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Web Publishing 101 for Musicians

So, you're in a band. Did you notice that record companies don't care about you unless you're a teenage dance-harmony, neo-rap-metal, or "alternative" guitar pop band? An alternative to selling your soul to a big nasty record company is to publish your own music online. Unfortunately, many bands screw this up because they don't know much about the culture of the web, and/or because they get distracted by the technology of the web. The grassroots-friendly culture will definitely help you sell CDs and get new fans; the technology can too, but only if you use it as a tool instead of a toy.

Why have a web site at all?

Unless you're already being promoted heavily by a record company, it's hard for current and potential fans to find out about you and your gigs and to buy your music. A web site is an excellent way to reach a worldwide fan base. You just have to do a few things.

What you should do

First of all, remember who the audience for your web site is. It is not the band. It is not the person you know who designs web sites (if you're not doing it yourself), nor is it a prospective future employer of the person you know who designs web sites. The primary audience for your web site is your current and prospective fans. A secondary audience (if you're lucky) might be a nice, friendly record label who wants to help distribute your music while giving you a fair deal. If you find one, tell them to say hello to Bigfoot and the Easter Bunny for you. :)

This means that you have to design your web site to satisfy the needs of your fans. They have specific goals in mind and you have to make a web site that satisfies those goals, and avoids doing anything that gets in the way.

As a music fan who has been to many good and bad band web sites, I can tell you what those goals almost always are:

  • Hear a sample of the band's music
  • Find out when the band is playing at a local venue
  • Buy the band's CD's online
  • Learn more about the band members and the history of the band
  • See pictures of the band members
  • See the bands's videos (playing live, or music videos
  • Read news about the band - notes from on the road, thoughts about music in general, etc.

Here are some things that aren't goals for users of your band's web site:

  • Installing new software on their computer (so they can see your web site)
  • Figuring out how to use obscure icons or symbols to navigate the web site
  • Getting a headache reading text because of your web site's color scheme

What this means is, your web site should be clear and simple, and it shouldn't let form get in the way of function. Save the artistic urges for your music and for your CD liner art. If someone else is doing your web site, don't let them use Flash, and don't let them go crazy with graphics or abstract symbolism or color schemes that make your site unreadable. (Also, don't let them add background music to the web site. If users want to hear music they will download it deliberately. I have never gone to a web site with background music without being annoyed, especially because it usually makes the page take longer to load.)

A good band web site has these major sections:

  1. Home Page
  2. Tour Dates
  3. Downloadable Music
  4. News
  5. Online Store
  6. Announcement Mailing List
  7. Band Bio
  8. Pictures and (maybe) Videos
  9. A Guestbook, Discussion Board, or Public Mailing List

More details about each of these sections follows below. Basically, your web site should have these sections, and really nothing else. If you need to show off your graphics skills, or your web designer / Flash skills, go set up separate web site for that stuff. This is about getting your music out there and selling tickets and CDs (and maybe some T-shirts too). If you want to create a "total experience" of what the band's about, sell some CD's and make a music video. Don't make your fans wander through an online artistic puzzle if all they want to do is give you some money for a CD or find out when you're playing nearby.

