Help!

Below are some of the reasons more and more indie fans and bands are choosing IndieShows::

• You can post and find independent music events and venues in your area no matter where you live!
• You can post events and venues without signing up which saves time.
• With our events section, fans can tell others, re-post on other sites, leave comments, add their name to the event's attending list, get directions, and add any event to their Google Calendar! Oh, and it's all indie... no major label bands deserve our promotion ;p.
• With our venues section, once the database is built up, with your help, bands and fans will be able to find multiple venues in cities all over the world for free!
• You can also post and find free podsafe and radiosafe mp3s in our music section! This helps promote artists because broadcasters are more likely to play your music if it is posted here because they know that the music is safe to use. How? Well, all artists agree to let podcasters and radio stations use any song they upload here.
• We have a cutting edge forum, blog, podcast and annual battle of the bands competition. All of which are focused on promoting local music.
• Finally, even if you use are site for nothing else but to get updated on whats happening in the indie music community, that's fine with us! Our music Newswire sucks up tons of music related news articles from around the net and posts them all in one spot.
• You should also know that IndieShows was started by a musician who believes in the little guy and not indie music sites run by huge corporations looking to steal your money! You can even contact him yourself... just use our contact form on our contact page and request Billy.

First of all, anyone can post events. You don't have to be in a band! If you know of upcoming shows in your area, please post them! Now having said that, when we say anyone can post an event, we mean anyone can post any kind of independent music event! Any other events will be removed! To post an event simply click on the "Events" link at the very top of the page. After you submit the event, you just have to click a link in the e-mail that is immediately sent out to activate your posting, and that's it!

YES! When you click on "Events" from the IndieShows Main Menu above, you'll be able to choose whether you want to post one event at a time or multiple events. We allow you to post up to 10 events at once using the multi-event form!! This saves you time, energy, and well, that's about it... mostly it saves you TIME! If you have over 20 upcoming shows, and you already have those shows listed on myspace, contact us and we'll re-post your shows here for free.

You know that event activation e-mail we sent you when you posted your event? Below the activation link is also a editing/deleting link. Click that link, enter in the password you chose when you posted your event, and edit/delete away.

All you have to do is host the image at your website, or at any free image hosting site like photobucket, imageshack, and even myspace. Once you have the image uploaded somewhere on the Internet, just copy and paste the image's URL into the Event Image field on the event posting form. Posting an image is optional, and a default image will be posted if you don't include a URL. What's a URL? If you've come this far chances are you know what a URL is, but, if you don't... An image URL would look something like this: http://www.yoursite.com/theimage.jpg
So, it has to end in .jpg, .gif, .bmp... or some kind of image file extension.

If you're not sure how much the event is going to cost, then just put "TBA", which of course means To Be Announced. You can also include a note in the event's description letting visitors know that you are unsure about the cost of the event. You can even direct them to the band's site which may have this information at a later date.

You can find events by country, state, city, date or keyword. Just click on "Events" from our main menu! To narrow down your search click on "Advanced Search". Here's a tip when searching by city:: When bands/artists post their shows, they manually enter in what city their show/event is in. So, if they misspell the city, then it might not come up in the search results. You may try searching for "ind" instead of "Indianapolis" for example, because that way any city that starts with "ind" will come up, so even if the city is misspelled, it may still come up as long as they at least got the "ind" part right. :)

When viewing events, below the event information, you'll notice a box that will say how many people are currently attending the event, and it will ask you if you'd like to attend. If you do, click the link and the attending form will slide out. Just type in a valid e-mail address and your name (Just your first name or nickname will do!) and click "attend". You'll then be sent an e-mail. You must click the link inside that e-mail before your name goes on the attending list. Why do this? So the band and everyone else can get an idea of how many people are going. If someone finds an events that has 20-30 people listed, they may be more inclined to show up.

Just click the "Get Directions!" button right under the event's description. Then enter in your address and the event's address (the city and state or country should already be there) and click "Go". It doesn't get much easier than that.

