Your website is the one place on the internet you actually own. Every platform profile you maintain sits on rented land, ranked by someone else's algorithm, redesigned without asking you. A website is the version of you that nobody can bury, and for most working musicians it takes one afternoon to get right.
This is the full walkthrough. It covers what a musician website is for, the pages that earn their place, and the fastest honest path to live.
What the site is actually for#
Before picking colors, get clear on who visits. For a working artist there are only three visitors that matter:
- A fan who heard you somewhere and wants more. They need your music, your shows, and a way to follow you.
- A booker or promoter deciding whether to reply to your email. They need proof you are real: photos, a bio, live clips, and past shows.
- Press or a playlist curator on a deadline. They need assets they can lift in one click.
Everything on the site either serves one of those three people or it is decoration.
The pages that earn their place#
A five-page site covers almost every career stage. More than that is maintenance debt.
Home#
One strong image, your name, what you make, and a single obvious action: listen. Resist the urge to put everything here. The home page is a doorway, not a warehouse.
Music#
Embed your releases where people already listen. Link out to every platform, because fans are loyal to their player, not yours.
Shows#
Upcoming dates with ticket links, past dates kept visible. An empty shows page looks worse than no shows page, so if you are between runs, lead with the mailing list instead.
About#
A real bio in three lengths: one line, one paragraph, one page. Bookers copy this text into their listings, so write it the way you want to be introduced.
Contact#
An email address that gets answered. If you have management or booking representation, list who handles what.
The parts people get wrong#
Buying a domain last. Get the domain first, even before the site exists. Your name is a small one-time decision that gets more expensive to fix the longer you wait. If you are weighing whether it is worth it, we wrote an honest rundown of the custom domain question.
Treating the press kit as separate. Your electronic press kit should be generated from the same content as your site, not maintained in a folder that drifts out of date. There is a full checklist in what goes in an EPK.
Skipping analytics. You do not need dashboards for their own sake, but you do need to know whether the Instagram bio link or the Bandcamp page is actually sending people. That is one number, checked monthly.
Send me one link where I can hear you, see you, and read about you. Not eleven.
The honest build paths#
There are three real options, and the right one depends on your time, not your talent.
Code it yourself. Total control, total maintenance. Right for artists who enjoy the craft of it, wrong for everyone who would rather be writing music.
A general site builder. Squarespace and friends make beautiful pages, but you assemble every music-specific feature yourself: tour dates, press kits, and streaming embeds are all manual. We compared the trade-offs in our Squarespace comparison.
A music-first platform. Purpose-built means the tour dates, press kit, and music embeds are features, not projects. On Artistplus you paste a link to your Spotify or SoundCloud profile and the website builder assembles a full site from your actual catalog, photos, and bio. You edit from there instead of starting from a blank page.
Launch is the start, not the finish#
Ship the five pages, then let the site grow with the career: a new release page when you drop, a press section when the coverage arrives, a store when there is merch. A musician website is never finished, and it does not need to be. It needs to be live, current, and yours.