Building an Artist Website that Rocks as Hard as You Do
“Is your website functional and compelling enough to keep a fan’s interest in your brand?”
A Band’s website is the hub of their musical activity. By directing your fans back to your website, you make deeper connections and you are in complete control of your fan’s experience with your brand. Your website can act as your Landing Page for your band’s marketing and should be the One-Stop-Shop for fans to find anything they need to know about you.
What to Include in A Musician’s Website
Merchandise via eCommerce
If you have Merchandise, I highly recommend building a web-store within your website to sell it. All Web Hosting platforms offer a service that includes eCommerce. I personally use Squarespace’s business plan, which lets me integrate a webstore directly into my site.
If you are working with a Merchandising company, such as ColorTest, Threadless, or HelloMerch, they will build out a webstore for you in addition to offering Print on Demand & Fulfillment services. Print On Demand means that your merchandise is printed on-demand at a per-order quantity, and then shipped out by the manufacturer. These Merchandising companies offer powerful eCommerce options and drop shipping, and will handle the hassle of holding inventory and shipping them out to customers.
If you are not working with a Merchandising company and you want to sell physical products from your webstore, then you will be obligated to fulfill these order manually (which means making trips to the Post Office several times a week). I only offer digital products on my webstore for this exact reason.
Tour Dates
BandsInTown has an event widget that seamlessly syncs with WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix, and can be embedded in any other website. BandsInTown is a concert discovery app used internationally with over 300,000 registered artists. BandnInTown will sync with a variety of platforms, including Spotify and most event calendars. If you have not created a profile on BandsInTown, you 100% should go do that right now. The BandsInTown widget will integrate with your website so that you can keep fans updated on your tour dates - so definitely do this if you are playing shows or planning a tour!
Press Photos
Press Photos are one of the main reasons to have a website at all - to host your Professional Assets for Journalists, Promoters, and Event Marketers to download and use to promote your show. I would certainly upload a variety of hi-res photos of your artistry in action, as well as casual photos of you. Make sure you include shots taken in a live setting, a formal setting, and a friendly headshot or informal group photo. You should use your Press Photos to tell a part of your narrative, and they should compliment your story and reflect your voice: Urban, Comedic, Goth, Sexy, Shiny, Classic, Retro, Scary, etc etc. Whatever your narrative is as an artist, make sure your Press Photos emphasize that brand.
Create a Single “Call to Action”
A “Call to Action” is essentially the consumer being asked to do something on behalf of the Band. It could be any, such as “Listen to our new album”, or “Join us for a Live Q&A”, or “Watch this video of our guitar player getting kicked in the ball by a donkey”, or “Download my Music Industry Success eBook, its FREE” (see what I did there?). You should streamline your website to point your audience towards a SINGLE Call to Action. Why only one? Because you want to avoid the anxiety that comes with making a choice. If you overload your fan with options, they may pick none of them. But if you can create a single welcoming, compelling, and engaging Call To Action, you may find that a lot of new fans will interact with that action.
Consider offering a Lead Magnet
A Lead magnet is essentially a “gift” that you give to a new fan or visitor in exchange for their contact information. You can use this contact information to warm up the potential lead, in hopes that they want to interact with you, your brand, or your business again at a later date. Whether that’s following you on social media or buying a ticket to see you perform, beginning that relationship with your audience is essential to building a fan base, and ultimately a consumer base.
Using your Website to Host your EPK (Electronic Press Kit)
Creating an EPK, or Promo Page, is one of the first steps to getting booked at new venues and doing DIY Publicity. A Promo Page is made for Promoters, Publicists, Journalists, and Venue Marketers so that they can pull what they need and use it to promote your show. You will have the most success creating this as an “invisible” page on your website, a page that is unable to be navigated to on the website unless you have the URL. That way you can tailor the content on this page for industry professionals and you won’t have to worry about your fans stumbling onto it.
It is important that your EPK/Promo Page be hosted on your website and not formatted or included in an email. At the time of this writing, the standard inbox size is 15GB. So if you send an email to 20 promoters hoping to book a tour and you attach 10 songs and 5 Hi-Res photos, you are occupying an important 100mb of space in that Promoters email Inbox. It is considered courteous to include as few attachments as possible and instead include hyper-links in the body of the email.
With so much potential content for an EPK/Promo Page it can be hard to create something that is both organized and detailed, but here are some helpful tips to help you highlight your strengths:
Highlight your Strengths
Gather quotes from reviews, venues, or fans and add the best ones to your page
Prepare Long and Short bio options. This allows for a quick grab, read, or copy for bloggers that need information about you quickly.
