Building a musicians website from scratch can be scary. It takes a lot of time out of our days and if you aren’t a creative, you might struggle a little. With your socials in tip-top shape, you might think a website isn’t worth your time. However, there are a lot of good things your website can do for your brand. We’re breaking down the reasons why you should dedicate time towards creating your musician’s website.

What Your Musicians Website Is Here For

Your website is only meant to exist for two things:

1. Help you engage with current fans and make new ones
2. Make you money

And that’s it! It doesn’t sound hard does it? We’re going to make it even easier for you and break down everything you need on your website and how.

Choose How To Build Your Musicians Website

There are two ways you can approach website building. If you feel creative enough, you could go the DIY pay-as-you-go route. Website builders such as Bandzoogle and Squarespace are great because they allow you to get creative while still having the option to drag and drop rather than working with coding.

Now if you’ve given the builders a shot, or maybe you don’t feel tech savvy enough to maneuver website building, you should consider hiring a web designer. A designer will help you with the stepping stones of website creation.

If you feel competent with code, and especially if you feel like your main website service is blogging, WordPress is what we recommend. It has a lot of moving parts and leaves plenty of room for creativity. However, this does take a lot more out of you so if you really aren’t comfortable with coding or getting creative, we recommend sticking to the drag and drop options.

Make Your Homepage Pop!

One key factor you have to keep in mind while designing your website is navigation. Many people are glued to their phones and other electronic devices, so it’s important to know how your website is displaying on those different devices. You want something that is easy to navigate and appealing.

One-page scrolls are becoming increasingly popular due to its simplistic nature. You can easily scroll through your music, bio, and contact info as it all lays within the home page. If you have a special initiative or challenge, you want to make sure to name it something that is easy to understand or clickable such as “New Initiatives”, and not the name of the challenge itself.

Be consistent with your brand! Whatever colors you’re using on your socials, images that represent who you are, anything that is tied to your brand and your music, use it. Make sure the color scheme on your website matches your socials to create consistency within your channels. You should always start off a brand with a style board, that way your font, font size, and colors coincide with your brand.

Your socials are NON-NEGOTIABLE! Links to your active socials need to be placed somewhere easy to see and large enough to spot. Wherever you want to be found and followed, you share those links for anyone to reach on your site. Make it bold and make it big. We recommend putting social links on every page. If you have a footer section that is the same on every page, put your socials there for people to find.

Create Your Musicians Website In 7 Sections 

We are now going to discuss the most important sections to have on your website. If you don’t already have these on your site, you need to insert it asap!

One: Your Pitch 

Your pitch doesn’t have to be lengthy, it just have to give current and future fans a hit on what is your sound or what will they get. You can use sound-alikes, a quote from the press, anything that can speak volume on your talent. Share who you are in just a couple of sentences.

Two: EPK and Artist Bio

You’ll need a press kit on your website that includes photos, links, your bio, and your album art. You can add press quotes, links to interviews, and music videos. This is your proof. If a blog or playlist comes to your site, they can easily find everything important laid out for them.

The most important part of the press kit is your bio. Your bio has to be up to date. It needs to tell a captivating story as it is the foundation of your brand. Your photos need to also be a part of your band. Selfies are nice…but save those for your socials. Take professional photos and have them on your site. You can either add instructions on how to download high res photos or insert a link to a folder with these photos.

Three: Music! Stream, Buy, Pay What You Want

You are a musician, therefore, you must have music! Make sure people can easily find where to stream AND buy the music. You can’t force people to buy the music, so don’t skip out on adding links to streaming platforms. Chances are, if people don’t want to buy your music, they still won’t do it if that’s the only option you give them.

The pay what you want model is something we strongly recommend. It’s a way to allow fans to actually give you money. You can use Bandcamp or Bandzoogle for your fans to give you however much money they wish. You can also offer a free song download with email list subscription on your site. The goal of that is to give something as thanks, not necessarily that they will use the music download. This free gift may keep them coming.

Four: Merch

People don’t usually spend a lot of money on music. We don’t download it and we don’t buy it, so merch is a key factor in making an income from a music career. A popular thing happening is creating bundles paired with singles, EPs, or album releases with different merch items in each bundle. You also don’t have to shell out a lot of money with creating these bundles. There’s Printful who is integrated with Bandzoogle, Merchbar who is connected to Spotify, and Merch by Amazon.

Five: Live Shows/Streaming Shows/Tour Dates

If you play live or stream regularly, you want to have a page on your site dedicated to this. If you’re too busy to manage tour dates, we LOVE LOVE LOVE BandsInTown. When you update on BandsInTown, it will automatically load onto your website once you set up the link so you don’t have to continue updating it. What’s cool about BandsInTown is that fans who opt in will get alerts to shows when you book them. Songkick is also good to subscribe to because it’s connected to Spotify. On your Spotify page, Songkick will show upcoming tour dates which fans can see when streaming your music.

Six: Email List

One of the key places to gather email addresses is through your website. You have to directly ask people to sign up for your email list as it’s not something they really think to do. You have to follow it up by sending out a newsletter at least once a month. It promotes engagement from your email list, keeps them attentive to you, and keeps them in the know about what’s going on. Creating a free download in exchange for an email is a great incentive to get people to sign up.

Other ways to grow your email list are by embedding your newsletter application to your website. You can use Noisetrade, Mailchimp, or Bandzoogle to create a nice widget that helps keep track of your list for newsletters. Bandzoogle has its own mailing list tool that’s already installed into your website.

Seven: Your Contact

Press inquiries, booking inquiries, or anything that isn’t signing up for the newsletter list, they can reach you directly without you having to give them any personal information. You can set this up as either your personal email address or set up another email address specifically for contact form submissions. You don’t want to make it hard for people to connect with you online. Make sure you add your socials on this page as well.

Get Into Action On Your Musicians Website

If you feel confident about your website, go through this checklist to ensure that your website is the absolute best it could be. These action steps should be taken:

1. Run a diagnostic on your website, OR ask fan
2. Does my website load in a few milliseconds?
3. Is the Homepage image popping?
4. Will visitors get what kind of music you make just by dropping in?
5. Is your navbar easy to see?
6. Do you have all 7 sections that were mentioned?
7. Is there a juicy offer when people join your email list?
8. Does it work on mobile?
9. Does your site have video content?
10. Do you have merch? Can people easily buy it?
11. Do you have Google analytics installed on your site?

Number 11 is important to understand. You absolutely should have Google analytics because then you’re tracking how and where people are going on your site. This allows you to adjust as you continue.

Now you are ready to share your website with the world! If you would like a little guidance on building an effective website, reach out to us for our Musicians Website service. We will dedicate our time on helping you get your site set up in which it will best reflect your brand!