You can now search for multiple countries and band status in the advanced search. Just click the "multi" link to toggle the country/status list from a dropdown to a multi-select box.

You can also search by location (city, state and/or province) in the album search. This is useful to check out (for example) new releases from bands in your area.

Enjoy.

-Morrigan

It is now possible to enter* the cause of death for artists listed as deceased (e.g. marked with a date of death). For deceased artists whose date or cause of death is unknown, non-moderators can still report the artist as dead and a moderator will update the artist page.

A list of deceased artists can be found here, or by clicking the "R.I.P." link in the left menu.

*Important: when entering the cause of death, please keep the description as brief as possible , and write down further details (if publicly available of course) in the artist's biography or trivia sections. Examples of valid entries include (but are not limited to) "Brain cancer", "Murder", "Suicide", "Heart attack", "Car accident", "Hit by a drunk driver", etc. Non-valid examples would be "Stabbed 27 times by Varg Vikernes" or "Died after a concert in Los Angeles when the band's tour bus ran over him." This kind of details belong in the bio/trivia section at best. Also, please only capitalize the first letter (e.g. "Car accident" and not "Car Accident").

-Morrigan

By now, most of you have probably heard of the SOPA and PIPA bills being considered by the US government. These are poorly thought out "anti-piracy" laws backed by corporate lobbyists that threaten freedom of speech and information on the Internet. This is especially worrisome for sites that rely on user-generated content like MA, because it gives the authorities the right to take down a whole domain due to complaints against content posted by a single user. Though this is an American law, it unfortunately has the potential to affect the whole world, as a major part of Internet infrastructures are US-based. While SOPA has been put on hold for the time being in the House of Representatives (though who knows when it will return?), PIPA is still going forward in the senate and the vote on it is scheduled for January 24th. You can read more details about this issue and why this is really detrimental to the Internet in this article on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website.

Now, many sites (led by heavyweights Reddit and Wikipedia) are organizing a planned downtime or "blackout" on January 18th to protest against these bills and raise awareness for the situation, and MA will be joining in. This means that the site will be inaccessible for a period of 24 hours starting on the 18th at 05:00 UTC (or midnight EST). We apologize for this inconvenience, but we hope you agree that this is a worthy cause and give us your support. Please spread the word about this issue and, if you are American, consider contacting your local representative or senator to voice your opposition to these bills. The website americancensorship.org has quick forms that make it very easy to send your comments to the relevant authorities, as well as a petition for non-US citizens, plus other actions you can take and information about the subject.

-HellBlazer

And we're back to normal.

-HellBlazer

The site will be in read-only mode and the search will be disabled for a few minutes while I update some software. Sorry for the inconvenience, it shouldn't take very long.

-HellBlazer

The site had some issues during the last two days, but everything should be back to normal now.

Thank you for your patience.

-Evenfiel

Just in case some of you hadn't noticed, we have added a small (but, according to some, significant) improvement to the advanced search for albums and songs: it is now possible to select multiple release types at once, instead of picking just one from the drop-down. So just hit your Shift or Control key and click on the release types you want to search for.

Enjoy.

-Morrigan

I've updated the rules and help pages regarding the new External Links feature (see previous post).

Please make sure you follow those guidelines for adding external links, especially for artists, so we can avoid clutter. Thanks!

-Morrigan

You can now attach external links for artists and labels the same way you can for bands (see the help page for more details).

The link categories are a bit different than for bands:

For labels, we (tentatively) have "official" (to include links such as the official label site, the youtube channel, the Facebook/Myspace sites, etc.), and "merchandise" (to link to the label's webstore), but we might merge all that under the same "official" category later.
Note that labels still have a generic field for "homepage". You can add the label's main official website there AND in the external links, but only use this field for the label's main site. Any other links should go under the new Links tab.

For artists, we kept mostly the same categories as for bands, minus the "label" one obviously. Again, these categories are tentative; we're not sure that merchandise or tablatures are a valid category for artist (maybe for some famous guitarists, but that's probably a stretch), so they might be removed later. But the other categories allow you to include an artist's Myspace, Facebook, official website, youtube, etc. but also fan sites with more detailed bios and the likes (but NO interview links, please, this will just create huge clutter).

Enjoy!

-Morrigan

We are currently updating the site with an important security fix. This mean you might get login errors or expired sessions in the next few minutes, so do not be alarmed if this happens. Simply relogin normally if this happens. We apologize for the inconvenience.

-Morrigan