Make Use of your Music! Assemble a few of your best performances and incorporate them as the focal point of your EPK. Keep this music player compact, such as an embedded Spotify player embed. Remember, in this day and age “Your Music is your Marketing”
Photos
Add images that are full-resolution for bloggers and Social Media posts. These photos should be pre-cropped to the correct ratios of different platforms: Portrait, Landscape (16 x 9) and Square. Your responsibility is to make it as easy as possible for journalists and show promoters to download and share these photos to promote your show. I recommend having informal and formal photos, as well as Live shots of you performing; the more photo variation, the better. Also, make sure to include the photo credits of the photographer! Lastly, you should include multiple file types for your Logo, a transparent PNG image being the most important.
Videos
Add videos (links) to promote what your band looks and sounds like, such as music videos, live videos, or promotional videos. High Quality Audio on the videos is very important, for obvious reasons! Make sure these video files are available for direct download.
Layout
Keeping your EPK section uncluttered is as important as having all the ingredients. Assume you have a 10-15 second window of capturing the attention of a new visitor. Make use of columns and feature titles, as well as color contrast in your design. Contact Information is the most important message, so make sure people who visit your EPK know how to get in touch with you! Include phone numbers and email addresses for your manager, booking agent, label and Publicist, as well as links to your social media and even a contact form.
Other Things to include in your EPK:
Contact information for the band’s Management, Booking Agency, and Publicist
Online Resources section with hyper-links to the bands Social Media and website
One paragraph Bio / Description about the Band.
Tour Admat / Poster (hi-res)
Promo video for the Tour / Show (2 versions: 60 second for IG and a full-length for FB)
Hyper-links and Embed code for Latest music via 2 streaming platforms (Bandcamp and Spotify)
8 Creative Rules for Your Website
#1: Embassy Theory
Embassy Theory states that: A brand must be coherent everywhere. All of the points of interaction (Social Media channels, streaming profiles, and live shows) should represent the aesthetic and brand of the artist, just like an embassy represents the culture of a country. An Artist’s website is an important digital embassy, and it should strongly represent your narrative, voice, & visual aesthetic. Notice in my website I maintain an informal, educational voice, and my narrative (story) & visual aesthetic is consistent to what I share on my social channels. No matter what your aesthetic is, whether you are a Hip Hop duo from Brooklyn, or a Death Metal band from Chicago, your aesthetic must be consistent everywhere someone would go to look up information about you. And you website, being the hub on your online presence, should reinforce that narrative and aesthetic more than anywhere else.
#2: Have a Strong Front Page
Your front page should immediately answer the question that your fan has come to the site. We operate on an attention economy, and if your front page doesn’t capture the attention of a new visitor immediately, then that is a problem. I imagine you have less than 5 seconds to convince a new fan to sign up for a call to action, decide to read your about me, or click on a social link. Make sure your front page is professionally laid out and that menu’s for navigating the site are easily accessed.
#3: Keep it Simple
Your website should be easy to navigate, so save your design creativity for blog posts and content marketing! If a fan is looking for information about your tour dates, they should be able to find those dates within seconds. The same goes for press photos, links to music or videos,and your merchandise.
#4: Keep it Updated
An out of date website is a huge turnoff for fans and industry professionals alike, keep your site updated with recent news and content! If you are playing a special show, make an announcement banner on your website about it. If you change members of the band, update your “about me” section.
#5: Make it Personal
Fans are there to hear from you! I recommend an honest “about me” page and a photo gallery to start. Don’t be afraid to break the 4th wall and really get personal with your audience, such as by advocating for a social cause or bringing up an issue that resonates with the core brand of your band.
#6: Create a Community
Your website is your hub for online presence, and as an artist your goal is to ultimately build a community of fans. Fans need to know that they can send other people to your website in order to add them to the community. Creating “call to action” buttons, social media links, and a newsletter sign-up on your homepage is a good place to start. Some more measures of community building could be things like:
Showing Twitter feeds on your website with #yourbandname
Offer a discount in the merch store in exchange for someone giving you their email or connecting with you on socials
Run a contest where artists can submit designs to be on your next T-Shirt or Album artwork.
#7: Give Your Audience a Reason to Come Back
If your website is the “one-stop-shop” for your brand, should you show the customer some special appreciation? In addition to hosting creative content, all web platforms offer a “commerce” and “blog” sections. These are opportunities to host something on your website that gives your audience a reason to come back. Examples include: New merchandise for a Album Release or a Blog section that tells the story of your favorite venues or touring experience.
#8: Make sure it looks good on Mobile!
Mobile traffic accounts for about 40% of my total traffic on my site. Any lead that I generate on Instagram, Tik Tok, or mobile facing social media like Facebook and Reddit are sent to the mobile version of my site. Make sure that your mobile menu is easily accessible, and that your site design and proportions are correctly scaling for the mobile user.
