GLOBAL – The Royal Artist Club was first introduced five years ago. Designed as a place for bands to blog about what was going on in their worlds (this is pre Facebook, MySpace et al going big) the premise was pretty simple – Nokia gave the bands devices to blog with, they wrote stuff, it was posted on the RAC site. Today though, things are different. The bands who started blogging all those years ago, are now all over social networks and although with a healthy online presence, it tends to be a bit fragmented. That’s where the Royal Artist Club comes in. Again.

The new site, built on WordPress, is designed to aggregate editorial from different sources, and acts as a central hub for a wide range of bands. They still use their Nokia devices to blog, tweet, update their status, share pictures and video but instead of their thoughts floating out into the ether, they’re all aggregated, along with everyone else’s on the Royal Artist Club site.

It’s still early days for RAC 2.0, the new site has just gone live, but it’s already looking quite stunning. The folks behind it are promising much more, too and we can expect to site to come alive with fresh content and new features. Right now you can check out what the likes of The Answer have been up to (just come off tour with AC/DC and about to start a near sold out tour of the UK) and the site is great for getting backstage access to a range of artists.

Backing up the main site is a series of mobile blogs, one for each band involved. If you like your music, you could seriously lose yourself in this for a while. I’d write more about it, but I’m too busy sniffing around myself.