Create a music website

For musical artists, it’s important to make themselves known to the public. There are many ways of getting your name out there: mobilising your social networks, advertising online and offline, forming partnerships with other artists…

Of all the different ways of doing this, creating your own music website is one of the most interesting in the long term.

However, creating a website is not the best way to promote your music. But it remains interesting.

In practical terms, how and why should you set up a music website if you’re a singer or musician?

Why is it worth creating an artist website in 2022?

The answer is manyfold: opening a space on the Internet allows you to be more visible, to gain notoriety and to build up a fanbase.

If your website is well optimised, you’ll be able to move up the search results and win qualified visitors.

Above all, having an official website makes it easier for fans to follow you and keep up to date with your news. Think of your website as a showcase for your business and your identity: Internet users should be able to see your music, your musical style, your news and your work.

Finally, having your own website means you can collect your visitors’ contact details and put in place other strategies that will raise your profile: this is the case if you want to set up a newsletter or notify your fans of a new release or tour, for example.

In fact, your website is your world. It belongs to you and must perfectly reflect what you want to inspire in your audience. Your music website allows you to stay in touch with your fans and provide them with updates on your career, which is a plus in terms of getting closer to your community.

Is a website enough to promote yourself as a singer or musician?

No, a website alone is not enough to make a name for yourself as an artist. You need to diversify the distribution channels for your music to reach as many people as possible.

This may involve distributing your tracks on music platforms such as Spotify or Deezer, or broadcasting videos on YouTube or social networks. The more visible you are on different channels, the more likely you are to reach new fans. After all, the challenge right now is to get your target audience to discover you: so it’s important to go and find them where they are at the moment.

As you will certainly have realised, even if the website is of great interest in the long term, getting your targets to discover you is not its basic purpose. Creating a music website is more about building awareness, i.e. strengthening your links with an existing audience, and not about visibility, since the vast majority of visitors to your site already know you.

Creating a site for your image: interesting but not a priority for starting out

As you will have realised, creating a website is not a compulsory step when starting out in the music business.

However, if you want to launch a long-term musical career, it’s important to think about your image on the web and to have a professional website.

This will enable you to stand out from other artists and gain credibility with your audience. At this stage, you’ll certainly need to have your website created by a specialist company, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves: your objective right now is to make yourself known.

How do you go about it?

You can mobilise your social networks: this is a good way of creating links, but as with your website, in theory people already know who you are;
Appear at festivals and concerts: you’re more likely to be discovered. However, your exposure remains fairly limited to people who are present and who do not necessarily correspond to your target audience. So what’s the solution?
Promoting your music via online advertising: this is the best way to get your music discovered. You look for listeners where they really are. There are many ways to advertise, both online and offline, but the best way is to make yourself visible where your target audience is.

As you will have realised, all the channels have their advantages, but the most effective way of making yourself known is through online advertising. Please note: we are talking about online advertising, not buying views or fake followers. These are two different things:

Advertising allows you to be visible to your potential audience, who may discover you and follow you in the future.
Fake purchases are essentially used to inflate so-called vanity metrics, i.e. they are useless, especially as algorithms can easily detect them.

So where can you advertise to get the maximum number of listeners?

You can use advertising on Facebook, Instagram or Tik Tok. But in reality, the most interesting thing is to publish your ads where your audience is: on YouTube for the most part.

Advertising on YouTube is still a fairly complex skill to master, which is why, at Red Label Agency, we’ve prepared some ready-to-use offers to help you publish your first ads on YouTube easily.

Using advertising to promote your music gives you an effective first point of contact with an audience that matches your target audience. This audience is defined according to your own criteria, which is very useful for referring interested people to your social networks and your artistic website.

How do you create a website dedicated to promoting your music?

1 - Why do I want to create and what do I want to convey through this site?

Your site is a showcase for your identity, but also for your progress. So you need to see it as a powerful and engaging communication tool for your community.

Vous devez donc le considérer comme un outil de communication puissant et attrayant pour votre communauté.

But the questions you need to answer first and foremost are:

Why create a website?
What do I want to convey through this site?

If you want to become a well-known artist, you will certainly need to invest in your website on a regular and ongoing basis. You’ll need to indicate your tour dates, and perhaps take the opportunity to sell your concert tickets and other goodies directly from your website.

