A venue booker hears your name and searches for you. What comes up? A Facebook Page you last updated in spring, an Instagram grid with no tour dates, and a streaming profile with no way to reach you. The booker moves on to the next act on the list.
That is the problem a musician website solves. If you want to be taken seriously by fans, press, and the people who hire bands, you need one central place that holds your official information and that you actually control.
Run Your Music Like a Small Business
If you are doing it right, you are already running your music career like a small business. You have a product, which is your songs and your shows. You have customers, which are your fans. You have partners, which are venues, promoters, press, and other artists.
I am Casey Keown, and I run Twin Lakes Web Co. here in Grayson County, Kentucky. A band or solo artist needs what any small business needs from a website: be easy to find, look credible, and keep a direct line to the people who care about your work.
Social Media Is Rented Land
Facebook is still worth having, and you should probably keep a Page there. Instagram and TikTok are where a lot of fans discover new music right now. Keep using them.
Just understand what you have on those platforms. You do not own your followers. You rent access to them. The platform decides how many of your followers see each post, and it can change those rules whenever it wants. An account can be hacked or suspended, and years of work goes with it.
Your website gives you more control. Keep the domain registration in your name, retain access to your hosting, and confirm your rights to the content. Visitors can reach your pages directly without waiting for a social platform to show them a post.
Each channel does a different job:
- Social media is where people get a feel for you day to day and interact with you.
- Your website is the calling card where all official information lives.
- Your email list gives you a portable way to reach subscribers who want to hear from you.
Social buttons on your site should send people to your social channels. Your social profiles should send people back to your site. Each one feeds the others.
What a Musician Website Needs
At minimum, your site should include:
- A clear homepage that says who you are and what kind of music you make
- Your music, playable right on the page
- Videos, both live performance and official music videos
- Upcoming show dates with venue and ticket links
- A short bio and a longer bio
- Press quotes and current press releases
- An email signup form
- A booking and contact page
- Merch, if you sell it
The pages you update most will be show dates, new releases, and new press. Everything else can stay fairly stable. If you want a broader look at page structure, my guide to small business website pages covers the same logic from a business angle.
Mobile matters here more than almost anywhere. A fan might look you up on a phone right after a show. If your site is hard to use on a small screen, you lose them. I cover that in detail in my article on mobile-friendly websites.
Build a Press Page or EPK
An electronic press kit, or EPK, is the digital version of the old one sheet. It gives bookers, journalists, and festival organizers everything they need in one place without digging through your socials.
Your EPK page should include:
- Your best two or three songs
- Live video that shows what you sound like on stage
- Music videos
- A short bio and a long bio
- Press quotes
- Current press releases
- High-resolution photos they can download
- Accurate, dated social and streaming numbers, if they help explain your audience
- Booking contact information
You can keep the EPK page public, or you can leave it out of your main menu and send the link directly to press and bookers. Either way, it should live on your own domain. A clear press-page link is easy to share. Leaving it out of the menu does not make it private, so keep confidential documents elsewhere.
Put Your Music on the Page
Modern browsers can play audio directly with an embedded player. That means a visitor can hear your songs without leaving your site, opening an app, or logging in to anything.
From there, you have options:
- Stream only. Fans listen on your site, and you link out to streaming services for the full catalog.
- Sell downloads. Your site can sell tracks and albums directly, the way the iTunes Store once did, with payment handled through a secure checkout.
- Give music away. Offer a free download, often in exchange for an email address. That trade is one of the best list-building tools a musician has.
Selling directly means the customer relationship stays with you.
Collect Email Addresses From Day One
Instagram followers and Spotify followers are nice. Facebook Likes still carry some weight with people who book shows. But you do not own any of them. When a fan explicitly signs up for your email updates, you have a direct way to reach them. A booking inquiry is not permission to add someone to a newsletter, and text-message marketing needs its own permission process.
Tell subscribers what you will send, make unsubscribing easy, and use an email service that lets you export your list. Track ticket-link clicks and replies instead of judging success only by opens. Email gives you more control over the relationship, but delivery still depends on inbox filtering and the quality of your list.
Put a simple signup form on your homepage and your EPK page.
