Website Making for Musicians 101

You’re on TikTok, Twitter, SoundCloud, Facebook, Instagram, and a handful of other platforms you barely remember signing up for. Maybe you’re communicating with fans via Snapchat, uploading videos to YouTube, and streaming live concerts via Periscope or Meerkat.

Yes, you do have an “online presence” — but so does every other artist in the world.

With Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and all the musician-specific social networks out there, you might think that your own website is obsolete. Instead, your website might end up being something that sets you apart. 

Still not convinced? Let us list you a couple more reasons why. 

You are the ultimate owner

With your own domain, you’re guaranteed to own that little slice of the Internet. As long as you renew it, it will always point to your website. A standalone website is really the only customizable enough place where a band or artist can effectively display their “brand.”

This isn’t quite the case with social networking websites. They can get bought out, lose out to competition, or simply become un-cool. Thousands of bands relied on their MySpace page as their home base, and remember how that turned out?

 

Having your own website makes you look like a pro

Having a website for your music shows that you’re taking your music career seriously. That means you’re more dependable, more talented, and of more interest to whoever is visiting your site.

 

People prefer a one-stop destination

If I’m checking out a new band, I look for their website first since it’s the easiest way to get a quick overview of what the band is all about and where else they’re active. And, it’s the easiest way to sign up for their mailing list if I’m feeling intrigued enough.

Yeah, you need that website. Let’s pick a name.

 

How to Pick a Domain Name

Be extra careful with this one, and keep the best-case scenario in mind – assume that you will make it big in the industry. You want this domain name to accurately depict your brand. Spend a solid amount of time picking a domain name that you wouldn’t feel the need to change 10, 20 years from now. It is also important to say your domain name out loud before you buy it. See how it feels to speak the name out loud. You want to be clear and concise here.

Also, think through how you are planning to handle hosting and domain registration. Many Web Hosting Services  these days give you free domain registration if you host your website through their platform. But if you have to shift services, getting your domain released could be more complicated than it needs to be.

The cleanest way to move forward is to keep these vendors separated.

 

The Content.

We know, you already have loads of content, but what you do need is a strategy. This is more of an exercise of setting up some ground rules other than anything else.

First, you need to settle on your images. You need to use the same image across all of your social media and have it on your site. This is how you create affinity, traction and promote your brand, which is how you end up making money in the long run.

Second, you need to think strategically about why certain content goes onto your site. Besides selling T-shirts and videos, and getting people to subscribe to your YouTube channel, you need to make some strides towards making yourself film, TV, and brand-friendly. You need to show that you can interact with your audience not only through music.

The easiest way to do this is by documenting your band journey, reality-TV way. People love hearing stories and seeing you tell your story will surely pave the way for some big contracts in the entertainment industry. The Rolling Stone estimates a film and TV rights and content license payday to be between $250,000 and $600,000, in the case of an established act.

Another popular and super effective way to get interactive with your fans in a constructive manner is education. How many musicians want their fans to sing along with them during gigs? The answer is nearly all. Yet it is strange that more musicians don’t have how-to videos on their websites and nor do they post and endorse sheet music. How cool would it be to sit down with your fans and teach them to perform your music?

 

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

Aside from the fact that most of your website’s visitors are going to be surfing your website on their phones, google actually punishes sites in search that aren’t mobile-friendly, so you’ll also want to make sure that whichever template you choose for your website works well on mobile devices. This basically means that your website should look great on any screen, including desktop, tablets, and mobile devices. 

 

Driving traffic to the website

To make sure that all this effort isn’t for nothing, you need to make a little extra effort to drive traffic to your website. For that, you need to do two things.

First, when your site is being set up, make sure that meta tags are filled out properly in your HTML code. This way, people searching for your band would actually “see” the page as opposed to getting a lot of garbage as top of the page results. Read up about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and apply whatever you can.

Second, spend a couple of bucks on some sort of advertising. Strategies for how you promote your site is a topic of its own – but you do need to advertise the content that you have on the site to its target audience. Just follow basic logic – offer your music to people looking for similar artists, offer your merchandise to people where you are planning to tour, offer your news to people interested in entertainment, etc.

We hope that this guide provided a solid foundation to help you build a website for your music! After your website is launched, you can use it as your main online hub to engage fans, sell your music and merch, and generate more bookings and press.

Now that you have your own website, the next crucial step is to start building an email list. Check out Why Every Musician Needs an Email List — Even in 2023