User:Michig/How to find sources for popular music articles

Many articles about musicians or groups are nominated for deletion as they are a common type of article created by new or inexperienced editors. The creators of these articles often "know" that the band or artist is notable and don't understand why other editors wish to see those articles deleted. There are several avenues for finding sources with which to improve such articles and demonstrate notability.

Web search engine

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are all good places to find coverage and may return different results so it's often worth trying more than one search engine.

News searches

Google News is a good place to look for news coverage - newspapers are regarded as reliable sources. It is also worth searching the websites of individual newspapers, e.g. The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Times, New York Times, etc. The BBC site is also worth searching. Many music papers such as Melody Maker, Sounds and NME gave considerable coverage to many artists that does not exist anywhere on the internet - sites such as rocksbackpages.com provide some of this on a pay-to-view basis, but the majority of content from these papers only exists in the original printed form. Bear in mind that Google results are only likely to include a fraction of the total coverage received by pre-web bands and artists.

Book searches

Google Books is a useful place to search, but won't find a lot of book entries and often will not show enough of a book's content to be useful. The Encyclopedia of Popular Music is a good starting point if you can find it - several other works have been derived from it, including the Guinness Who's Who... and Virgin Encyclopedia series of books. The content is also syndicated at www.nme.com, where the biographies and discographies from the encyclopedia are included at the bottom of the 'artist' pages (though beware - some of the bios at NME.com are sourced from Wikipedia).

There is no substitute for the books themselves, and your local library will be a good place to start.

Other websites

Allmusic is a valid reliable source. Contrary to what some editors believe, the site is not a blog, is not user-editable, the biographies are not submitted by the bands themselves or their record companies, and it does not aim to write about every artist that ever existed. Many of the writers for Allmusic are respected and experienced authors, some having written several published books (e.g. Dave Thompson). Check for reviews as well as biographies - several artists have no biography but have considerable biographical information included in reviews. Trouser Press is a good source for consolidated reviews/overviews of artists. Other useful sites can be found in the list of accepted sources of album reviews at Wikipedia:ALBUM#Review_sites. Metacritic is useful for finding links to reviews and gives a decent overview of the critical coverage received to ensure that reviews cited in an article offer balance. Cite the original reviews though (and the ratings there, if present), not Metacritic.

Specialist web resources

Reggae

• Roots Archives - album discographies up to 1985 - the "classic era"
• Jamaica Observer - many news articles on Jamaican artists
• Jamaica Gleaner - many news articles on Jamaican artists

Alternative music

• Pitchfork media
• Drowned in Sound
• Exclaim!
• Chart

Search tactics

Many bands have names that return lots of unrelated results when searched for, and the first few pages of search results may not contain anything that indicates that the band is notable. In such cases the searches can be made more useful by searching for the band name combined with the band's town or city of origin or the band name combined with the name of one of the members - coverage of bands will usually mention the name of at least one member or the town that they come from. Searching on album or song titles, in conjunction with the band name if the titles alone give unrelated hits, can also retrieve more relevant results.