Dave Haynes

Image via Wikipedia

Dubber makes an interesting post over at New Music Strategies on the importance for artists and bands to be listed on Wikipedia. It’s not something that I’d thought of before but there’s definitely a point to be made here. Many sites are now referencing and scraping sources like Wikipedia. They know that the data contained is well structured, easily accessible and would be great to use in their new wbe site / service / app etc. For example, a website like gig-recommender Songkick crawls websites like Wikipedia and music blogs to pick up related artists based on positive or negative associations between the bands. And as someone points out in the comments of Dubber’s aforementioned post I’m sure that for many lazy or time-strapped journalists Wikipedia is often their first and last point of reference.
Let’s not get carried away here, tending to your Wikipedia entry isn’t really gonna make you instantly more successful but is definitely something that needs thinking about. There are a lot of small things that labels and artists can easily do that all make a small amount of differentce. Having worked with labels and artists for many years now, I know that a lot of them aren’t even doing the basics.