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.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.

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.

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?

If you already know a band's music or an artist work it may not matter as much.

But for artists who are not well known, a website can help make a great first impression.

I found this Apple Music for artists page a good intro on why promo/marketing materials are important.

https://artists.apple.com/support/1121-why-an-electronic-pre...

For a great many people, the artists own website is the last place they’d look for the artist.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Spotify would all rank much higher.

Even as someone who doesn’t do social media, I would still turn to YouTube and Spotify before I’d even bother looking for their band website. In fact the only time over ever visited an artists website in the last 10 years was to buy merch from their official stores.

Furthermore, people’s first impression of an artist is seeing them live at a festival, as a support act for another band they went to see, or even just that artist playing in the bar. Maybe they heard that artist on an independent radio station. But it would always be about the artist. Literally no one would have heard a band name and think “I will check out their website before I bother listening to any of their songs”. (Or at least if anyone does, they’re not the kind of people who give a crap about music so wouldnt be buying their albums nor going to their gigs anyway).

I’m not saying your advice is bad per se, just that you’re vastly over exaggerating the importance of a good website for people’s perceptions of an artist.

Maybe I am not thinking through this enough but... why? Social media accounts and artist pages on streaming platforms showing up at the top of Google search is probably more important than their website.

Yep. When was the last time you went to a bands actual website to find info? Spotify has tour dates. You’d follow them on Instagram, they share music and dates, links to merch stores there. The website itself means pretty much nothing these days so you can take some creative angles. So many smaller bands I’ve worked with who are growing don’t have one.

Surprisingly, I am listening the latest Rolling Stone album right now and I wanted to check if they will tour our town. I went to their web site to check it and to my surprise I was not able to find any tour info there.

Not a counterpoint, just coincide I guess.

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.

> 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.

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.

My 75 year old mother who struggles with the remote still can update her church wordpress.

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

Why should they care whether it’s nice to look at?

Hacker News isn’t exactly pretty, and I hope it never will be.

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.

> 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.

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

brutalism through free corporate spreadsheets

could you _get_ more indie than that?

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

That's even better because it seems to allow anyone to edit.

Nah, this is 100% an artistic choice.

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

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

> tour dates... pictures

All that stuff is here

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

Sadly these days social media fulfills that requirement.

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.

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+pla...

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. :)

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

But all that information is on the website

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

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).

They have their own instagram account.