Website Hosting Platforms:
Squarespace (personal favorite, a nice balance of options without being too difficult)
Wix (easy as pie, but not very many options)
Weebly (also pretty easy, few options)
WordPress (Much harder than the others, but incredibly flexible)
What the heck is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is how a search engine, like Google, will rank your site when people search for related keywords. It is unlikely that you will be worried too much about SEO, because bands rarely do blogging or SEO related activities. As long as you have a unique name (known as a keyword), Google will be pretty good about ranking your site near or at the top of search results. However if you have a common name, or keyword, Google might not know to place you at the top of a Search Ranking. I recommend checking out Neil Patel’s incredible depth of knowledge regarding SEO. He has a free SEO Analyzer Tool that has definitely helped my own personal site, as well as a Keyword Search Tool so you can see where in Google Search results your site ranks when different keywords are searched. Check it out, the results might surprise you!
Collect and Study your Website Analytics
You need to be gathering Analytics about your audience as they visit your website. Website analytics gives you the answers to questions like:
Who is your audience?
Where is my audience located? (geographically)
What do they want? (Tour Dates, Merchandise, etc)
Where did they come from? (Search Engine, Social Media, etc)
How do they interact with your site? (Page View Time, Button Clicks, Sales)
Does my audience meet my expectations? (Age, gender, location)
Am I able to convert new fans? (Newsletter Sign-Ups, Lead Magnets)
At the end of the day, your band is a business. Being able to answer these questions will help you sell tickets, promote your music, and build a financially stable career as an artist. To give you an example, here are some of the analytics for this website over the last 30 days:
Unique Visitors:
176
Device Type:
Desktop: 61%,
Mobile 38%
Unique Visits by Source:
Direct: 56%
Google: 25%
Reddit: 9%
Medium: 6%
Other: 3%
Unique Visits by Country:
USA: 54%
UK: 8%
Canada: 5%
Italy: 5%
Australia: 3%
Sri Lanka: 3%
Germany: 2%
Make of this data what you will, but I have learned several things from it. Notably, almost 40% of my traffic comes in on mobile devices, which means my site better be well equipped to present a good mobile viewing experience. Secondly, my traffic comes into the site from a Direct URL hyperlink 56% of the time, which means that I am not reaching as many people 1 to 2 degrees away from my immediate connections. I should focus on improving my SEO so that I can build out a wider audience over time. Thirdly, I was pleasantly surprised to see Reddit come in at 3rd, with 9% of total traffic. That feels good, knowing that I’ve spent a lot of time developing long form, high value content for that platform. Medium makes sense next, as I introduced my content to that platform for the first time recently. I had a nice “first ever Medium Article” announcement post that pushed some people over there, had some organic push on Medium, and then some of those people came over to my site... so maybe, 6 people? Gotta start somewhere!
Even More Analytics Options
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Pixel
Do you ever wonder why you see an ad for a product you were just browsing? Its because there was a Facebook Pixel coded into the web store you were just browsing. Ever wonder why You are targeting with advertisements related to your location? That’s because Google knows everything about you, including your geographical behavior.
Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel are both platforms for tracking your audience and their interaction with your website even more in depth than your website hosting service can. Setting up these services takes a little bit of know how, but once they are installed you open up a whole new world of advertising and audience re-targeting.
Google Analytics:
Fine tune the efficiency of your website pages (such as Call to Action %’s, and View Time)
Gain Keyword insight to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Track and React to Trends in Real Time
Session Duration (How long each unique visitor spent on your site, on average)
Times of Day that users go to your Site
Realtime Analysis of Users on your site
Details to Assess and Improve your Bounce Rate (Your Bounce Rate is the percentage of people that leave your website after visiting only 1 page)
A Detailed Breakdown of each of your site pages, to include things like Unique Pageviews, Avg Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and so much more.
Graphs and charts and all sorts of crazy, detailed stuff, just google it.
If you like this article, check out the
2019 Music Industry Success Book
The Knowledge you need for Success in the Music Industry!
This 102-page book is a practical guide for navigating the music industry as an artist or band. This book is not in any sort of chronological order, its more of a “choose-your-own-adventure” book. Pick and choose whichever chapter you want and read at whatever pace you please. Each chapter is, for the most part, a standalone article on that topic. And each module features topics that are in a similar category. This book contains niche ideas as well as general knowledge, and is based off of my years of experiences in the Music Industry.
This eBook is Free! Please grab a copy!
Meet Your Teacher:
26 Years Old
Youngest Current Published Author with Mel Bay Publications
Full Time Freelance Touring Musician
Published 3 Books for Bass Guitar
Studio Engineer
Live Engineer (FOH & Monitors)
Music Festival Coordinator
Venue Bathroom Cleaner
Biased because he’s writing his own “About Me” section
The very best
Josiah Garrett, photo by Cathy Marszalik