Indie Music Marketer .com

The Elements of a Successful Band or Musician Website

Written by Josiah Redding
Friday, 01 June 2007
When it comes to your online presence, there are basically 5 elements you need to get setup before anything else. They are the most essential elements of any musician's web presence. This article tells you a little about what they are and how you can get setup with them. 1. BAND BIOGRAPHY You may already have this, but it may not be accomplishing what a biography needs to accomplish. Listeners and potential fans need to be able to relate to you, to get to know your personality, where your music comes from, and what makes you unique as an artist. If your biography isn't designed with this in mind, you may need to re-write it or at least expand it. I suggest not skimping when it comes to your biography. If you're not a great writer, you may not want to write it yourself. If you're on a budget, find an English major at a local college who might be able to help you write your biography while getting credit for it. Or just find someone you know who has a knack for writing. There may be someone you know who has written professionally or semi-professionally before. Ask them to do you a favor by either editing or completely rewriting your biography. Your biography needs to connect with people, make them smile, laugh, cry, and relate to you. 2. STREAMING MUSIC PLAYER You've seen this type of streaming music player on major-label artist sites, on Myspace, and other websites. Do yourself a favor and don't just link to your Myspace site for people to listen to your music. Make the visitor's experience completely integrated — don't make them leave your website. There are plenty of options out there for you to easily add your music to your website. Here are a few suggestions: iSound.com has a service where you can upload songs to their site to be featured on your profile page. They also provide a feature where you can put some simple HTML code in your site and display the same player on your own website. The XSPF Music Player, which is an XML based Flash player, is an open-source option which is highly customizeable and there are three versions (full player, slim player, and single button player) which you can embed on your site with a custom music playlist. This is a good option for more advanced web users who want to control the way the player appears on your site. You can read more and get instructions on installation by clicking here: http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/ Wimpy has multiple player options which can display their player in different ways, and can even stream video in addition to audio. You can check out the different options here: http://www.wimpyplayer.com/ 3. MAILING LIST QUICK SIGN UP FORM Having a quick signup form on your front page can really help increase the number of mailing list signups you get. I recommend placing the signup form prominently on the top of one of the sidebars on your website, and putting a message in large text advertising the benefits of joining the mailing list. Be sure to put in small letters somewhere that you will not SPAM them if they sign up, and will not sell their information to anyone else. There is a plethra of mailing list services out there that will let you setup a signup for which automatically tracks signups, sends autoresponders, adds the person to your database, and confirms their email by sending a confirmation message. Here is a short list of sites that I recommend: Yahoo! Groups — Free! Vertical Response — Free to Setup, Pay Per Email Sent Aweber — Pay a Monthly Fee Constant Contact — Pay A Tiered Monthly Fee Based on List Size If you want to use your own email program, you can setup a simple HTML form which emails you a new signup's information each time the form is submitted. Checkout FormMail.com for a great free service. 4. BUY IT NOW! BUTTON Assuming you don't already have a professional shopping cart setup on your website, the easiest and cheapest way I know of to setup a Buy It Now button is to use Paypal's Buy Now buttons. If you don't already have a Paypal account, you can sign up and get started for free by clicking here: http://www.paypal.com After you sign up, click on the "Merchant" link at the top of the page to get started. If you already have a shopping cart and a product page for your CDs, simply take the URL for that page and create link with a "Buy Now" image. 5. TOUR DATES LIST When you're starting out, I suggest using the widget provided by SonicBids.com. Not only is SonicBids a great service to have otherwise, they also have a Tour Dates Calendar which displays a browsable, self-rotating list of tourdates on both your SonicBids Electronic Press Kit site, as well as any other site where you insert their widget HTML code. If you don't want to spend the monthly fee to get SonicBids, you can just do a bulleted list of dates, which you can update manually as time goes by. There are also free and pay-to-use professional online calendar providers which will customize an embeddable calendar which you can use in any site. Some of these are also RSS-sydicatable, which allows your fans to subscribe to your calendar and automatically get updates when you release a new tourdate. AN ALL-IN-ONE OPTIONS For my group, THE REDDING BROTHERS, we use a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla, which, with some additional free extensions, manages our mailing list, articles such as biography and discography, streaming music player, shopping cart and buy it now buttons, self-rotating tour dates calendar, and much more. Joomla is a free, open-source CMS which you can download here: http://www.joomla.org If you're not much of a web programmer, another all-in-one option which you can use is available through a company called Ultra Entertainment. They have a system pre-configured for musicians which will handle your news, mailing list, shopping cart, tour dates, photos, chat room, etc., all with one central system complete with back-end control panel for band members. Their service starts at about $50 per month. You can learn more at their website: http://www.ultraentertainment.com CONCLUSION Of course these 5 elements are not all that you need to run a successful band website, but these 5 elements should be the cornerstones of your online music presence. The better and more efficiently you present and promote these items to your visitors, the more money you will make from your online music business.