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How to create a good website for music promotion

9 min read
How to build a good website for promoting your music and getting discovered by a record label

Having an artist or producer website is a great way to direct your fans and other people to your music and contact details. If you are a band, producer, or DJ wanting to look professional, then there is nothing better than a pro-looking website. Today I will be going over the requirements, such as what are the best options for choosing a domain, and where to host your site, as well as what to provide so people can find your music online.

This guide will help you find your Wix from your WordPress, your Bluehost from your HostGator, and links to all the different parts you need to read more into.

Honesty note: I have included some affiliate links in this guide. I have only linked to products which I am currently running for this site and would recommend for free (it just helps the site run if I can get something out of my honest suggestions too!)

Why have a website?

Probably the biggest question that you are asking yourself (and probably know the answer to).  

Remember, to be successful, your music must be treated as a business. Either you can treat it like a business, or you can hire a manager. Regardless of how much you want it to be about the music, to succeed, someone needs to do the “office-work”.

Every business should have an online presence. Not only does it mean that someone can find you easily with a google search, it is also a platform to provide updates and news.

There is, of course, the argument that social media is a great platform for this, but over the past few years, Facebook especially has significantly cut the relevance of pages for musicians and small businesses. They say this is to make the content on people’s newsfeeds more friends and family orientated, but it also means that if you want to get around it, you need to put a lot of money into Facebook advertising. 

Convenient.

 

Social media is a great start for promoting yourself, but having a website to link back to is increasingly easy and important. Use it as your business card.

Having a website means that everyone who visits it can see everything you decide. While it has the challenge of getting people to click on it, you should be able to share it every time you have an update.

It is also a digital business card. Many people rank the professional-ness of a business or an individual on their “business card”. If you have a bad LinkedIn profile or hand over a bad business card, you look less serious or professional. Conversely, If you present a nice business card or website, then you will look more professional. 

Many record labels nowadays want a complete product from the start. They don’t want to invest in musicians who aren’t established yet and need to see a level of self-management. This means that a good quality website is essential for any aspiring musician.

If you aren’t too fussed about the details and pros and cons of each offer, that’s OK!

I added this box for the people who just want to get on with it and make a website. In that case, I recommend something which worked for me. If you pick Bluehost, you get WordPress hosting and a free domain. 

It is, in my opinion, the simplest option and has worked well for me. Click here for the link which can get you started immediately and select the “WordPress Hosting” option.

First Steps

The first steps for anything is to know what is needed and what your limitations are. Websites are time-consuming to learn about and can be costly. Likewise, saving time by getting someone else to do it is costly too. 

If you want to take the journey alone and really invest time into the project, I recommend you spend some time using the Google Digital Garage. It is a free online marketing course by Google. It does, of course, recommend that you use Google products in the course, but overall it is a brilliant beginners guide to setting up an online presence for your business. 

Next what you need to know is what you want to achieve out of a website. Everything should have a purpose and so this is an essential consideration.

As just a general guide, some musicians have a single page website with a few of their songs and a contact form. Others may have a multi-page website with tabs for tour dates, integrated merchandise online shopping, and fan pages.

Choosing a hosting platform

When you want to load a picture on your desktop, you need to find the file and open it up. This could be in the file location C:\Users\Public\Pictures, for example. Much like any other file, a website has to be stored somewhere. While it is possible to store your website on your computer (and leave it running so it can be connected to), most people look to have their website hosted on another computer. 

There are lots of sites which will host your website for you, lots are free with big drawbacks, others cost a lot but provide a really good quality user experience. 

This site uses Bluehost to store the files. Bluehost is really good if you have a website built with WordPress (which this site is).

What should you look for in a hosting platform? Here’s a few things you might not know you want:

  • Reliability – if the host goes down, people can’t click on your website and it will look like your fault. Downtime can cost a lot of money, particularly if you rely on any merchandise sales or it happens during an EP launch.
  • Speed – nobody wants a website to be slow. If the website takes ages to connect to you lose business. If you are a music page, there’s a good chance you will want to include high-quality press pictures on the site which can slow things down on a bad host.
  • Storage – a website takes up space. This site is full of photos and my words, while it doesn’t take up a huge amount of space, I still need to make sure that I don’t go over any limits.
  • Customer support – you are paying a significant annual fee normally, you want your business to always be up so labels can sign you at any moment. If you can’t get things fixed fast, there is a problem. 
  • Free Domain – Many hosts, Bluehost for example, offer free domains along with the website hosting. This is a good thing to consider as it is integrated into the same account and payment. Before I moved to Bluehost I had this site hosted in one place and was paying separately for a domain from elsewhere. 

