Explaining the Bonnaroo Website

There have been many of us who have noticed, and tried to make sense of, the plain URLs that the Bonnaroo webmasters have used for the individual artist pages. As we've seen they all follow this template:

www.bonnaroo.com/artist-name

And thus many of us have tried to input names we hope to be there, with varying results. Sometimes the name will bounce you back to the main page, sometimes it will reveal a page with just the name you entered, and still other times the name will actually give you a page complete with artist photo and press bio. The temptation to read theories into the varying outcomes is very strong, but in reality the reason behind all this is quite simple.

1) Every single artist who has performed at Bonnaroo in any previous year has a page, even comedians. This is directly related to the artists listed on the respective webpages of previous Bonnaroos; in other words, every artist listed under the pages for 2002-2006 does have a page for them. The resonable assumption is, firstly, that the webmasters plan on hyperlinking these names to their respective pages, and secondly that they plan on fleshing out the pages with at least a photo and perhaps a bio as well.
In the meantime if you try to access a page for one of these previous artists by manually entering their name in your browser, be sure that the name is entered just as it is on that year's page: thus Devendra Banhart should be entered as devendra-banhart-band, Marc Ribot as marc-ribot-y-los-cubanos-postizos, and so on. Also remember that any punctuation must be removed, so Umphrey's McGee is umphreys-mcgee, and Tom Petty is of course tom-petty-the-heartbreakers.
(You may also notice that a few artists have come to Bonnaroo under different names, and indeed each name has its own page: cut-chemist and cut-chemist-funky-sole, north-mississippi-allstars and north-mississippi-allstars-hill-country-revue, etc.)

2) The artists whose pages have photos and bios are 2006 artists. While not every '06 artist has a completed page as such, most of them do. This appears to be the information left over from the 2006 version of the website, transferred over into these new pages. Again this indicates that the webmasters plan to preserve the info on the pages of these past performers.

3) Some have also pointed out that artists' pages have the Bonnaroo 2007 lineup listed to the left, which would imply that the artist in question will be added to the current lineup. But if you try out a number of different names of past performers you'll notice that every page has the '07 lineup on the left, which instead indicates it is just their chosen format.

So that's the explanation of the website. Keep in mind that these pages apparently are sporadically updated, so a bare page you check now may have info added later. But in all the webmasters seem to be keeping a tight lid on letting any new artists leak through their URL system; at this writing even Fiction Plane, who it has been leaked will be at Bonnaroo this year, does not yet have a page.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this has helped. ;D