Archimedia Studios is a huge advocate for bands and musicians having official websites. We maintain that a professionally designed website must serve as the foundation (hub of a wheel) in any Internet marketining or branding strategy for a musician or band with the many social media outlets (the spokes of the wheel) deployed to aggregate fans to your website. Social media is a great way to update your fans, but with Facebook’s current news feed algorithm and Twitter being updated nearly every .0000001 seconds, your updates are likely to go unnoticed if your fans are not online at the exact moment that you publish the update. And even then they are not guaranteed to see it.
Here are our reasons why bands and musicians should have their own websites :
- You own your website. There is no fear of being deleted because you are being too “commercial” or violating any 3rd-party terms of service.
- You can claim your brand on the web and prevent others from taking your name.
- You are creating your own brand equity, instead of relying on 3rd party websites.
- You increase your web exposure.
- You develop a stable presence on the web. You never know if that 3rd party website will exist in the future (MySpace?) or be as relevant. How much time was devoted by artists on Myspace the past 5 years? What would happen to all your email addresses tht were captured, as opposed to capturing fan email addresses through your own official site.
- You control your search engine results. Be ranked #1 for your artist/band name. If you have your own dedicated domain name it is easier and also you can receive search “juice” or “pagerank” to your official page by linking to your official site from social sites as well as others linking to you.
- Building a brand is a long-term strategy.
- Visitors to your website have a much higher sales conversion ratio than 3rd party sites.
- You control your own brand, image, and user experience,instead of relying on what a 3rd party service provides.
- You portray professionalism and legitimacy. Would anyone in the press or in the music industry take you more seriously if you had a website or if you did not have a website? First impressions count.
- You can funnel and aggregate all your social media and widgets in one location, where it is convenient for your fans to find information about you.
- Flexibility. You can create polls and add any programming, widgets or any modules of your choice without being limited to 3rd party restrictions.
- You can own your shopping cart and keep more profit from your sales.
- You can add your own advertising and sponsors on your page.
- You can offer unique product bundles and exclusive contests for your fans.
- You build credibility with your fans as well as can create a fan club area for your superfans as well as dedicated message boards to interact with your fan.
- You can strengthen your online presence by linking to and from all your social media profiles.
- You can add tracking code like Google Analytics to measure your performance and see what parts of your site get the most traffic. Using such metrics can help you measure your site performance and sales, and assist you in making changes to improve your bottom line profitability.
- You can collect emails and create a newsletter designed to keep you in touch with your fans, give them up-to-date news and increase sales. It is more expensive to acquire new fans than to maintain your current following. Recurring sales are integral to your success
- Invest in yourself and not others. Websites are like cheap virtual real estate property. Why wouldn’t you invest in your domain name for only the costs of a few Starbucks a year?