Have an explore of different hosts because there is another key decision to make – whether you want to use WordPress or another system to manage your website. 

Check out these guides from across the web:

Best Web Hosting Services in 2019

If you want an example of a slow website that takes ages to load, check out the official website for Skrillex

To avoid this, make sure that you use a good host. Other reasons this could happen is if you have an ultra-fast internet connection, slow loading page elements may not be as apparent.

Much like how a producer should make sure the mix works on more than just their speakers, a website should be tested on several internet speeds.

Choosing a domain

Make sure you do a good job at this stage. I hope it is obvious, but if you get a bad or forgetful domain, nobody will find you. Your domain should be the name of your project and nothing more if possible. 

If your band name was “Dinosaur Stew” then a web domain like www.dinosaurstew.com would be best. The problem is, there are so many people in the world, there’s a chance a domain will be taken. 

I just came up with that name off the top of my head there and typed the domain into my browser. As you can see, it’s already taken by a photographer (who is probably now wondering where the additional traffic is coming from).

Choosing a domain is an essential way to identify you. Some are more trustworthy than others, bear that in mind.

What you could so is find a different ending. Are you from the UK? would www.dinosaurstew.co.uk work? It looks like there is (at the time of writing) no website attached to that domain, but you obviously don’t have as good a brand separation. 

A good free tool for finding if a domain is available can be found on Bluehost’s website. Just select “Domains” and search for what you want. If the domain isn’t available, it will suggest similar alternatives which you can snap up before someone else does.

Lots of countries have their own endings, think about sites that end in .ru or .ca for Russian or Canadian sites. Does your country have one? 

Of course, the more original your name, the more likely you will be to get a good domain. If you name your band “Google” then please realise you may be stuck.

Designing your website

Once you have picked the host and back-end management of the website, you can focus on actually building it. 

If you decide to go for a WordPress site, there are hundreds of tutorials out there for building your site up and making it look how you want. Since WordPress is used for a huge percentage of websites, you know it is going to work well. 

I recommend you download the Elementor plugin which is free and will make designing your site a lot easier. It is really nice and I have used it for many of my most recent articles as it works by dragging and dropping blocks together. 

Other options include Wix, and various other smaller options. I recommend you stick with one of the more well-known options since they will be the best-documented. 

If you are a coder, you may also be comfortable making your own website, but for everyone else its better to stick to templates and community created options. 

Make sure you include:

  • Contact information
  • Links to social media
  • Links to music
  • Tour dates

Everything else is a bonus. Get an old or tech-illiterate person to test it out. They should be able to use it easily. 

 

I got in touch with my friend Seán who runs FROZEN SOUNDS AUDIO, to chat to him about how he made his website and what it does for his business. Seán is an audio engineer, musician, and composer based in London. 

His website is run on Wix, one of the most popular hosts for small businesses.

Seán from FrozenSoundsAudio

“What I really love about Wix is that it is choc-full of helpful tips and advice as you build.

“You can add almost anything you want to it: a store, Spotify/SoundCloud players, and any kind of graphic, feature, polls etc. that you might want.

“It also allows you to rent a domain and sync emails as well as many other things.

“I should mention that I’m using the first tier of the subscription service. The free one isn’t too limited but paying allows me to remove the Wix tag and allows me analytics integrations and sync functions. 

“I hardly get any traffic so really it’s more of a digital business card.

“Also the mobile app is super handy as I can see who’s on the site at any time and contact them immediately.”

He went on to demonstrate the feature by messaging me as soon as I went onto his site to check it out. It is a really cool feature as it gives an instant ability for visitors to connect to you. 

Seán’s site is a good example of a clean, multi-page website with clear information and user interface. You immediately know how to find out about him, or where to get in touch. There is not an overload of information and he even provides audio clips of songs he’s worked on. This is the kind of website that most musicians and producers can make easily. 

1 thought on “How to create a good website for music promotion

  1. First.. the website shows that the band or musician is really serious! maybe at this time there are still many musicians who only rely on social media for promotion! even though to make a website actually doesn’t require too much money! one of its main advantages is the integration which makes it a single gateway for all band monitoring and promotion! this is one of my friend’s band website; https://www.colderra.com/ I think with a model like that is enough..

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