Creating a music composer website is a great way to showcase your abilities through your past work and showreel. It also creates a presence for you online and helps to build a reputation, as well as allowing potential clients to contact you directly. Not to mention the ability to offer licensing and sales of your music straight from your own website. Overall you want to show that you have delivered high quality work and that you are easy to work with.
If you’ve been wondering, “how do I create my own music website?”, you’re in the right place. In this article we’ll look at some of the most popular platforms to create a website for your music.
Wix
While not designed exclusively for music makers, Wix has many music specific features that make it a great choice. For a start, you don’t need to know how to code to use Wix, but you will still find a lot of functionality. To get an idea of the music oriented templates available at Wix, check out their page here: https://www.wix.com/website/templates/html/music
Wix has its own music player which you can use to showcase your work. If you pick a ‘Business and eCommerce Plan’ you can also sell your music on your website. The lowest priced Wix plan without the ability to sell is the Combo plan at $16/month, while $27/month will get you the basic business plan to accept payments. Note also that there is in fact a totally free Wix plan, but it is very limited in storage space and you cannot remove the ads placed on your site until you upgrade.
Last of all, you can buy your domain name directly within Wix and set everything up from there without needing to worry about complicated hosting and domain arrangements. From our research, Wix comes highly recommended by composers.
Squarespace
With a similar offering to Wix, Squarespace is another great option for composers. While not dedicated to music websites, Squarespace has templates for musicians and its own built-in music player. Check out their tour to see what they offer for composers: https://www.squarespace.com/tour/music-website.
Pricing is also similar to Wix, with a Personal plan starting at $16/month (on the annual plan), going up to $49/month for the Commerce plan. With Squarespace you can start selling direct from your website with their Business plan at $23/month. Be sure to check out the comparison table of features offered, as only the top Commerce plan offers a fully-fledged ecommerce experience to customers. For example, selling subscriptions and allowing customers to recover their cart after abandoning it.
WordPress
WordPress is a solid platform with a long history of facilitating the creation of websites in all areas. It is a content management system (CMS). The simplest way to think about it is as it being somewhere between coding a site yourself and using a Wix style website builder with no coding required.
WordPress is free, but to use it you will need to purchase a hosting plan and domain name separately, and then install WordPress on your hosting. Hosting plans can be as cheap as a few bucks a month, so if you feel comfortable going this route, it can certainly save you some cash. WordPress has thousands of templates available, both free and paid, with many designed for music websites. It also has a huge library of plugins, which you can use to host music on your website and carry out marketing and SEO.
In theory, you don’t need to know any code to use WordPress, but it can sure come in handy. You may find you wish to alter certain aspects of your WordPress site and to do so, sometimes coding is the best way.
Bandzoogle
While Bandzoogle is designed exclusively for musicians, it may appeal more to bands and to those who perform live. As with Squarespace and Wix, you do not need any coding knowledge to create your music composer website on Bandzoogle. The price is very reasonable for the included feature set. In fact, you have the ability to sell your music on any of the plans. The Lite plan is $8.29/month when billed annually. The Pro plan is $16.63/month and includes unlimited pages and tracks, as well as unlimited subscribers to your mailing list.
You can connect up your Bandzoogle website to third party apps like YouTube, Bandcamp and SoundCloud. All plans come with professional email newsletters for you to use with your subscribers. The Lite plan allows a maximum of 100 and the Standard plan 1,000 email subscribers. Reviews for Bandzoogle are very good and you can try out the service for 30 days free at no cost.
Conclusion
Check out the website builders above and see which suits you best. Really, any one of them can work very well, but for the most hands off and glossy approach we would recommend Wix, Squarespace or Bandzoogle. If you are more into coding, remember you can always purchase a domain name and hosting package independently. This way you can create a website to your exact specifications. This can of course be more expensive if you hire designers and coders.
For some useful tips on how to optimize your website, check out Evenant’s guide here: https://evenant.com/simple-ways-to-improve-your-composer-website/. Loading times are an important part of your website. You want to make sure visitors aren’t left hanging while waiting for your content to load.
You can also join in the discussion on MLR here: https://musiclibraryreport.com/forums/topic/app-or-service-to-host-a-music-library/ and here https://musiclibraryreport.com/forums/topic/please-recommend-me-the-best-website-builder-to-show-your-work-as-a-composer/