10 Reasons Why You Need A Professional Website To Succeed As Musician Or DJ

With so many musicians, producers and DJs out there, it can be hard to stand out and get booked, so you need some extra effort. Whether your aim is to sell your music online or be known as a professional musician, building your brand both offline and online is necessary.

You may have been doing paid promotions such as Facebook ads or promoted tweets, but you know that as soon as your promotions ends, you are sometimes left with nothing on hand. 

That is because, without a system to optimize your investment, you can’t build something stable that brings you returns from those paid promotions.

Even promoting your fan page, Soundcloud page or promoting your single release on iTunes or Beatport, is really much like paying to promote someone else’s website. This is what happens when you promote a page that does not belong to you. Don’t you find unfair to pay someone to drive traffic to their own website? With the same money, you can promote your own music website on social media platforms and transform the visitors in loyal followers that will be yours forever, using tools that are not available on most social networks, such as newsletters, discount promotions and more.

Plus, consider that social networks have total control over your contents. They can decide to close the website, close your page, ban your posts, without any possibility for you to redeem yourself. No refund is given for the thousands of dollars you spent over years for the damages to your career and for the reputation issues you may then encounter. Sounds ugly, but it has happened to many artists and bands who only rely on social media platforms like Facebook.

In fact, every small effort done to promote a social network channel gets lost in a few days in the thousands of other people’s feeds. With that, you’re really building nothing solid.

Probably with this comparison is easier to understand: using only social media is like putting all your keyboards in someone else’s studio: you don’t have any own music studio and they can use your tools as they want, disappearing without telling you nothing whenever they want to do it.

If you want to build a solid fanbase and create something durable that will last in time, you need to do what most great musician do out there: build your own official music website, showcase your best work, and use all the tools that a website put in your hands.

Here are the top 10 reasons why a professional website can change your music career for the better:

#1. A professional look

To be a professional musician your style needs to stand out. Everything today is about look, design, aesthetics and appearance. Social networks don’t give you the complete tools to really create a custom design, colors and look that speaks about you, your band or your brand towards an online presence.

A website for a musician is like an office for a company: you have a “physical” location where your fans, promoters and club owners can have a global look at all your artistic profile, and decide to follow or book you. And besides, by having a website, people would know that you’re serious about what you do. A musician with an official website? He or she must be a pro, right?

#2. An aggregator of contents for your fans

If you are building a serious crowd of followers, these people always want more from you. They want a place where they can independently search for what they want to find and explore everything.

It could be music releases, podcasts, videos or the list of your gigs, a website is the only place where people can access to all of your contents in a easy & convenient way.
You can create an attractive situation on your website where people who comes just to listen your new track, ends up getting involved in what you do by purchasing a ticket, buying your msuic, booking you for a show or dropping a comment on your website.

If you only rely on social networks, you get these 2 big issues instead.

1. The type of contents which people can consume are limited. (you can’t for example check gigs in the Soundcloud page of an artist)
2. The actions people can do are limited: a post on Facebook can’t be shared on twitter, or people can’t access full contents if they don’t like a page, and it prevents cross-community communications, while a website is basically open for everyone and to everything, maximizing the interaction possibilities and helping you to grow your followers much faster.

Imagine you have a page where you can put podcasts from Mixcloud, tracks from Beatport or Soundcloud, your videos from Youtube and a cool map of gigs. All of that in a single official music page. The experience exploring your music and shows would be much better for your fans if you direct them to your official webpage.

#3 Optimize your promotions

Getting in the charts is a hard task. It requires a big investment of advertisements and communications. But if your advertising campaigns are pointing all to websites that belongs to other people, you are basically giving away free money and free visitors. Your efforts will be nothing more than a drop in the sea.

With a professional music website, you can create Release Pages to showcase new albums. When people land on your website you have the power to keep engaging them in many ways; designing and creating the page to maximize the appeal of the contents, prompt visitors to share your page on social networks, collect comments form the visitors, or ask them to subscribe to your mailing list.

Think about it. Every little promotion you make on your official website is like growing your brand, a brick at a time. With the fan base on your website and mailing list, you can simply send out promotions and offers the next time you have a gig or show.

#4 Build fans and never lose them

As mentioned, it’s important to build something solid. As a musician that means building a fan base and to keep your fan base loyal to you.

A website is the only place where you can do this, for 3 reasons:

1. You can ask people to subscribe to your mailing list (mailchimp integration for example is a very easy way)
2. Fans can follow your RSS feed in many ways, increasing exponentially the readers of your news
3. With the growth of your website, it will gain organic visits by itself, thanks to Google SEO ranking, people’s sharing and much more. Your visits will increase day by day, instead of being limited by the quality of the post that you make in the moment.

