Daft Punk’d: Songkick Coachella Info = “Bad Data”

Back on Tuesday, while the rest of the blogosphere was pimping the Daft Punk, Phoenix and Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Coachella story, we explained the problem with the source of the story – a Songkick email. Today, Songkick has posted a blog entry that goes into detail about just what happened. In short, the data was not a leak and did not come from anyone connected with the festival.

As we warned, anybody could’ve added the bunk info into Songkick’s system and if it wasn’t caught before email notifications went out, this bad data makes its way to many Songkick users.

Here’s the company’s explanation…

When bad data like this is added to Songkick, we remove it as swiftly as possible to avoid any confusion or rumours 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 rumour and snowballed from there.

This wasn’t the first time Songkick’s system was gamed and apparently it’s been happening frequently since DaftEllaGate…

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.

When you give free-rein to your users to add data without the company first approving it, something like this is bound to happen. The Coachella lineup is expected to be announced in January.

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