I'm Mickey Arline. I'm 21, I play bass in a three-piece called Kudzu Fire Sale here in Athens, Georgia, and I work the counter at a record store downtown, which in this town means I spend all day watching people try to find out where bands are playing.

Everybody in Athens is in a band. That's not a joke; you can't throw a guitar pick downtown without hitting a drummer. And more and more of them have Web pages, which is great, except most of those pages are no help to the two kinds of people who actually look at them: the people who book the shows, and the people who come to them.

Here's how I know. The store has a computer behind the counter. A couple of the club bookers come in on Tuesdays when the new releases come out, and while they're there they look up bands that have sent them tapes. Kids come up to the counter all week asking where some band is playing this weekend, and I look it up for them. I've watched a booker give up on a band's page in about fifteen seconds because he couldn't find an e-mail address. I've watched a kid give up on one because it started playing a song at him. So here's the list. It's short, because your page should be too.

The first thing on your page, above your band's name if you have to, is your next show. Not a link to it. The show. And all of it:

• the date and the day (Friday, October 1, not 10/1)
• the club, and what town it's in
• what time you go on, not just doors
• the cover
• all ages, 18 and up, or 21 and up
• who else is on the bill

The all-ages part matters more than bands think. Half the kids who ask me where a band's playing are sixteen. If they can't tell from your page whether they can get in, they won't drive across town to find out.

A real address that somebody in the band actually checks, on every page, at the top or the bottom where people look for it. Bookers do not fill out forms and they do not sign guestbooks. They want to send one e-mail and get one answer. If nobody answers in two days, they book the next band.

What do you sound like? One sentence. Not "we defy categories." Every band defies categories, and every booker has read that sentence four hundred times. Tell them what's going to come out of the amps. Ours: "Three guys playing short, loud pop songs with too much feedback at the end." A booker can work with that. He knows which night to put us on and who to put us with.

Names and what they play. That's the lineup. A paragraph each about your influences is fine further down, but people want to know how many of you there are and who sings. Ours, so you can see how short it can be:

If you have a tape, say how much it is and where to get it. At shows? At a store? By mail? People ask for tapes at our counter every week, and half the time the band never told anybody where to buy one. Ours is six songs, $4 at shows and on consignment at the store, $5 by mail; e-mail us and we'll tell you where to send it. Don't give your home address out on the page.

I know. You want people to hear you. But a song that starts on its own, on a computer behind a store counter with a customer standing there, gets turned off before the first chorus, and so does the page. Lots of people look at band pages at work, too. Put your song on a link that says what it is and how big the file is, and let people click it when they're ready. Then they'll actually listen.

I get it. It looks like a record cover. It also can't be read, by anybody, on any monitor I have ever seen. If you want dark, go dark with white or light gray letters. If you can't read your own show dates from across the room, neither can a booker. This page is white with black boxes because it's supposed to look like a flyer stapled to a telephone pole, and because you can read it.

The show you just played comes off the top, the next one goes up, and you write one line about how it went. Do it that night, or the next morning, before you forget and before somebody looks at your page and sees last Friday's show still sitting up there as your "next" one. A page with an old show on top looks like a band that broke up. Sometimes it is one.

THE WORKED EXAMPLE
I'm not going to tell you all this without doing it. Our fall 1999 show listing is built the way I just said: next show on top with everything on it, the rest of the fall below it, and every show we've already played with one line about how it went. I updated it at two in the morning after our last one. Steal the layout. I don't mind.

OTHERS DOING IT RIGHT
Two pages on GeoCities.us I send people to:

• All-Ages Shows: The Church Basement Circuit. It's not a band page, it's a show page for a church-basement all-ages series, and its calendar is what every band's should look like: every date, who's on the bill and a note, with $5, all ages and doors at 7 spelled out right above it. When a show's over it says HAPPENED and how many people paid. Bands, if you want to play there, read how: send a tape and a letter.
• The Basement Tapes, the page for Static Cling, a high school band. They list every show they've ever played, and they tell you exactly how to get their tape: $3, or bring a blank and they'll dub it for you. Most bands in this town with a van and a manager don't do that much.

That's it. Next show, an e-mail, one honest sentence, the lineup, the tape, no autoplay, colors you can read, and update it. None of it takes any more HTML than a <TABLE> and a mailto:. The rest is up to how good you are live.