  1. Home Page. This is the first page you see. This should clearly identify the band's name. Good things to add include:
    • A photo of the band
    • A link to buy the latest CD
    • A note that this is the official web site of the band
    • A clearly labelled set of navigation links to the other major pages of the site (see below)
    The home page should not have so much information on it that you have to scroll and scroll and scroll to see it all. That's what the other pages are for. Basically all you want to do is have a simple first page that says what band it is and where to click to see the rest of the info you have on the web site.
  2. Tour Dates. If you have fans, they will want to know when and where they can see you play. As soon as you find out about a new gig you should update the web site that day, or as soon as humanly possible. Fans shouldn't have to keep checking the web site, either, because they probably won't remember to do so. Combine your upcoming gig schedule with the mailing list so that you tell your fans when you're going to be playing in their area. If they don't want to know they wouldn't have signed your mailing list, so don't be bashful. It's amazing, if you actually tell your loyal fans when you're playing, they show up. If you keep your gigs a secret they don't come. So many bands get this wrong, and it's really irritating to sign up as a fan for a mailing list and then see on the web site six months later that a month ago, they played in your town and they forgot to tell you, so you didn't go. Tell your fans about your gigs!
  3. Downloadable Music. This is the big one! This is how you get new fans and sell CDs without touring, without radio play, and without a record contract. The most popular format for downloadable music is MP3. Don't put all your songs up in CD-quality form (see below for what this means) or people will have no reason to actually buy the CD anymore. Instead, you can do one of three things:
    1. Post only a couple of songs from each CD, but make them full CD quality MP3 files. That way, folks have to buy the CD to get all the songs.
    2. Post partial clips of a couple of songs from each CD, but make them full CD quality MP3 files. Again, folks have to buy the CD to get all the songs, but they don't really even get a single whole song, so if you have a popular single they won't just be able to download it and skip buying the CD.
    3. Post full or partial clips as lower-than-CD-quality MP3 files. You might not want to do this because you don't want potential fans to think you really sound like that on the CD.
    4. "Stream" full clips of a few songs in some kind of streaming audio format. "Streaming" is an alternative to downloading, and it works somewhat like radio does. The server (your web site) sends the audio file and the user's computer plays it as it arrives, never saving it. Streaming has one advantage and a lot of disadvantages. The advantage is that users don't actually ever have the whole audio file on their computer, so they can't keep listening to it over and over. The idea is that people will want to buy the CD in order to get a copy of the song which they can keep. Unfortunately, there are programs which defeat this form of copy-protection by just saving the data as it arrives in a format such as MP3. The disadvantages mainly come from the fact that most people have internet connections with limited bandwidth, so the sound quality is limited by how fast their internet connection is. Usually this results in very low-quality audio. The companies that make streaming audio products have worked hard over the years to improve their technology, and this means that they are always updating their audio file format and streaming player software. This leads to the other major problem with streaming, which is that even though users may have an old version of the audio player, they often have to upgrade their software so they can hear audio files in the latest and greatest format. That means that in order to listen to your 30 second clip or 4 minute song, they have to first go to some other web site and download some software and install it, and then they have to try to play your clip again. Worse, since internet traffic comes and goes, the streaming player has to keep a "buffer" of audio data ahead of where it's playing or else it will skip, somewhat like a good portable CD player does. There is usually a lag time of 10-20 seconds when starting a streaming audio file while the player collects enough data to fill its buffer, and in my experience (with a very fast DSL internet connection) streaming files often skip anyway. Finally, streaming is technically complicated to set up and possibly as a result, on a lot of the web sites I've been to which offered streaming media, the streaming media wasn't actually working. You could click the link but the player said the audio file wasn't there, or it couldn't connect, or something else was wrong.
    By now you've probably gotten the impression that I don't like streaming. If so, you're right. I recommend option #2: post partial clips of a few songs in full-CD-quality MP3 format. The MP3 file format hasn't changed in years, and pretty much everybody with a decent computer and an internet connection has an MP3 player and knows how to use it. By the way, when I say "full CD quality", technically I mean that you use the settings 128Kbps, 16bit 44KHz sampling rate, stereo when making the MP3 files. That's not exactly CD quality but it's so close that most people use those settings for making MP3s for personal listening or sharing.

