Following Chinese bands on Douban

Update on Douban's ongoing changes and motherfuckery when it comes to following bands. Some good news, in fact. At the bottom.

So, previously. And for those who are utterly new to this. All active Chinese bands use Douban's xiao zhan 小站 for their homebase. 

It used to be that following the band page would put all their updates into your main newsfeed/timeline and then there was a filter that showed only musician pages - then called 音乐人 yin yue ren. Sweet. You could add in all the active bands on the scene and get continuous updates and links to shows, demos and videos. 

Then Douban took out the filter and combined all stand alone pages to be the 小站. For a while, we had to go individually to each artist page. That meant over 200 for me and Jake. Then they introduced the 喜欢 like button and following a band's feed became a separate, hard to spot, option. This option: 关注Ann的广播. Guangbo 广播 is feed. See the first picture.

So you could create a new profile. Add only band pages and no friends. Then go to each page and follow the feed. Finally you'd have a time line of band updates again. Of course, band pages are fully 'editable' now so the band may have hidden the feed, and thus the option to follow it.

But now, Douban have finally added back a feed of sorts. Now we have the My Mini-sites 我的小站 tab which shows a chronological list of bands who have updated and their last two updates. See the photos below.