With personal supercomputers resting in everyone’s pockets these days, a band’s online presence means everything. Whether someone hears your song playing at a coffee shop or they happen to catch the end of your set before the headliner they came to see, making sure you’re easy to find online is of paramount importance.
But it doesn’t just stop at being easy to find. A professional, all-in-one online destination for your fan base and potential promoters is important, and knowing how to code your own site is no longer a barrier to entry.
To alleviate some of the stress often associated with weeding through your varied options, we’ve detailed a few different services that can help your band build a strong online presence.
The Music Site: Difymusic
If your band is looking for a website building service that caters specifically to musicians, check out Difymusic. Difymusic is specifically unique in that they cater exclusively to musicians and are not a subscription-based service – certain add-on and optional advanced apps and widgets will cost a fee, but their core features for website building are entirely free to use.
Difymusic advertises that you’re able to get your site up and running in as little as three minutes. Users can customize their site experience by dragging and dropping each section of their site (audio, video, social, tour schedule, contact info, etc.) into whatever position they choose, highlighting the content that’s most important to them. Users can also feature a band photo or video by embedding it directly onto their front page.
Difymusic's websites designed for musicians
Difymusic also offers merchandise integration so that fans are able to buy your band’s gear directly from your site. If you opt for their most basic shop functionality, Difymusic takes a 5% commission and leaves you to deal with your customer service and shipping.
If you choose to upgrade, Difymusic will take a 20% commission, but they will also take over all of your customer service and shipping duties. This is a particularly great option for touring bands who might not have the time or resources to dedicate to quickly shipping out merchandise.
As mentioned above, Difymusic offers a wide array of extra widgets and apps in their Difymusic App Store that can increase your website’s functionality. You can pick and choose what you want to add to your site based on your band’s specific needs. You can find features for your music store like “preorder” and “name your price,” as well as more advanced features like “collections,” which allows you to organize products and content into specific categories.
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The Website: Squarespace
If you’re looking to get more serious than Facebook, Squarespace has a great reputation for making beautiful sites for all kinds of purposes. Brands, restaurants, podcasters, bloggers, artists, people getting married and more all choose Squarespace for their website needs because it’s easy to use, customizable and stunning.
Squarespace’s own website is broken into categories, so you’re able to filter their templates and services by what you’ll be using your website for. The musicians section has a variety of templates you’re able to click through, but make sure to check out every template in every category since you can add music services to any design.
Leon Bridges' website built on Squarespace
Once you choose your basic layout, you can further customize the design details, like font type and color palettes.
The key features Squarespace offers their musician users are merchandise table integration, an event calendar for tour dates, and their Audio Collection app. The latter allows you to drag and drop your music directly onto your site so that Squarespace can organize it into a beautiful playlist.
You can also integrate your Spotify or SoundCloud, your Twitter or Tumblr feed, and you can manage your Facebook bandpage from Squarespace as well. This allows you to funnel all of your social activity into one place with cross-platform updatability.
Squarespace services start at $12 a month and move up in price based on what features you chose. If you’re not totally committed yet and just want to try it out, you’re encouraged to take advantage of their free trial.
Squarespace also sponsors quite a few popular podcasts and those sponsorships come with a discount for the podcasts’ listeners. So if you are going to commit to Squarespace, be sure to grab one of those promo codes before you sign up.
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The Band Page: Facebook
Having a Facebook page is one of the best ways you can help build up your band’s fan base and should be one of your first forays into establishing your band’s online presence. Facebook band pages work a lot like traditional websites. You can post pictures, video, tour dates, and even make your music available to stream. You can also make events for upcoming shows or album releases and integrate those events with your main page.
Facebook also gives band pages the option to include a “call-to-action” button on their page. You can make this button anything you like – some variation of “Contact Us” or “Book Us” are generally popular choices.
One of the best parts about a Facebook band page is that you’re able to very easily track traffic and engagement with your fan base. In today’s socially rewarding culture, not much is more satisfying than being able to hit “like” on a band’s page for updates and exclusives or to let your friends know that you’re going to an “event near them.” Facebook makes all of this engagement easily trackable for the page admins.
Page admins aren't the only ones who can take advantage of those engagement stats. Since number of likes, fans, comments, and posts are public, anyone going to your page can immediately get a sense of how popular you are. This is especially true for promoters.
Promoters are going to check your Facebook for engagement numbers. They’re going to judge you based on how many people have liked your page, on how much engagement your posts generally get, and how interactive and exciting your content is. Before they book you, they want to make sure you can bring a crowd – especially if they're paying you. Period.
Regardless of which service you opt to use, strengthening your band’s online presence is something that will inevitably help you land gigs, sell merchandise, and grow your fanbase. So don't wait to dive in – you never know when someone might try and Google you.