    MP3 files are much bigger than web pages so you may need to put them somewhere other than on your main web site. This is OK, but if you use a free MP3 service like MP3.com to publish your MP3s, make sure to check on them to make sure they're still in business. Some of these companies have gone under lately, so they aren't publishing anything for anybody. On a related note, no matter how you choose to do it, there's a really big mistake that lots of bands make: their downloadable files don't work! The actual audio files aren't there (somebody forgot to upload them, or named them one thing and linked to them under a different name), or the streaming server is not working, or whatever. The point is, make sure to TEST your downloadable audio files from a computer other than the one on which you created the web site. Even better, put an "email the webmaster if this doesn't work" link on your downloads page so that if you didn't catch it, your fans can still tell you it's broken.
  4. News. Are you recording a new album? Are you opening for a famous band when they tour in your area? Your fans like you and they want to know what's going on. Why aren't there any gigs this summer? Did you just win an award? Did someone in the press write a nice article about you? Copy it to (or link to it from) your web site! You are the #1 source of info about your band for your fans. Keep them informed. They will send you e-mails congratulating you on your award, asking you to tour in Belgium, or telling you to put out a live album. The more you share the more connected your fans feel, and the more likely they will be to buy your CDs, tell their friends about you, and come see you when you play in their area. Update this part of your site often! It's really disappointing to see a band's web site which says "we'll be starting our 1999 tour soon, check back for dates". People really do read your web site news, so keep it up to date. Also, you should preserve the old news - don't just delete it when you update the site. Make it possible for a fan to read all the news you have ever posted to the site.
  5. Online Store. You want to sell CD's, right? Well then you'll need an online store. There are a zillion companies which will do this for you, and they will charge you a small fee on each sale. There's no need to do this yourself. Make sure you take credit cards, make sure your online store uses SSL security so your customers' credit card numbers are safe, and make sure there is an email address (and maybe even a phone number) which customers can contact if they have a problem. It might be a good idea to sell other stuff, like T-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. There are companies which will let you upload a JPEG image to their web site, and from that they will make all sorts of merchandise on demand (as needed to fill orders) using that picture. CafePress is one such company. Ta daa, band sweatshirts in the online store! Sweet.
  6. Announcement Mailing List. This is very important. By "announcement mailing list" I mean a one-way mailing list which lets you send your subscribers an email once in a while, but which doesn't let subscribers send messages to other subscribers. This is how to tell your fans it's time to come to a gig or to buy a CD. They want to, they just won't come to the web site every day to see if it changed. Telling people to check back frequently doesn't work. Unless you have something new and interesting to see every couple of days, people will come back very infrequently. So you have to use your mailing list to tell them when something interesting has happened. You could just have a new bit of band news to share, or you could have a new CD or gig. If you're worried that people might get annoyed, make one mailing list for gigs and CD's, and another for news, so fans can sign up for what they want. But above all, be sure to use your mailing list to promote your gigs and CD's! Your fans want to give you money; you just have to tell them where to see you and how to buy your latest CD.
  7. Band Bio. This is optional but hey, aren't all artists somewhat narcissistic? Seriously, fans want to know more about you and how you came to make all this cool music. Tell them how you picked your band's name. Tell them the history of your band. Tell them about lineup changes. Tell them about all your wierd instruments. Tell them how you used to play tuba in high school band before you decided to master the electric triangle. List awards and positive comments from the press, if you are fortunate enough to have them. Show a couple of photos of individual band members.
  8. Pictures and (maybe) Videos. This is optional but lots of fun. Surely, you have lots of pictures from pro or amateur band portraits, live performances, and practices, right? Show fans the picture of the time you set your electric triangle on fire on stage. If you can, add a video clip or two or three. It can be tricky to offer video because it's even bigger than audio and so there are bandwidth issues on the user and server side of things. Again, take time to periodically make sure it still works. Good formats to use are Quicktime and MPEG. Windows Media Player (.avi format) only works on Windows, so any Mac-using fans won't be able to see the videos. I recommend Quicktime because it works on Windows and Macs and has some higher-quality, smaller file formats than MPEG. I also recommend that you don't bother with streaming (see my audio streaming notes above) because the quality of streaming video is always horrible.
  9. A Guestbook, Discussion Board, or Public Mailing List. This is optional as well. This can be cool because you're providing a means for your fans to talk to each other. Just read what they say about you and you can learn a lot. Even better, answer their questions! If you set this up you should commit to having at least one band member read the messages at least once a week and answer them. It's pretty lame for a band to set up a mailing list about themselves and then not even bother to join it or read what's said on it.

Things to do once your web site is up and running

  • Update it with tour dates and band news.
  • Test your downloads and online store links to make sure they still work.
  • Read the webmaster email, the band email, and the guestbook / discussion board / public mailing list messages.

It ain't rocket science... just keep the news & tour info up to date, make sure it works, and respond to your fans' messages. Don't leave an outdated, broken web site out there with fans' messages asking you questions! It makes it look like you broke up or don't care about your fans, or both.

Conclusion

Your band's web site is there to sell albums and concert tickets, and to build a community of fans. It's not there to help your web designer friend get work by showing off. You have to update your tour info and communicate with your fans. If you do this they will become loyal fans and give you money and tell you how cool you are. If you ignore them or baffle them with animated junk or an inscrutable site design they will ignore you, and will not tell you how cool you are. You decide which one you prefer. :)

- Jamie 10/29/2001