D.I.Y.

Google Search Now Highlights Tour Dates, Here’s How To Feature Your Concerts

Chick-corea-graphGoogle's Knowledge Graph now presents info about a variety of topics in a sidebar beside the search results. Click the image to the left for one example featuring Chick Corea. For your concert dates to appear in such a manner, you must have the info available on your official site using structured data markup. It sounds painful but even if you've never heard of such a thing you may already be using tools from sites like Bandsintown, Songkick, BandPage and ReverbNation that will take care of your end of the lifting.

If someone looks at your website and can figure out when your next show is without having to conduct a big search, then you're fine on the human side. But as Google forefronts more information using their Knowledge Graph, which is displayed beside search results as we see in the Chick Corea example above, it pays to present that information in a form that Google's web spiders can recognize.

Getting Your Tour Dates in Knowledge Graph

This week Google announced the rollout of official tour dates in the Knowledge Graph to which Hypebot was alerted by Bandsintown.

Google goes into further detail about what this means and how you can make it happen on your site.

To make sure that Google can read your tour dates, you do have options like HTML coding or Google's Data Highlighter.

Fortunately there's an easy way if you're using one of the leading services for spreading tour dates.

Options include widgets from:

And plugins from:

Check for news from the company you're using to see if there are additional steps as Bandsintown has done though if you're already using their widget you're set.

Where's My Knowledge Graph Box?

Near the bottom of the help page for Knowledge Graph events, Google shared some troubleshooting tips if your box doesn't appear:

"Many factors determine whether a specific search triggers a Knowledge Graph panel, but helpful steps you can take are to make sure that the artist is in both Wikipedia and MusicBrainz, and that the artist’s official home page is recorded properly on both those sites."

If you are showing up with a Knowledge Graph box in search but events aren't appearing even though you've taken the appropriate steps, check the troubleshooting section for more on that as well.

More:

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/Facebook) is currently relaunching All World Dance. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

Related articles
BandsInTown Launches Spotify Tour Dates App
Spotify Adds Concerts To All Artist Pages via Songkick

admin on 03/14/2014 in D.I.Y. | Permalink | Comments (3)
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3 Comments

  1. This is just another reason to learn WordPress.. considering there is a plugin to get tourdates onto Google, WordPress allows for an Artist to have a “white labeled” web site without the branding of Reverbnation, or BandPage. However, not all musicians have time to learn WordPress. This makes sites like Reverbnation a no brainer. Still, why not have both? Any serious Artist can learn WordPress for free through tons of tutorials available on YouTube, or Google search. Of course, an Artist with a decent budget can hire someone to help with building a WordPress web site. Another option is to simply find a college intern you can pay through posting an ad on Craigslist for a “WordPress Developer”.
    Terrance
    3000 Records
    “Market to the niches” is something that stands out of all 100 tips. This is what can make a musician stand out.. find a niche and stick with it. Even with only a small number of fans, if an artist has a niche, the fans are very loyal. Trying to be simply another Pop Artist is a bad idea if you want to stand out.
    Terrance
    3000 Records
    http://www.3000records.com

  2. Bandzoogle has also implemented Google’s new Knowledge Graph. So all musicians/bands using our Events feature are getting their upcoming show dates sent to Google automatically:
    => Bandzoogle events now appear in Google Search: http://bit.ly/1kXSguM
    Cheers,
    Dave
    —
    Dave Cool
    (Yes, that’s my real name)
    Director of Artist Relations
    http://Bandzoogle.com
    Twitter: @dave_cool @Bandzoogle

  3. Indeed, using a data source like Songkick makes absolute sense in order to not end up maintaining different data sets. However, being forced to include some kind of “widget” might prevent many web developers to include this data into their website. I have created a web service that pulls the data from Songkick and returns the raw JSON-LD representation, which can be included into a website without changing the layout. That is, concert data in Google’s Knowledge Graph via Songkick, *without* touching the visual appearance of the website. Check it out here: http://gehrcke.de/2014/12/songkick-events-for-googles-knowledge-graph/

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