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How To Create A Music Website (Step-By-Step)

Build your reputation online with a professional music website

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How To Create a Music Website

Creating a music website is essential for any artist or band who wants to be taken seriously in the music industry.

With several intuitive website builders on the market, creating a great music website that grabs your attention has never been easier.

To help create an awesome site for your brand, read on, and we’ll break down the complete process, from choosing a domain to promoting your content.

 

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What To Include In A Music Website

A great music website is the first port of call for fans and music industry professionals to discover exactly what you’re about.

It should showcase your brand and style, along with a complete collection of audio files, videos, and photographs that capture the essence of your music.

 

How To Create A Music Website (Step-By-Step)

Setting up a music website requires several key steps, from choosing the best builder to cataloging the digital assets you wish to include.

We’ve covered all these factors you need to consider and some bonus tips on search engine optimization and analytics to bring you this complete step-by-step guide.

Without further ado, here’s how to create a music website from scratch:

 

Step 1: Pick Your Domain Name

Before you can assemble your website showcasing your music, you must decide on its domain name.

This is the unique uniform resource locator – the URL – which directs users to your website.

When choosing a domain name, it should be catchy and easy to remember, with no unusual spellings or characters that might be easily confused.

The website address should be associated with or directly taken from your artist or band’s name and match up closely to the names used on your social media accounts.

If you’re offering professional music services, such as working as a session musician or producer for hire, you can consider using your name for your domain.

Once you’ve picked the name you like, you’ll need to check its availability and price on domain registrars such as GoDaddy or Hover.

Some domain names can be considerably more expensive than others, particularly if you want to use them as a dot com site for additional online clout.

If you’re outside the US and won’t have a global audience, you can consider using the URL extension for your country; for example, in the United States, choose a site ending in .US.

Other options for a music website include .club, .song, or .stream, and they can often work out cheaper than using .com.

 

Step 2: Choose A Website Builder

Many online services specialize in helping people assemble their sites, and the best website builders for musicians deliver dedicated tools to ensure optimal results.

Like other types of websites, music sites typically include all the features you’d expect from a site as well as core architecture that allows them to run optimally.

Using a website builder lets users quickly assemble a site with all the necessary code to function as intended.

They feature a selection of easy-to-use tools that allow users to select and refine their websites from a selection of templates.

Whereas previously, some knowledge of website coding languages such as HTML or CSS was required to build a website; however, with a builder, all of this is covered.

In addition to offering a large selection of templates, these builders allow you to customize templates to create the ideal layout for your music website.

Pre-formatted web page layouts, form builders, and e-commerce solutions combine to allow you to build your music site as pain-free as possible.

They also allow you to create high-quality image galleries, share your music, and ensure it’s fully responsive on all mobile and tablet devices.

In our opinion, one of the best builders for musicians is Friday’s website builder, which is excellent for anyone setting up their first site from scratch.

 

Step 3: Customize Your Website Template

Once you’ve selected a website builder and chosen the template that best matches your requirements, it’s time to start customizing it.

These extensive customization tools include altering everything from the fonts and color scheme, as well as tweaking the page layout.

When choosing a color scheme, select a primary color that you wish to use for the background, then select contrasting colors to bring it to life.

If you’ve already branded your social media pages, you should use the same color schemes here, or if you’re after a fresh look, update these pages to reflect the website’s overall aesthetic.

Next, you’ll need to upload an artist or band logo, which should be used appropriately throughout the site and on the header image.

This logo and related branding should fit in with your chosen color scheme and should avoid being overly complicated with too many colors.

Logos are sometimes scaled down to small thumbnail icons, and you want them to be clear and easy to view in all possible instances of use online.

An additional customization step to consider when selecting a template includes adjusting the menu layout and position, so it’s easily accessible and includes all the pages you need.

If you plan on adding a lot of content to your artist or band website, ensure you’ve included the necessary pages and categories to cover everything you’ll be featuring.

You can access a broad selection of Friday’s free music website templates oriented explicitly to help you create a fantastic music website.

 

Step 4: Create Your Essential Pages

All websites feature a selection of essential pages that allow visitors to easily navigate their content and find exactly what they’re looking for.

When working on editing your music template to promote your band’s content, you need to ensure the website navigation is easy for users to follow.

The first and most apparent page you should include is a homepage, which should be designed with a striking visual appearance that showcases your professionalism.

A basic contact page is also essential, allowing potential booking agents and other clients to get in touch should they wish to hire you for a gig.

Next, ensure you’ve included an About page, where visitors can check out your biography and discover what drives you creatively and your services.

You should also have a dedicated music page with work examples, including new music and links to platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

If you gig regularly, an Events page is another must, keeping fans informed about your upcoming concerts and events while funneling them to online booking sites.

 

Step 5: Create An Electronic Press Kit

Whether you’re a music production whizz or a band member, an electronic press kit is vital when contacting booking agents and venue managers for gigs.

A press kit can be included as a downloadable PDF from your About page or contained on its own page on your music website.

It isn’t just booking agents interested in electronic press kits; if you’re promoting a new release and want to drum up interest in the press, they’ll be eager to check out your kit.

The basic elements that should be featured on the EPK page include the following:

  1. An artist/band bio in both short and long form, explaining the music genres you work with and what makes you stand out from the competition.
  2. Photos that showcase your live performances, as well as professional headshots and any artwork used for your previous or upcoming releases.
  3. Embedded videos from your live streams or venue performances, and music videos if you have any.
  4. A selection of your best and latest music linked from your streaming platform of choice.
  5. Any positive press coverage or reviews you’ve had up to this point, including quotes and excerpts that cast you in a positive light.

Once you’ve created a press kit and hosted it on your music website, you can use it in marketing efforts with booking agencies, club owners, and journalists.

