That’s a yes from us. Sure having 50k plays per month on Spotify and a couple of hundred thousand views on YouTube is great, but you still need to respect the power of your own website.
Why
Look professional
· What do booking managers, promoters and record label staff all have in common? They all look for your website first and foremost. Whilst they will also likely link off to your socials and streaming sites, they will want to get an idea of what you’re all about by checking out your website. This is your space, make the most of it.
· With a professional-looking website, a booking agent is much more likely to get the sense that you are a serious and qualified musician and is in turn more likely to book you for a gig.
Be findable
If you have to tell people to search for you on Facebook, your Facebook really needs to be Facebook.com/yourbandname, and often times, your page URL might just be a number when you first create your page (ie. Facebook.com/89832430934). This adds more work for the searcher as the search results can vary on facebook between other pages, ads and random posts around your band.
We suggest you go with your own domain name which is much easier to tell people to visit and for them to remember. You can also include this domain name on posters, articles about you, youtube clips, etc. Making it easier for people to find you.
Convenience
Create a one stop destination for you to:
· Sell tickets
· Sell merch
· Sell hard copies of your own music (if that’s your vibe)
· Build your mailing list (you own this forever and people rarely change their email address so you can maintain connection)
· Direct people to all your streaming options, socials, youtube channel etc.
Just remember that social media is great, but trends change over time. Don’t forget that there was a time where having a presence on MySpace was important for bands and musicians. A new example of this is Facebook, with getting people to see your posts organically on Facebook becoming more and more difficult due to their new algorithms which reward pages that pay for ads.
Don’t become a victim to a fad, websites will outlast social media, history shows this. Go check out some graveyard Facebook pages that have no posts for 2 years and tell me if you trust the contact details on them?
We’re not saying being active and getting big on social media is a bad thing, quite the opposite, however, the idea is to have both socials AND a website working together, with socials being used to send people to your site so you can have them listen to your music, watch your videos, buy tickets and merch and ultimately become a fan.
Learning
Analytics are becoming more and more important, just as you should check out your numbers on spotify, apple music and youtube to see where listeners and viewers live, where people are coming from to check you out on your website is also important and provides another layer of rich data. We can set you up with detailed analytics to see who is finding you, how and what they’re doing on your site once they arrive there.
Miiesha Case Study
At RooDigital we have been lucky enough to work with Miiesha who when we first met her was finishing her EP / Song Collection (Nyaaringu). She hadn’t played any gigs yet and wasn’t sure how her music would be received. However, she did have a song ready to be added to Triple J Unearthed and thought she better get a website as a place where people could find her.
She is now an aria award winning artist with a record label deal at EMI. But she started from humble beginnings and didn’t have a heap of money to spend from the start, so we organised a monthly rate for her and as she evolved her music and grew her presence in the industry, we worked with her and linked in all her streaming accounts (spotify, apple music and amazon music), her Youtube channel, Instagram and bandsintown accounts.
When she was dropping music, we changed her main slider image and announced the release, as she changed her bio or added professional photography imagery from her shoots that came from her newfound exposure we added them to her site. We pride ourselves on helping our artists that work with us. She continues to grow and next up will be merch on her site. We get the feeling it will sell really well.
But don’t take our word for how important a website is for making an artist findable, Miiesha, as someone who now has 88k monthly streams on Spotify and 280k views on YouTube, has been the feature album on Triple J and won best new talent at the National Indigenous Music Awards 2020, after all that, when you type in her name see what google shows you. Odds are it’s her website that we built. Give it a shot and check out her site via your search or go via this link.
If you want help with your own website get in touch. We can discuss prices depending on the scale of what you’re after.