iTunes Chart-Toppers (a/o February 21st):
#music, #artistadvice
This started as a comment on a Digital Music News story last month, has since been reposted on a number of blogs, and is still getting re-tweeted. It was authored by Constantine Roussos of .music, whose startup is pushing to create and develop the .music domain extension. The top 16 reasons...
1. You own your website.
2. You are branding your artist/band name - not a third party website.
3. You never know if that third party website will exist in the future or be as relevant. What happens to all that work that you put into the third party to help them create THEIR brand not yours (eg, MP3.com shutting down)? How much time was devoted by artists on MySpace the past 5 years? All your "friends" left and unless you captured their email through your official site, then you are in trouble.
4. 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
5. It is a long-term strategy.
6. Visitors to your website have a much higher sales conversion ratio than third party sites.
7. You control all the content and brand image.
8. You portray professionalism. Would anyone in the press take you more seriously if you had a website - versus not having one? First impressions count.
9. 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
10. Flexibility: you can create polls and add any programming, widgets or any modules of your choice without being limited to third party restrictions.
11. You have no fear of being deleted because you are being too "commercial".
12. You can own your shopping cart and keep more profit for your sales.
13. You can add your own advertising and sponsors on your page.
14. You can offer product bundles and competitions for your fans.
15. You can build credibility with your fans, create a fan club area for your superfans as well as dedicated message boards to interact with your fans.
16) 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 Starbuck coffees a year?
Comments Closed
Visitor Friday, September 17, 2010
how does this relate to print advertising? for example, i see some companies including their Facebook URLs in print ads. should this be avoided?
NathanJE Friday, September 17, 2010
yeah, good q in my opinion. I think that it really depends: is your website url horribly long (best you could get) - like crusherthebandphilly.com or something like that? then don't put it on a poster. maybe you have facebook.com/crusher so that's better.
but I think the bigger point is: embrace the ecosystem not just a website. It's not that what was being said here is wrong, just that you should have everything, and make everything talk to every other thing. And make smart decisions in each case - it's not bad to direct people to fb if you're gonna get more traffic that way.
@sureshk2n (Twitter) Friday, September 17, 2010
Artists what do you think?
@fjfonseca (Twitter) Friday, September 17, 2010
Great points being made here.
bjza Friday, September 17, 2010
The website is essential. Speaking as an artist, it's for all the reasons above. Being social and engaging with fans is important, but your site is where people should be able to find relevant information without digging through the constant scroll of social media feeds.
Speaking as someone who books half a dozen shows each month, I don't find the social sites to be good ways to manage promo quality photos, press bio, tech sheets, etc. If I can't find these (and high quality audio samples) within two clicks, I'm most likely moving on to the next email.
@paulgreenberg (Twitter) Friday, September 17, 2010
Make sure you control your own brand.
@HBSmktg (Twitter) Friday, September 17, 2010
As social media embeds itself more deeply, some say no point in having a co. website. 16 reasons not to jump ship.
Carl Jacobson Friday, September 17, 2010
Here at Nimbit we believe having your own website and a presence on social media sites are both important.
The author really summarized the benefits to your own site very nicely in this article. Social networking sites are important resources for the discovery of new music, so you definitely want to be there too, but they're not really the best place to base your entire brand presence.
Maintaining all of these online presences can be time-consuming, which is why a comprehensive direct-to-fan platform that pulls it all together is important. That's what we provide at Nimbit, and we have some really big things on that front coming soon.
@CecdeMille (Twitter) Friday, September 17, 2010
this is a no-brainer for artists & the like
Constantine Roussos (.music) Friday, September 17, 2010
Thanks Paul for the article,
I am glad many have found the points useful. I think it is imperative that artists have official websites.
I have posted 20 reasons to have your own website on MusicThinkTank and my blog. We received a lot of useful comments and would love to get more feedback on the .music domain name and the issue of official websites. The article link is:
Why the music industry needs a .MUSIC official website domain name
Constantine Roussos
The Album Project Saturday, September 18, 2010
All irrelevant. A band needs to own their own domain name and publish that places, but they can have that redirect to myspace or bandcamp or facebook or whatever is the popular thing/best thing to use at the time.
A band doesn't need to need to be able to code or spend high amounts of money to keep up a site.
http://thealbumproject.net
@Valleyarm (Twitter) Monday, September 20, 2010
Shying away from your own artist website? Here's 16 reasons to convince you otherwise.
Jackie Henrion Tuesday, September 21, 2010
It seemed to make sense from the very beginning to have my own website primarily to control my own brand, be nimble with updates and avoid the blinding ad blinkers. So I found my way with iWeb despite the cluck clucks about it being non-commerce oriented. But the real discovery is that recently I just installed new software from LicenseQuote that allows me to directly sell and license all my own music from my website. The quality of play is pretty darn good at 320k mp3s and I can control all the aspects of what is played, downloaded (wav or aif) and what people pay for my music. While keeping the entire revenue stream. For the overly long url's I use tiny cc's.
Street Spirit Thursday, September 23, 2010
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