My Top 6...music fan sites

As the proprietor of a fan site I've always had an interest in what fans are doing on the web, a year or so ago I posted ruminating on the fan site and whether it had a place in the brave new 2.0 world...

Whatever the reason it seems the days of the fan site is over and all that’s left are the few excellent sites run by the few dedicated individuals that will remind the world what things were like in the days before MySpace and Wikipedia and blogs...

David Jennings, the author of the excellent book Net, Blogs & Rock 'n' Roll, responded arguing that things maybe aren't so gloomy...and he's probably right.

Anyway...I was talking fan sites to a couple of people over a lemonade yesterday (more of which maybe at a later date) and I was asked about what my favourite fan sites were. It was a question I found a bit overwhelming in a noisy pub but a lot easier when I was sitting in front of my computer later on. It seemed an ideal opportunity for the long since neglected My Top Six... category to be prodded back to life.

My fondness is for a lot of information so these are mostly concentrated on content occasionally at the expense of aesthetics. Looking over the list they all seem very "traditional" - very web 1.0 which possibly only reinforces David's counter that...

the next phase of fan site development will see the development of more collaborative projects, whereby fluid groups of fans work together complementing each others' skills and filling in when someone drops out.

So here is "My Top 6...music fan sites"...

• Stereolab
  In the early days of A Head Full of Wishes the best fan site on the web (IMO) and one it aspired to be like was Robin's Stereolab site. It was packed with every sort of anything and encouraged users to vote and contribute. Sadly Robin closed down (and passed on his site) so it can only be seen in most of it's glory on the Internet Archive...
• Go-Betweens.net
  Jonathan's site is an awesome resource and one that has managed to get an online community going successfully which I never managed to do with A Head Full of Wishes...maybe it's time to try again...or maybe the time has passed.
• Low
  Another site that you have to head over to the Internet Archive to see it as it should be. I adored the Low website before it became official (and actually for quite a while after) but sadly a lot of the content has gone astray and it looks less like a fan site and more like what I guess it is now - a promotional resource.
• Electricity Comes From Other Planets
  Olivier Landemaine's Velvet Underground site is utterly breathtaking in it's detail - it makes me feel like such an amateur.
• Milky Moon
  The Joanna Newsom fan site Milky Moon is a site I like a lot, for a relatively new artist the site has a gorgeously old-fashioned way about it.
• Sparklehorse: What Kind of Name is This?
  Another site overflowing with content and another one that sadly seems to have been neglected of late.