Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

One of my first stops to a new site, assuming they have one, is the about page. In the case of a blog I like to learn a little more about the author and their passions. One of my passions is music and was excited to see a review come through for a concert and music-related site called concertgroove.com.

From the Concert Groove about page we learn:

ConcertGroove.com (CG) is a guide to top music concerts around the world. Including all listings for artists, venues and tour dates. We provide the most comprehensive, reliable and accurate source of worldwide concert tour schedules. You can find out about concert tour listings, concert news, new concert releases, and top concert shows in your area.

Since it is their words that they provide the most comprehensive, reliable and accurate source of reliable concert tour schedules, I decided to put these to a random test, but first let’s tackle the site design and elements.

Site design, content, ads, features and page loading speeds
Think Coca Cola. Red and white with a tinge of gold are the chosen colors for CG with a bit too much emphasis on red. Personally, I prefer red be used sparingly in site designs. Red is hard on the eyes especially against a white background and when it comes to reading I take away points from sites who lean too heavily on red. It’s definitely not gaudy as this abominable design, but I wish CG had chosen a little softer secondary color than red.

The CG pages load fast and aren’t burdened with too much information. The homepage loaded around 1.5 - 1.9 seconds. Random search queries performed by artist, venue and location returned results very fast.

CG has a very good ad to content ratio with a single horizontal Google Adsense strip placed down near the footer of the page. A sponsors section has a few sponsored text link results and pitches first party ads for sale. All (?) the purchased text links I saw were related in some way to music, no viagra or mortgage text ads, stuff like: Concert Tickets, Music Posters, The Police Tickets, Band T-Shirts and Gwen Stefani Tickets. Good.

The text link advertising prices seemed reasonable for a site over three years old that had 26,730 unique visits and 298,344 pages views in January 2007 with a homepage link costing $55/month and an artist page link costing $30/month. CG offers discounts for longer ad runs (6 and 12 month plans) as well as custom advertising. They do not use nofollow.

There are five main choices at the top of each page: home, concerts, forum, subscribe and about us. Along the right sidebar is a list of the top 20 concerts which is a nice way to see what’s hot at a glance. The Police reunion concert I wrote about recently was #3 on the list. Bob Seger and George Strait edging out The Police? Hmm.

The text font size is a little too small and I found myself adjusting in the browser. Yes, us old guys still buy tickets to concerts. Since there’s a lot of white space on CG the text size could easily be increased to be more friendly to an era of concertgoers that are going — or already are — gray.

The concerts tab lists concerts.

How to get free backstage passes
Also in the sidebar is a subscription pitch to receive a “free copy of our Top Secret Guide to Getting Backstage Concert Passes!” CG promises not to spam but if I were them, I’d remove the exclamation point and tone down the “top secret” stuff. The James Bond hyperbole isn’t helping. Reluctantly, I subscribed.

Almost immediately I received the email with a link to a PDF file on concertgroove.com. There was also a coupon code with $9.00 off all concert tickets at lavatickets.com. I’d never heard of Lava Tickets, buying most tickets through Ticketmaster, but throughout the review I noticed a lot of links to lava tickets, none of which were labeled as affiliate links. If none of these links are affiliate links it’s too bad because CG is missing out on a cut. This could be a non-intrusive way for the site to make money. I took a quick peek at Lava Tickets and didn’t see any affiliate program links so it’s possible they don’t have a public available program.

Now what about the top secret backstage pass info? Regular readers already know I despise PDF files, but that sin is forgiven if the information is good. Some of the first words on the 4th edition of the guide indicate that “all information contained in this eBook is confidential.” Argh, what can I say? I don’t want to be disavowed from the agency for disclosing any mission details, but I’ll summarize my feelings after reading the three page guide as: this appears to be useful information for those interesting in getting a backstage pass.

Whether it works or not is up to somebody who has actually been backstage. I’m sure you can find all this information on the web if you spend a little time in Google but it is nice to have CG put it in one neat ebook. The closest I ever came to any stage was waiting all day to get into a Quiet Riot concert and be near the front row having tons of people pushing against me in a hot, sweaty mass of strangers. No wonder it was the first and last time I ever did that.

Testing “comprehensive” claim
With hundreds of thousands of artists, any claim of being “comprehensive” is going to include a massive database and unfortunately for Concert Groove they fall apart on this test. They admit only having some 600+ artists listed and too many that I clicked on turned up pages that looked like this:

Now if you clickthru to the Lava Tickets page you’ll see Pat Benatar has six concert dates next month, here’s a screenshot:

Why have a page returning “no” concert dates when there actually are some? That’s not comprehensive, that’s erroneous. I realize it’s difficult keeping up with concert dates, especially if the process is manual or using a vendor that has incomplete information, but a truly comprehensive source would not have many (any) of these types of situations. Also, if visitors are going to need to clickthru to Lava Tickets to see truly comprehensive information, why wouldn’t they just go there to begin with?

Testing reliability and accuracy claim
To continue this theme it wasn’t only Pat Benatar, several other bands I searched for turned up empty results. Some examples:

Quiet Riot who came out with their new Rehab album recently has no results. Metallica? No results, despite them playing the Rock Werchter festival in July 2007. How about Heaven and Hell, the new band by Ronnie James Dio and former Black Sabbath members sans Ozzy? Nope. They have tour dates as early as next month.

What information was listed on Concert Groove like the aforementioned Police tour dates as well as Ozzy Osbourne dates seemed to match up with the artist websites fairly well.

Summary and grade
Concert Groove is a clean website but isn’t nearly as comprehensive as promised. And why what about the thousands of top indie artists and their concerts? As a small niche site focusing only on major acts it is ok but remains lean on content if focusing on music concerts in the grand scale. And acts like Metallica are top acts so why no listing for their concert? Would I visit/use a site like this? Probably not very often.

My favorite part of Concert Groove is the search by city search which allows me to see who is coming to Seattle or Tacoma on one page. It would be even more handy if an RSS feed would be provided having this information. In the back of my mind though, I can’t help thinking the information is incomplete so I probably would still visit the venues directly to check for updated information which negates at least some of the value offered by CG.

Concert Groove also has a forum with some back and forth conversation, but a rather small 65 members. Maybe they just launched the forum because after three years this isn’t very good. Forums can be tough to build and a PITA to run, so best of luck there.

I tend to visit the artist sites I’m interested in directly and wonder how many others do that? This is how I knew concerts in this review that were happening to compare against the Concert Groove data which, sorry, didn’t really pass the test. Concert Groove isn’t a bad site but definitely needs more concert information — and accurate information — and absolutely, positively must lose the hyperbolic claims that they don’t really backup otherwise visitors will see more than the red design and not return. Grade: C+

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