Let us worry about remembering when your favorite band is playing. Just find the show you want to attend. Sign up to attend the show and before you submit that you are attending, make sure you check the remind check box. That's it! We couldn't of made it any easier! Just confirm that you are attending by clicking the link in the e-mail we send you. About 2 days before the event is scheduled to occur, you'll get the reminder e-mail.

The "Tell a Friend!" link is below every event's description. It allows you to quickly send a friend an e-mail about that particular event. They'll be sent a link which will take them directly to the event that you recommended to them.

Yes! You can easily add any event to your Google Calendar by clicking the Google Calendar button located directly below the event's image. As far as iCal goes and other calendar programs, you can sync Google Calendar with those programs. You may have to use a third party program to do so though, just Google syncing Google Calendar with iCal or something similar to that and you'll find a lot of helpful articles. So, bottom line, you can easily add any event on IndieShows to Google Calendar... adding the events to other calendar programs will take a little bit of research on your part. We suggest that you use Google Calendar anyways, you can access it from anywhere and it's very easy to use!!

This is to help you, not hurt you. When you print any event or most of the pages at IndieShows it will probably only print the text for the most part. This is to save you ink and printing time!! All you need is the text anyways if you're wanting to print out an event so you have the show time, directions, etc.

You may wonder why you must give us a valid e-mail, name, plus enter in a security code when posting an event, or attending an event... The reason is simple... security and spam. Hey, at least we don't ask you to sign-up or register to create an event like most other sites. Oh, and we don't sell e-mail addresses, or e-mail you annoying advertisements or anything. When you type in your e-mail address, the only thing we are using it for is to send you that event activation link and editing/deleting link. You won't get any other e-mails from us after that. For more information read our boring Privacy Policy (at the very bottom of the page in the footer...).

When you flag an event it alerts us, and tells us to check out the particular event that was flagged. If you see any events that look like spam, or look like they are not independent music events, please flag them and help us fight against spam!

More than likely you just over looked it! Make sure you didn't miss it! Also, your e-mail provider may mistake our e-mails as spam, so check your spam/bulk e-mail boxes! If you double check your inbox and your spam/bulk mail area and you still don't see an e-mail from us, you can... try posting the event again, or wait it out! Sometimes it could take up to 5 minutes to receive our activation e-mail and in rare cases it may take even longer... but these are RARE cases. If it has been longer than 24 hours, then you can also go to our contact page and let us know about it. We have noticed an issue with hotmail accounts... We recommend that you open a gmail.com account if you use hotmail or another e-mail service and you never get our e-mails.

If you can't find the event you posted, you may of posted it accidentally under the wrong country and/or state! So be careful when you post the event. Your event may also of been deleted because we thought it was spam or we didn't think that it was an independent band post. If you feel that your event was wrongfully deleted, please e-mail us by filling out the form on our contact page. In your message please include all the information that you used when originally posting the event. If we have to remove your postings multiple times, you may be banned from posting events.

Also, once your event has passed, it is automatically removed from the site. This is just to keep the site running as fast as possible. Plus, who wants to come to an upcoming event site like this and find old events?

We don't have an actual Featured Artist spot, however, we write about a few different artists every week at our blog. We probably won't blog about you if you just e-mail us. But, if you participate at our forums or upload your mp3(s) to our music section, chances are we'll notice and if we like your sound, then we'll blog. We may also add your song to our myspace page music player or we might promote your music through our podcast called "IndieShows Mixtapes" which we do once a month. Finally, you can get your press release featured at our Newswire and on over 30 other music sites across the internet. For details visit our Newswire and click on "IndieShows PR".

To get information about how our Battle of the Bands competition works and to find out how to sign up, please click here.

Voting could be disabled for a number of reasons. The most common reasons that voting would be disabled is because the voting hasn't started yet, or the voting has ended. Also, after you vote (since you can only vote once per band/artist) the voting button will say "disabled!!" above it and it won't allow you to vote anymore until the next battle. This is just to make the competition as fair as possible. To get information about how our Battle of the Bands competition works and to find out how to sign up, please click here.