#5 Contact fans directly

A very important factor that can please your fans in a genuine way is to establish a contact with your fans. In short, the communication is important between fans, others artists or booking agencies.

Some musicians argue that you can do private messages on social media as well. But think about it. How secure is that? Or perhaps how professional that would be? Besides, how would you know if a competitor tries to ruin your career by creating fake pages of you. Booking agents might be messaging the wrong person instead of you.

By having your own website you make communications easier, by using contact forms that requires probably only 30 seconds to set up (see Contact Form 7 for WordPress for example). With a website, everything comes into your email directly without the need to log in into Facebook or to worry if some messages goes missing. Anybody around the world can message you without becoming a friend first.

You also have the capability to have comment functions on your official website. This can be really handy to keep in contact with your fans and to see what they are really thinking about your music and your act.

#6 Focus on what’s important

Social networks is a mess. Someone visiting a page would be easily distracted by tons of other content, advertisement, messages, notifications and pictures.

When it comes to communication, focus is everything.

For this reason, when you are looking to push your album sales, nothing is better than a nicely design page that speaks and focuses about you and your music. No ads and no distraction on the page.

With your own website, it’s easy to create a space where your art will be the center of the communication, giving an immersive experience to your visitors so they won’t fall into clicking other unrelated things while browsing your music, videos and galleries. This would ensure the focus to be always on you.

#7 Build online reputation

When people tell their friends about you, they may want to do a quick research on Internet to find out who you are.

Imagine a booking agent wants to look for you. All he or she have to do, is to do a quick Google search for your name or your band name and find you on the internet. With a website, you’ll be able rank better on the top pages of Google, so that’s a great plus than just having a Facebook page, which is not optimized for the Google search engine.

A booking agent will only think that you’re not a big act after all, if he or she fails to find information about you on the internet. So always be available.

#8 Save a lot of money in the long term

With your own website, you can increase visitors just by publishing daily new content and suggesting visitors to subscribe to your mailing list.

Once these numbers starts to grow, it will be much more efficient & cost effective to send email messages to your subscribers, rather than reaching out to the same amount of people with paid advertisements.

#9 Make possible collaborations with bigger artists

With a better appeal and a professional presence, who would think that you’re not “big” io “important” enough? It’s easier to get in collaboration with other artist and producers around the world if you have a good branding.

See branding is all about perception. How you portray yourself online would be how people perceive you to be.

Now with a great branding presence, you immediately enter the sphere of the music professionals, demonstrating that you are not fooling around, but only truly committed to the music industry. Looking professional does help open more doors to opportunities.

#10 Judge a book by its cover

They say don’t judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately most people judge a book by its cover. If you music lacks a professional look, the perceived value will decrease drastically.

Get real. No organizer, PR, club or venue can sell a product or act that comes as an unattractive package.

Imagine being at the supermarket. What makes you choose a product on top of the other one? Was it the package or the way it was designed that attracted you into thinking that a particular brand is better than the other?

In the music business, musicians and tracks are basically “products”. You’ll need to make your package attractive and this requires more than just a cool Facebook banner.

Only a professional music website can truly potray a professional and cool look as a package, transforming your act into something that clubs wants to book, work with and resell.

That said, it’s a no brainer to get an official music website up to supercharge your music career.

How To Achieve This

First off, you’ll need content.  Your website needs to be able to showcase your music, photos, gigs and more. You also want to be able to modify it quickly and for no cost when you need to.

Today buidling a site with WordPress is the most obvious solution, as it comes free and you don’t need to know how to code in order to build and maintain a professional and nice looking website. To do that quickly, there are many companies who collaborates with artists, DJs and booking agencies to create WordPress website themes specifaclly crafted for musicians and artists.

If you like something fast to build, check out QantumThemes. They have 2 themes that can automatically import all the releases of a musician, artist or label in just 2 clicks, creating amazing websites within minutes and not hours.

These solutions are widely used and actually being adopted by some of the world biggest professionals, like Bonzai Records, with the cool advantage that you can customize anything, design your own brand and create a professional looking website that speaks about you in just minutes.

In conclusion

As musician, artist, DJ or label owner, a website is definitely one the best investment you can do for your career. By spending no more than 40 or 50 dollars, you’ll be able to get the best of you to be shared professionally to the world , while allowing yourself to save money, reach a wider crowd and build a serious plus professional presence online.

Have always been wondering why successful musicians have their own official websites? Well we’ve explained the reasons. Get to work now and grab yourself an official website.