More Dead Bodies for the Fire

So I got this in my email today:

“Dear Pollstar Premium Subscriber,

Pollstar.com is in the process of upgrading our site, including many of our online features. Because the changes to Pollstar.com will be substantial, new or renewed Premium memberships are no longer available.

We still offer all users our free auto-notify accounts for five artists or venues. If you wish to continue to receive these free notifications after your Premium expiration date you will need to edit your list down to five selections.

We anticipate launching more new features in the near future and hope you will continue to enjoy using Pollstar.com during our time of transition.

Thank you for using Pollstar!

Your Premium account expiration date: 12/04/2007″

For those who don’t know, Pollstar is a site that keeps track of bands and venues and will notify you when a new show date is posted. Free accounts can monitor 5 bands or venues, Premium accounts can monitor 99. I have a premium account and over 50 bands being tracked. I could understand them canceling the service or scaling back for some reason, but here they’re telling me that they are going to be upgrading their site, but will have to shut off all premium services. What gives?

Granted I can apparently monitor 5 venues, which will more or less let me keep track of most worthwhile establishments in the area, but I don’t want daily venue spam letting me know that Mainstream Joe and the Top 40 Wannabe’s are playing in two months. All I really want is an explanation, because the one they’re giving doesn’t add up. You’d think, now that we’re in Web 2.0 and all (sic), that we could have a whole slew of sites that allowed you to automatically track all kinds of things: movie/music/game releases, concerts, etc. But for the most part you still have to trudge around to everyone’s individual sites in order to gather the information you want and then keep track of it yourself. The information age is really starting to piss me off. And while I’m on the subject of futurism…where the hell is my jive-talking robot butler!

PS. First Punk Planet, now this.

::begin sarcasm::

I’ve been using Web 1.0 this whole time. I better upgrade!

There, I’m done…and everything is the same.

Seriously though, I’m waiting for this to show up on store shelves. In fact, I’m fairly certain that if I could create a box labeled “Web 2.0″ to sell at Wall-Mart and Target, I would make millions. It would basically be a bunch of packaging and an install program that doesn’t actually install anything, but spends an hour “uploading” anyway.