If you're sure that voting has started for one of our Battle of the Bands and you're sure that no one else used your computer or any computer in your house to vote and you still can't seem to vote, we apologize! The issue may be that your browser isn't compatible, or you have javascript turned off, or you do not have flash installed on your computer. You need an up to date browser, javascript and flash to participate in our Battle of the Bands.

If you're browsing around our event listings and in our venues section and you're noticing that there is little to nothing posted for your area, then please post some! This site is user fed! So, it's up to the indie bands and fans like YOU to post the shows and venues.

You may notice in our music venue directory that there are only categories for countries and states, not cities. So how can you narrow down your search for a venue in your city? Easy. Before any venue is posted, we must approve it and we make sure that in the venue's description the city is listed. So, if you type in your city into the search box at the bottom of the venue directory page and click search, then all the venues listed in your city will pop up!

We don't think this is an issue for PCs. However, if you're on a mac, the zip file may not open. The solution is to try right clicking the zip file, choose "open with..." and select your zip extraction program like stuffit expander. But the BEST way we've found is to Google "The Unarchiver". It's a small mac program that will unzip anything, and so far we haven't had and issues with it. If you're a PC user and you can't get the zip file to open please utilize Google and search for solutions that way. We use all Apple computers here at IndieShows so we don't get to find out about PC errors until we hear about them from you.

By separating your tickets into multiple pdf files we use less bandwidth/resources which means that you get your tickets, usually, instantly (or almost instantly). But don't worry, you can still print all the tickets at once without having to open up each file. Just highlight ALL of the pdf files, then right click one of them and select print. If you're a mac user you can highlight them all, then go to "File" in the top menu then select print.

You might get error messages (headers already sent errors) if you don't tell Tix-O-Matic how many tickets to create. So don't forget! (This should be fixed because now you can't submit the form unless you type in a number of tickets.

We've also found that you might get weird error messages if you don't use a valid image file URL. So, if you're getting a weird error, try making some tickets without entering anything into "Image URL" field. If it works, then the problem is your image. So the next question is, does your image URL end in .jpg, .gif or .png? If not, that could be your problem. A valid image file URL or link will look like this: http://www.yoursite.com/imagefolder/yourimage.jpg

Tix-O-Matic is our free ticket generating system for small events. You can use it for large events too, we just had small events in mind when making it. You can create tickets for your music venue, other concerts and really any type of event. There are security features and the ability to use popular perforated paper templates so you can easily tear apart the tickets. For more information please visit tixomatic.indieshows.net.

That's easy to answer. Unlike most sites that offer mp3 downloads, ours are all free and they are all podsafe and radiosafe. In fact, if you find an mp3 that you know violates someone else's copyrights, please tell us so we can get that mp3 removed. The way we ensure that the mp3s are safe to download and share is by having the person that is uploading the mp3(s) agree to allow their mp3(s) to be downloaded and shared freely. You can't, however, claim that an mp3 is your work when it isn't, alter or sell the mp3s, that would be violating the artist's rights. But, you can for example, play any song in our music section on your podcast. You should also always give the artist credit in your podcast, radio show or on your website.

In our music section when you click download the music should do just that, download. However, certain browsers may have issues, or our website may just decide to have a mind of it's own. So, if you have trouble, the full proof way to download an mp3 file is to do the 'ol: "right click, save as...".

Our music section is kind of in beta even though it doesn't say that anywhere. In other words, one day we will probably increase the number of mp3s you can upload. But, think of it like a demo that you give out for free at shows. You usually put 3 or 4 songs on it. Well, do the same thing here. Choose 3 songs that you don't mind giving away for free that are a good representation of your sound.

As it says below, you can contact us or post a support question at our forum if none of the above questions helped you. Please don't be shy about it! If you contact us and your question is one that could help others, we'll then be able to post it here for future reference!