago

Band websites used to be very much about an art experience and very little about conveying any kinds of facts. Back in the early 2000s homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really.

thfuran 3y ago
That was a time before almost everyone got almost all their information about everything from the internet.
cxr 3y ago
> homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really You can shorten this by eliminating the "of artists like Radiohead" from the phrasing, and it will still be true of many businesses. You'd think that when an organization shells out money to someone so they'll grab a domain name and set up a site for them, it would be for the org to have a depository for their content just like TBL intended—and they can piggyback off the ubiquity of the Web so those resources are retrievable/accessible with pretty low friction. Weirdly, a whole industry of people specializing in e.g. Wordpress or CSS-framework-du-jour have managed to pull some sleight of hand so that the world at large doesn't have expectations that are anything like that in mind and instead thinks that the purpose should rather be little more than something like a visually stunning brochure (or billboard) that's already out of date the day it's published—and everything the business relies on to actually operate and communicate will happen either through Facebook or is created in a facsimile of a 90s-style office suite and gets shuttled around via email or Google Drive (or simply never leaves the machine where it was created). Pretty weird fuckin' milieu (and expensive), if we're being frank.

axlee 3y ago

PTM has won a Grammy, they don't need planners to get a sense of their style. If anything, GSheet might be their styles.

ashutoshbsathe 3y ago

Agents and venues can look at Instagram or other socials for promo pictures and styles etc.

senthil_rajasek 3y ago
Hmmmm ideally you want them to look for your best images not some random after show picture from a fan on social media. Websites make it easy for you to control your promo material ( EPK).
- admax88qqq 3y ago
  They have their own instagram account.

smeyer 3y ago

My guess is that this is a funky artistic choice, and that they used to have a "normal" webpage. I checked with the wayback machine, and it looks like my guess is correct. I clicked randomly into an archive a few years old, and here's 2016 website looking a lot more like what you describe http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portugaltheman.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portuga... . I guess an audience that you left out in your description is people appreciating the experience of looking at the website or the artist themselves wanting to make a statement. I think the band has thoroughly "made it" so to speak, and doesn't have to worry too much about most of what you mentioned. They do list tour dates in their google sheet and also can sell out pretty large venues easily, and I don't think there are any festival planners who don't know who Portugal, the Man who have any chance of nabbing them for their festival.

runeks 3y ago
Maybe they got tired of paying some web dev money every time they needed to update their page. With Google Sheets they can do that themselves.
senthil_rajasek 3y ago
Ahhh that totally makes sense. Thanks for researching and sharing. Portugal The Man is "made" but my concern was that the new bands that are still struggling to make it should not take inspiration from this and create a google sheets website. That would be terrible for their career.
- al_borland 3y ago
  I would hope that a website wouldn’t make or break an artist. It’s about the music after all. Outside of looking at this post, I don’t think I could tell you what a single musician’s webpage looks like. It’s not something I ever look at. For concerts, I tend to look for who is coming to venues near me, rather than looking at 200 band websites and hoping they are both on tour and near me. Do most people go to the band’s actual site to learn this stuff?

roywashere 3y ago

They are not the only band to do this. My fav small Dutch band Woezels do the same, just for lolz https://woezels.nl/ https://woezels.nl/

pests 3y ago
That's even better because it seems to allow anyone to edit.

jareklupinski 3y ago

brutalism through free corporate spreadsheets could you _get_ more indie than that?

IAmGraydon 3y ago
>indie You misspelled “pretentious”.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

Most ways of putting up a conventional website don't make updates easy, unless you buy into some whole system, or pay someone. If Sheets is familiar and works, why not? Arguably the fact that the website is more likely to be accurate and up to date this way makes it more user friendly.

cl3misch 3y ago
Sure, but there are a lot of options these days which are much nicer to look at. For example you can easily share Notion documents as websites.
- runeks 3y ago
  Why should they care whether it’s nice to look at? Hacker News isn’t exactly pretty, and I hope it never will be.
lagt_t 3y ago
My 75 year old mother who struggles with the remote still can update her church wordpress.
- seattle_spring 3y ago
  Funny related story: I have nearly 2 decades professional webdev experience, including a cumulative decade at a FAANG and a "decacorn". My HOA was looking for someone to take over maintenance of their website for events and photos and other super basic stuff. I volunteered along with some other lady who only had experience maintaining her church website in WordPress. The board chose the other lady without even talking to me "because she had deeper WordPress experience." The site still looks and functions like it's 1998 /shrug

afavour 3y ago

Sadly these days social media fulfills that requirement.

senthil_rajasek 3y ago
Not really. Social media is feed based. Finding "on demand" info such as "when are they playing in my town?" is a nightmare even with pinned posts.
- leehuffman 3y ago
  First result for "when is portugal the man playing in my town?" via Google. https://www.google.com/search?q=when+is+portugal+the+man+playing+in+my+town https://www.google.com/search?q=when+is+portugal+the+man+pla... https://www.songkick.com/artists/400418-portugal-the-man https://www.songkick.com/artists/400418-portugal-the-man The "Track Artist" button at the top of the page will let you subscribe to all future dates inside a radius of your town. Nightmare avoided. :)

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

All of your stated purposes are effectively communicated via this spreadsheet.

omginternets 3y ago

I don’t understand. It seems to be doing exactly the job you specified.

tantalor 3y ago

> tour dates... pictures All that stuff is here

tracerbulletx 3y ago

Nah, this is 100% an artistic choice.

smcleod 3y ago

I think it's awesome, just the kind of fun thing they'd do.

kevinmchugh 3y ago

I saw them live last year and they had the stage lights off the whole show, you couldn't see them at all. They closed with their big hit and played the Beavis and Butthead clip making fun of it first. I think they're a little (playfully) antagonistic

asdfman123 3y ago

But all that information is on the website