Coachella 2013 on Songkick: an explanation

We love festivals. And we love the build up of excitement around who’s going to be headlining what. This week however, things got a little bit out of hand surrounding the Coachella festival in Indio, California. On 15th December, the Coachella 2013 lineup on Songkick was incorrectly edited to feature Daft Punk, The Rolling Stones and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, amongst others. This lineup was not confirmed by Songkick, Coachella or the artists in question. It is not a leak, and did not originate from anyone related to the festival.

When bad data like this is added to Songkick, we remove it as swiftly as possible to avoid any confusion or rumors spreading. In this case, the information was added in the early hours of Saturday morning UK time — thankfully, one of our moderators in the US caught the false listing and removed it within a few hours of it being added. However, in the short space of time that it was live on the site, some email notifications were sent out. A screenshot of one of the emails was widely spread around the blogosphere and Twitter, and then picked up by the larger news sites. Unfortunately, it was seen to be a rumor and snowballed from there.

Since this slip-up occurred, we have had a number of issues with further false information being added to Songkick. Despite our very best efforts to moderate this content, it has now reached a point where we’ve decided to temporarily turn off all user-editing tools. This will be in place over the holiday period, and we will reassess the situation in January.

Songkick would like to apologize for this mix-up and any problems caused by it. We’re really excited to find out who is going to be headlining Coachella next year, and will be poised to update the lineup when it is officially announced by the festival in 2013.