It’s been a while since one of us posted to the blog, so I thought I’d jump in and give you all an update on all things BandPump.

The site’s development has been steadily continuing, although a lot of the changes are more “behind the scenes”. Our timelines for new features have been delayed due to a variety of reasons. But Chris, myself, and the rest of the team are still committed to the project, and expanding what we feel is the start of an excellent new music experience.

Keep your eyes and ears open for new features which should be arriving fairly soon. These include venues, groups, and a new and much cooler commenting system which should help increase user interaction.

Hot on the heals of the new metro areas, we’ve rolled out a glut of minor site enhancements and fixes. Plus a couple of exciting new features!

The fixes include some pesky IE6 formatting improvements and some new handy links on the top banner. The first new feature allows BandPumpers to include hyperlinks in comments, which opens the door to more interactivity between users. It has also allowed us to generate a welcome message for new users moving forward.

The second new feature is for you musicians. You can now create an events calendar which shows your concerts and gigs for the next 3 months. Right now we only have the functionality for you to add, edit and delete events. But once we get a few new events in there we’ll roll out a way for other users to easily see these. I’s just another way BandPump will help you promote yourselves and connect with listeners.

Look for more new BandPump features coming soon. As we’ve said before, we have a ton of exciting ideas and have several initiatives already under development. In the meantime, go browse the site, let us know your thoughts, and listen to the steady stream of new songs which various musicians are uploading for your enjoyment.

One of the key aspects of BandPump is localization. In other words, being able to identify and connect with listeners and musicians in your local area. When we rolled the site out we included about two dozen U.S. metro area options, and about as many for the rest of the world. But we always planned on adding more.

Well, guess what: we’ve added more metro areas! To be precise, we just rolled out 101 of ‘em. They include a load more for the United States (at least one per state); several more each for the UK, Canada, France and Germany; and some for previously overlooked countries including India, China, Spain, Italy and Brazil.

If you’re a BandPump user but don’t have a metro area assigned go add one! Don’t see one for your country? Ask us to add your city! Not a BandPump user yet? What you waiting for?! Come join us today: signup is free and easy.

As our members are aware, when BandPump was initially launched, a little over a week ago, we required images to be a perfect square before you were able to upload them. This proved to be problematic and caused a lot of members, including ourselves, a load of grief! A few days ago we were able to put out the short term solution which allowed members to resize their photo to a perfect square before uploading it. Unfortunately, this solution was also problematic with certain old browsers.

As of this afternoon we have introduced photo galleries along with a more intuitive photo uploading tool. This will allow you to upload up to 8 pictures and will automatically create a thumbnail of the image that you can use as your default profile picture. The gallery feature will allow you and your friends or fans to view all of your pictures in full size. We plan to also introduce photo commenting in the near future which will further increase the level of interactivity between you and your BandPump friends.

As always, member feedback is appreciated!

We at BandPump are all about helping you connect with other users. So it’s only fitting that we make it easier for our users to share their profiles on other social networks! Well, today we rolled out that feature.

Now under your “edit profile” page you’ll see a “networks” tab. Click on that and you’ll be able to add your unique id on many of the biggest social and blog networks. These include MySpace, Facebook, Technorati, BlogCatalog, and Flickr. For each id you add a link will magically appear on your BandPump profile page!

Check it out, and show off your social savvy to fellow BandPumpers!

We’ve received a fair amount of feedback on the site so far. Most of it has been very positive. But one of the areas of criticism has been the profile picture upload tool.

The one which rolled out with the site’s release required the image to be square, so it fit snugly into the site’s layout. But understandably, it isn’t easy for some users to crop an image, either because they don’t have the time or the necessary software. So we’ve obliged with a new tool, based on Dave Spurr’s JS Image Cropper code.

Existing users who don’t have an avatar image yet should check it out. And you guys who haven’t registered yet, what are you waiting for?!

Well, it’s been a fairly busy couple of days. But I want to say a quick thanks to some users who have been bouncing around the website and notifying us of the quirks they found. In no particular order, thanks MrsGates, Aw Shutup, Jacklyn, and Counterstrike 75. Your help is really appreciated.
There were a few fairly minor bug fixes to deal with, plus a bigger issue with registering which was a problem for the first few hours after launch! But those are now fixed and we’re making good progress.

But there are some other features which we literally just released which I’m really excited about. They might seem kind of dull to some, but they make accessing BandPump much easier. First, you can now use your email address or your username to login. Second, when you log in you can now have the system remember your email/username. And finally, you now have the option of staying logged in for much longer than before.

Hopefully these little tweaks will all help enhance the user experience.

Keep on rockin’ fellow BandPumpers!

After several months of planning and development, BandPump.com has officially launched into Beta phase. Being just shy of 100 initial members to kick things off, we are pleased to say that BandPump is finally available to the rest of the internet.

We hope that those out there who are as passionate about music as both Andy and I are will enjoy and appreciate what BandPump has to offer. We hope that BandPump meets and surpasses your expectations of what an online local music community should be. Above all, we hope that BandPump serves as an effective platform for emerging musicians to expand their fan-base, and for avid music listeners to enjoy something new and exciting in music.

We’d like very much to hear your thoughts, your ideas, and your suggestions to help improve the user experience as a whole. There is no way that Andy and I could have made it through the countless all-nighters of planning, developing, and debugging without the continued support of present and future BandPumpers…thank you.

Have fun, and Rock On! \m/

Just a quick update… We’ve made great progress over the past 2 months, and are now sooooo close to launch!

The past 7 weeks has been a time of grunt work, testing, and fixing up issues. But all the major launch functionality is done now, so we’re hoping for a launch by the end of this week!

We also have a bunch of amazing and ground-breaking ideas on how to improve the site after the initial launch, and really set some heads spinning. So once we go into live beta keep checking back for cool new stuff!

Welcome to the first post of the brand new BandPump Blog! This is the official mouthpiece for BandPump: the awesome new music community designed specifically for emerging musicians and those who love to discover new music.

Before I continue, let me introduce myself: my name’s Andy, and I’m one of the guys behind the site. I’m the uber-geek in charge of all the technology, site architecture and pocket protectors. My colleague is Chris, he’s the avid musician and marketing genius who first envisioned a kick-ass revolutionary music community. We have a TON of exciting plans for BandPump, some of which have already come to fruition.

At the time of writing the site is still in development, but progressing very nicely. In fact, the lion’s share is done and we’re hoping to have the site up for preliminary beta testing by the end of the year, if not sooner.

In the meantime we encourage you to keep checking in on the blog for the latest news, and don’t forget to register to become a beta tester (no worries, it’s free!).