If, on the other hand, you prefer to share your sounds when the mood strikes you, perhaps the investment in your website won’t need to be regular.

Once this is clear to you, it’s important to take care of the visual aspect of your site as well as its content. Your site needs to reflect your personality and musical style to attract the Internet users who are right for you.

Easier said than done, isn’t it?

However, the procedure is not very complicated. Red Label Agency’s experts will take you through all this in the following steps.

2 - Choosing your web host and domain name

Once you’ve answered these questions and have a clear idea of what you want to set up, it’s important to choose the right web host and domain name.

These two elements are essential for creating a quality music website.

Your web host is the company that will keep your site online at all times.
Your domain name, the name of your site, which also serves as an identifier (for example: google.fr)

To choose your web host, take the time to compare the different offers and choose the one that best suits your needs. You can turn to hosting providers such as OVH (international leader) or O2Switch (French leader), for example.

Hosting a website also gives you access to a database, where all the data for your site will be stored. You can subscribe to a basic package as part of a music website. Even if you have to change later, the transition is not very complicated.

Then, when it comes to the domain name, choose one that reflects the name of your artist or group. It must be easy to remember and spell so that web users can easily find you on the web.

Your domain name consists of your band/artist name and an extension (.fr, .com, .org…). We advise you to choose .fr if you want to stay on a national scale and .com if you want to shine internationally in the future.

You can buy your domain name at the same place as your hosting, which makes the process easier.

3 - Choosing your CMS

You can create your website using code if you like, but to be honest, it’s often a waste of time. Today, there are a number of platforms, known as CMS (content management systems), that make it easy to create your website. WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal: to choose the one that best suits your needs, you can compare the different functions offered by each CMS.

Then install the CMS of your choice on your web server and start designing your site.

In fact, we strongly advise you to create a site on wordpress.org, as it is the most developed and free CMS. You’ll find a multitude of tutorials for all your WordPress-related questions, which will make your life much easier. On top of that, WordPress can be manipulated at will because it is open source, which is not the case with other CMS.

4 - Choosing your theme

Once you’ve installed your CMS, it is important to choose a theme that matches your image and artistic style.

There are many free and paid themes available on the web.

Take the time to compare the different themes before choosing the one that suits you best.

Don’t worry: you can customise the colours, fonts and layout of your site on your theme.

Once you’ve installed your theme, you can customise your website to suit your tastes. WordPress has a specific interface for this:

Go to Appearance > Customise and explore the options available to you for modifying the look and feel of your website.

5 - Installing the relevant plugins

Plugins are add-ons that add extra functionality or protection to your WordPress site. There are many free and paid plugins available on the web, each with their own uses, but you should concentrate on the following plugins:

Yoast SEO, All In One SEO or SEOpress for your search engine optimisation
WP Rocket to improve the speed of your website
Wordfence Security or WP Cerber for website security
WPS Hide Login to add another connection URL (by default, you must connect to the URL https://votrenomdedomaine.fr/wp-login/). The purpose of this plugin is to modify the wp-login to limit malicious attempts to connect to your website.
Akismet Anti-Spam to limit unwanted comments
Woo-commerce if you want to turn your site into an e-commerce shop for your concerts or merchandise. Be careful though, we’re getting into the complex here.
Elementor or Divi if you prefer, which are theme builders (see next point)

With this base of plugins, your site will already be well configured so that you can use it fully and safely.

6 - Creating content

To create content on WordPress, you can either create articles or pages. Articles are intended to be published on your blog (news) and pages are intended to be published on your site (fixed pages on your site, such as your home page or music pages).

To create a post or page, go to the “post” or “page” tab on your WordPress dashboard, then click on “Add a new post” or “Add a new page”.

To create interesting content, you’ll need to think about adding text, headlines, images and perhaps videos or audio tracks to share your sounds and clips.

If you’re working on the basic WordPress interface, you’re pretty limited in terms of what you can add and create on your layout. To fill this gap, you can download a theme builder, such as Elementor or Divi, which will allow you to customise the layout of each of your pages and posts as much as possible.

On the other hand, it adds complexity to learning how to use these theme builders. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to invest time in learning these extensions.

