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"Here's fun little factoid for the day. It seems people are turning to Wikipedia more so than MySpace when searching for musical acts.\nAnthony Bruno of Billboard is reporting that Yahoo data shows Web users are going to bands' Wikipedia entries more often than their MySpace pages, or dedicated site, by a 2-to-1 ratio.  The surprising part comes in how little attention bands are paying to their Wikipedia entry. That is, if they even have one. Which many still don't. MySpace boasts that they have 3 million plus artists, while Wikipedia's head of communications, Jay Walsh, estimates artist entries on their site number only in the tens of thousands.\nSo, why aren't more bans appearing on Wikipedia?  It probably has something to do with the fact that all entries on the site have to generally conform to a non-biased tone, which doesn't allow for hyperbole on the part of the artist or their label.  Jason Feinberg of the Web promotions consultancy company On Target Media Group shared similar thoughts with Billboard:\n\"(Wikipedia) is so clear, so concise, and it's standardized. That's something I think is a draw over MySpace, where you never quite know the experience you're going to get. Is it going to be a horrible jumble of images and video and text that's difficult to read? Also, (its) rooted in fact. It's not promotional. Especially these days when the Internet is full of artists trying to essentially ram their message down your throat, I think a fan is a lot more receptive to a simple, no-hype approach.\"\nAs someone who is exposed to a lot of new music through services such as Pandora and Last.fm, I must say I personally tend to look up a lot of bands I hear for the first time on Wikipedia first.  My reasons are just as Mr. Feinberg stated: I don't want to be assaulted with annoying graphics, hard-to-read text or auto-playing music when searching for musicians.  With Wikipedia I know I'm going to get a clean interface and a generally comprehensive amount of information.\nAnd I'm not alone in this taking this method to search. Which raises the question of what will bands do to encourage the creation of a Wikipedia page.  They can always start it off. But who will fill in the non-biased information? Could we start seeing labels forming online versions of promotional street teams charged just with writing about the bands?  And even then, will they be able to stay unbiased enough to meet the sites standards?    It should be very interesting to watch this story develop further. That is, if bands ever grow aware that they are missing out on a largely unexploited promotional tool."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/03/22/music-wikipedia-search/>