Set Up Google Analytics First
Some website builders include basic built-in analytics, and they are convenient. I still highly recommend adding Google Analytics. It is free, and it goes much deeper. With the right setup, it can report page visits, traffic sources, engagement time, and selected actions such as ticket-link clicks. It will not automatically record every action, and consent choices or blockers can leave gaps.
That tells you what your fans actually care about and which platforms send you the most traffic.
On most custom sites, Google Analytics has to be added manually. Set it up before you launch so you have data from the first day. My guide to small business website analytics walks through what to track and how to read it.
Reach Your Website Visitors Again With Facebook Ads
If you plan to run Facebook or Instagram ads, ask your developer about visitor tracking and retargeting. These tools need a deliberate setup that respects visitor choices, platform requirements, and applicable privacy rules.
The goal is to reach interested listeners again when you release music or announce a show. Do not assume every visitor can be identified or reached. Start with a clear campaign goal and budget, then decide whether advertising tools are worth adding to your site.
Pick a Domain That Sounds Like You
Your domain is your address, and you own it for as long as you keep renewing it. A .com is still the safest choice, but musicians have more creative options than most businesses.
Extensions like .fm, .stream, and .online are all available for music-focused names. I use Cloudflare as my registrar. Cloudflare Registrar sells domains at cost, which means you pay what the registry charges without a markup. One catch: your domain has to use Cloudflare for DNS, which is also where I manage mine.
Before you buy any specialty extension, check the renewal price, not just the first-year price. Some extensions are cheap to register and much more expensive to renew. My article on choosing a domain name covers what to look for, and my guide on who owns your website explains why the domain should always be registered in your name.
Use a Professional Email Address
Booking inquiries from a free email account look less credible than booking@yourbandname.com. A professional email address tells a venue or journalist you are serious.
I use Google Workspace for professional email. If you are considering it, ask me how to save 10% on your first year of an eligible Google Workspace plan. I can check the current offer and eligibility before you sign up. I may receive a referral reward if you subscribe through my referral.
Here is how my own setup works. My Workspace account handles my Gmail inbox. For twinlakesweb.com, I use Cloudflare Email Routing, which forwards every message sent to an address at that domain straight into my Workspace Gmail. I am not affiliated with Cloudflare. I use it because it works. For a band, forwarding can bring booking, press, and general inquiries into one inbox. Receiving forwarded messages does not by itself configure replies from those addresses. Set up authenticated sending separately and test the address a venue sees when you reply.
Host Your Site and Audio Without a Huge Bill
Audio and video files are large, which is where hosting costs can surprise musicians.
Cloudflare Pages hosts static websites and is well suited to a fast musician site. On the free plan, a site can include up to 20,000 files, with a maximum of 25 MiB per individual file. That limit matters if you plan to host full-length WAV files, which can easily exceed it.
Cloudflare R2 is object storage for larger media libraries. The free tier currently includes:
- 10 GB-month of standard storage per month
- 1 million Class A operations, such as writes and lists, per month
- 10 million Class B operations, such as reads, per month
- No egress fees for data transferred out
That last point is the big one. Many storage services charge every time someone downloads or streams a file. R2 does not charge egress fees, but storage and request charges can still apply above the free allowances. Other services in your setup may also have charges.
Compare the full hosting terms, including commercial use, storage, requests, and support. GitHub Pages restricts sites primarily focused on commercial transactions, so do not assume it is suitable for your music store. My article on small business website hosting explains the tradeoffs in more detail.
Free tiers change, so confirm current limits with the provider before you commit.
DIY or Hire Someone?
A template builder is a reasonable first step for some artists. Hiring help pays off in the details that are easy to get wrong: a fast mobile layout, a real EPK page, an email signup connected to your list, appropriate analytics and advertising tools configured correctly, music players tested on common phones, and a domain and hosting setup you actually own. If you are weighing the cost, my guide to small business website costs lays out what drives the price.
Let's Build Your Musician Website
Whether you are a Grayson County bluegrass band, a worship leader, a cover band working weekend shows, or a songwriter recording in a spare bedroom, you deserve a website that makes you look as good as you sound. I live here, I work directly with every client, and I build sites you own from the domain up.
If you are ready for a musician website that holds your music, your shows, your press kit, and your fan list in one place, request a quote and tell me about your project.