As your career progresses and you can afford to quit your day job, you can update your press kit to include any new achievements worth mentioning.

 

Step 6: Upload Your Music & Events

One of the main benefits of having a music website is to showcase your live music, DJ sets, and other events you’ve been involved with.

While there is still a healthy market for vinyl records and CDs, most people first listen to music online, and your site should take advantage of this.

You can upload tracks you’ve produced directly to your website or embed them on a page from one of the best music hosting sites, such as SoundCloud.

If you sell content on platforms such as Apple Music and Amazon Music or have an artist channel on Spotify, you should also include these.

With such scope and potential for presenting your music and previous live events, it’s worthwhile to check out music websites from other industry professionals.

While you might not have played at one of the best nightclubs in the world just yet, you should still include footage from DJ gigs showing off your style.

These should give you inspiration for what types of music and other content you can include and where to add them to your site.

Fans will view it as a central hub of your work, so make sure you add new music and videos from events as they’re created.

 

Step 7: Stock Your Online Store

A great music website means nothing if it doesn’t include your products, so including an online store for your music and merchandise is essential for monetizing your work.

With many website builders offering an eCommerce store as a standard, like Friday’s eCommerce website builder, featuring this on your site is a no-brainer, even if you don’t yet have anything to sell.

With stiff competition and many artists and bands willing to perform for free, earning money from music production and gigging can be increasingly challenging.

Giving your fan base a chance to support your work through merchandise and purchasing physical copies of your music helps introduce a new revenue stream.

As well as records and CDs, a store on your site can sell a wide range of merchandise, including mugs, T-shirts, and stickers.

You can also sell digital downloads such as lyric books, tutorial lessons, sheet music, and high-quality audio files of your compositions.

Merchandise is a great way to push your branding to a wider audience, with fans happy to wear shirts and hoodies sporting their favorite band’s logo.

 

Step 8: Include Social Media Links

While your website should be the go-to resource for everything related to your music, social media accounts are essential for driving traffic to your site.

Whether you’re on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram, you need to add links to these social media channels to make it easy for visitors to share your content.

At the same time, social media posts should always include a link to your website so anyone engaging with you can quickly access more information about your music.

Including these social media icons to redirect site visitors to the relevant channels so they can share your content can be easily achieved using a website builder.

Such social sharing buttons can sit prominently at the beginning of additional text-based content, such as tutorials and blog posts, to make it easy to share them instantaneously.

In addition to including icons that link to your social media pages, you should also feature a link to sign up to your email list throughout your site’s pages.

This lets fans get the latest news and updates on scheduled events directly to their inbox so they won’t miss out on your next release or performance.

 

Step 9: Create Content & Promote

Search engines use algorithms to determine where a website is ranked based on search terms, so including a blog section can help new fans discover your work.

Additionally, search engines such as Google rank websites higher when they produce regular original content, making a blog a must-have for a music website.

There are plenty of topics you can write about on your site, from sharing journals about your previous tours to adding tutorials on music production.

If your website is gaining traction and has a reasonable number of monthly visitors registered through Google Analytics, you can monetize it by writing sponsored posts for other businesses.

Reviews of your favorite music and other articles on relevant topics can all help to keep your SEO score high, as well as encourage visitors to stay on your site.

The more value you bring to the table, the more your fans and others will likely bookmark your blog and return for more.

If you’re not good at writing, plenty of freelancer services are available where you can hire professionals to write content for you.

Once you’ve produced any new content, share and promote it across all your social media pages and send an update to your email list.

If you create evergreen content that isn’t time-bound or has an expiry date, nothing stops you from sharing and promoting this regularly.

Over time, you’ll get an idea of what articles have proved to be the most popular, and you can reshare this content on your social media pages to maximize your online reach.

 

Step 10: Analyze & Refine

Using a professional website builder grants access to an impressive selection of analytical tools to help you monitor your music website’s performance.

Overall traffic to the site can be broken down into which pages are viewed the most and the social media channels that drive more viewers to your site.

You can also discover which other websites are sending traffic your way, giving you further insights into what resources your fans are looking for.

Additional information about visitor demographics, such as the country of origin, can also help you refine and improve your content.

This can assist with organizing promotional campaigns and creating a more effective sales funnel to improve your overall monetization.

You can also check out how well the keywords you’ve used in blogs are performing, for instance, by adding Google Analytics to your website and checking out your competitors.

By updating your site to ensure it is optimized for search engines, you can further drive traffic and help visitors tune in on the content they’re looking for.

 

Free Music Website Templates

With dozens of website builders offering thousands of customizable templates for their customers, knowing where to start looking can be tricky.

While many builders offer all-purpose templates for use in a variety of ways, a dedicated music website builder is optimal for musicians and bands.

For the best selection of free music website templates, we recommend checking out Friday’s free music website templates, as they’re outstanding, in our opinion. 

 

Summary

That wraps up this step-by-step guide exploring how to make a music website to attract new fans, booking agents, and club managers.

Your website should reflect the most up-to-date content you’ve created, so once you’re set-up, make sure you add fresh and consistent content as often as possible.

Having a music website is essential for any musician or band who wants to transition from amateur to professional, making a living from their music while finding more fans.

 

Best Newcomer / Easiest Website Builder
Friday Website Builder

Easily build your own website and online store that's search engine ready with Friday’s intuitive website builder.

Learn More
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

 

What’s your favorite music website? Leave a comment below.

Andy has been producing music since the early days of Cubase and spent much of the 2000s mixing house and techno with his trusty Technics 1200s. Fast forward two decades, you'll find him in his home studio experimenting with the latest music production software, tinkering with Ableton plug-ins, and occasionally trying (and failing) to complete Cuphead for the hundredth time.