7 - Putting sounds online

Your website serves as a virtual business card for your audience. To boost your impact with your target audience, you need to offer them what they are looking for above all else: your music or melodies.

You can integrate your sounds directly into WordPress using a number of free and paid plugins.

Among the plugins that will allow you to easily add your music to your site, we recommend extensions that offer an attractive visual and a pleasant user experience:

The basic “Audio” function in WordPress does the job, but it will only show you a simple audio track, with little potential for customisation, so ;
AudioIgniter. It’s already more appealing in terms of visuals, and also very easy to use. AudioIgniter is in freemium version, but you already have enough interesting features in the free version.
ZoomSounds, the highly customisable extension. This plugin is not free ($20), but it allows you to integrate audio and video, while customising its appearance so that the track fits in better with the design of your website.
Integrating a YouTube video is also an option if you simply want to showcase your clip, but the visuals will be less authentic.

Above all, don’t skip this stage, because visitors to your website want to know more about your business and your products.

8 - Connecting your social media

Highlight your social profiles directly on your website to make it easier for your visitors to subscribe. It’s also a good way of linking your different profiles on the web.

The more you link your various media together, the more you will consolidate a coherent marketing strategy.

You can even embed your latest tweets or Instagram posts on your site to take your channel communication even further:

Your visitors see your feed and take an interest in it
They click on it and are sent back to Instagram
They like what they see and subscribe to your page

It’s through atypical journeys like these that you’ll gradually build up your community.

9 - Monetising your image

Your music, tours and concerts are not the only ways of monetising your business. Another way of earning money, through your personality and, in this case, your site, is to sell products based on your marketing.

Your branding can also be used to highlight any spin-off products that might be relevant: clothing or the creation of a clothing brand, goodies and any other items that you can sell based on your image.

Creating a clothing brand, for example, is a very common way of expanding your business as a singer or musician.

To do this, you’ll need to invest some time in Woocommerce, which can be quite complex if it’s not your core business. We advise you to turn to a specialist company or agency at this stage.

10 - Using data to strengthen links with your audience

Once you have data on the visitors to your site, you can target the content you send them. You can find out what they like and don’t like, and you can give them what they want. You can also use website data to improve the overall user experience of the site.

For the time being, you can see this data once you have set up Google Analytics on your website. Google’s documentation on this subject is quite clear and explicit.

A good way of exploiting the traffic on your website is to offer a newsletter: as much for your future releases as to generate novelty, desire and rarity, and to mobilise your fans around your future releases or tours. Remember: if you communicate regularly about a forthcoming project or release, you’re going to generate engagement with your audience, which is very important for solidifying your fan community.

Bonus: Work on your website to increase your visibility

A little more technical but nevertheless very interesting, you can also work on your website to increase your digital visibility. Except this time it’s not for people looking for you in particular, but rather for your style of music, for example.

This is the case for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEA (Google Ads and YouTube Ads).

These two levers enable you to be visible on search engines such as Google and YouTube, either “organically” (i.e. free results) or sponsored.

In both cases, you can invest time (and money) in trying to be visible to other Internet users who might be interested in your music.

Their objective, for referencing on Google for example, is for you to be positioned in the first position for specific keywords.

Of course, as an artist and public figure, when someone types in your stage name or real name, they should quickly find your website. If this is not the case, or if you are not positioned in first place, you may need to make some efforts in terms of referencing your site.

These disciplines are also very complex to get to grips with, and are not a priority. These disciplines are also very complex to understand and are not a priority.

So it’s not a priority here, but it’s still interesting if you want to extend your visibility on the Internet.

Finally, is creating an artist website to promote my music necessary or not?

An artist website can help you gain public exposure, communicate with your fans and sell your music. If you don’t have a website, it’s harder to make yourself known and develop your audience.

In practice, then, we tend to say that a website is desirable for your digital visibility. It’s simple: the more ways your potential audience can find you, the more exposure you’ll get, and the easier it will be for you to build a solid, loyal community over the long term.

Don’t forget that this is not the priority: your objective is above all to be visible where your target is, and not where your audience is looking for you. If you’re just starting out, designing a website isn’t the priority: get involved with social networks, music platforms, advertising and YouTube instead.

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