I am infuriated with Bandzoogle.
In 2021 I moved the two folk organizations that I work with over to an all-in-one solution that provides them with web hosting, ticket sales, mailing list… Bandzoogle does it all and though they’re geared towards artist websites, they have a page dedicated to how they’re great for labels, and another dedicated to building music venue websites on their platform : https://bandzoogle.com/blog/how-to-build-a-music-venue-website. Both FocusMusic and Institute of Musical Traditions have decades of history supporting artists and being a go-to for OTHER local folk and acoustic institutions when looking to advertise their shows or to cross-promote. Both have existed longer than Bandzoogle.
Today I noticed that my mailing lists for both organizations weren’t being sent out. They’re marked “scheduled”. I gave it some time, but from experience I know that the moment I check the box marked “I understand. This message is not an unsolicited communication.” and click “send now” they start churning out the emails to our painstakingly-collected email lists.
Painstaking? Yes – because if a person doesn’t signup while purchasing a ticket or through the form on our website, the only way we sign people up is via a piece of paper at a venue.
After an hour of hanging on “scheduled” I checked the help desk expecting to see perhaps a notification that there was an error or traffic… but no, I found a “closed” ticket with the title “Campaign request – Denied”. In there it was explained that their terms of service now* proscribe generic addresses like “support@, info@, sales@, admin@ etc.” A couple of additional emails were also flagged and when I asked for clarification on THOSE they stated that they sounded like industry contacts rather than personal fans and that “it’s against our terms to send bulk messages to media lists, press contacts, festivals or recording labels.”
Great. I can personally name half of the people they’re flagging. I know who president@fsgw.org goes to. I know why info@roberlighthouse.com is subscribed to our mailing list. We’re partnered with the former, we’ve booked the latter. The former likes to keep tabs on whether we’re cross-promoting, the latter likes to know what dates we’ve already booked. Plus it’s just good form to be on the mailing list of organizations that support you.
Additionally I received what feels like one of the most contemptuous emails talking down to me about about how “The mailing list is intended to be only for ‘fans’ of your music, it’s not to be used to solicit media or industry” and “addresses like this are almost never a personal address, so sending campaigns to them can almost certainly result in it being flagged by their providers as spam”.
For years I’ve argued that artists and venues need to MAINTAIN their MAILING LISTS religiously because it’s the last thing we “own”. It’s the last bastion of communication that doesn’t up and leave or isn’t subject to the Zuckerburg Algorithm or the Musk Whim. Maintain those mailing lists because your fans can find that message SOMEHOW.
But now overly aggressive spam filters that somehow work on everything BUT spam, Google’s notice that Gemini reading and summarizing your long-form emails is opt-OUT not opt-IN, and AI-generated bulk emails flood us at every turn and Bandzoogle has arbitrarily decided that a bunch of emails aren’t “real” fans because of a bunch of parameters someone cooked up.
And they didn’t flag those emails. They didn’t put them in the “invalid” list that they put bounces in. They didn’t push out a “resubscribe” link. They didn’t inform the mailing list admin (me) that there was a problem. Hell, I went through the process of signing up on a bandzoogle mailing list today with my publicity@imtfolk.org email address to see if it’d flag a generic email from an industry address.
No, they took the laziest route. They left the mailing marked “scheduled” and buried the solution in a “closed” help request.
So I’m infuriated with Bandzoogle. They’ve taken the last method of communicating with fans that didn’t feel dirty and inserted an arbitrary rule and accuses these organizations, respected for decades in their local spheres, of sending unsolicited emails and being part of the problem.
SO – who’s got another all-in-one website builder, mailing list and ticketing solution? I thought Bandzoogle was it. But they just accused both of my organizations of lying every time I check their little box that says “This message is not an unsolicited communication”, something I have done once a week EVERY week for 4 and a half years on behalf of two organizations. Collectively that means I’ve collectively spent roughly $2000 on an organization that has sought the laziest solution to problem of spam.
Oh, and no, ilyAIMY’s mailing list is NOT with Bandzoogle. I’m hoping that over the summer I’ll be able to solve that problem for both Institute of Musical Traditions and FocusMusic as well.
*”now” is added by me. They seem to be implying this has always been the way this is set up, but since most of these emails were imported upon opening the account in 2021, it’s not been a problem for the last five years.