Musician Website Quick Fix #4: Make it easy to listen to your music

January 11, 2012

Musician Website Quick Fix #4: Make it easy to listen to your music

Another quick improvement you can make to your website is to make it easy for people to listen to your music. First time visitors should be able to sample your music in one, easy, and obvious click. Sound like common sense? Well, I can honestly tell you that from 4 years of booking bands at a music venue, I had essentially given up going to band websites to hear music and simply used profiles at Myspace or Bandcamp pages instead. It was often difficult to find full songs to listen to on artist websites, and with limited time, I went to the one place I knew I could hear music easily.

Make a first impression: Music to listen to, not only purchase

Keep in mind that a lot of your traffic is from people who aren't your fans yet. Maybe they’ve heard about you. Maybe one of their friends posted your website somewhere. Maybe you’re opening for a band they like and they want to decide if you’re worth showing up early for. Think of them by putting your best track right there, at the top of your homepage in high bitrate glory (good sound quality). A good video? Even better. That way you’re grabbing their viewing as well as their listening attention.

All too often music pages only have music for sale that at best offer 30-60 second sample clips. Sometimes there is only music available to purchase with no music samples at all, or worse yet, only links to external sites to purchase music, with no music available on the site whatsoever. You should definitely have your music for sale on your website, but make sure to also have at least 1 or 2 songs people can listen to, from start to finish, so they can get a good taste of what your music is all about.

Make it clear where to listen to your music

Once your music is available to listen to on your site, make it very easy for people to find it. Again, best thing to do would be to have a music player right on your homepage. You can also use a site-wide music player that can continue to play while people surf the different sections of your site. Once they start listening, having a “playlist” of your best songs that keeps playing is definitely better that forcing them to hit “play” for each track (because chances are, they won’t).

Speaking of the different sections of your website, “Music” should be in the main menu of your website. Again, this sounds like common sense, but there are still too many websites that either try to be fancy with sections like “Experience” or “Discover”, or have the music buried within another section of the site like “Media” or “Press”. You might only have that person’s attention for a minute (maybe less), so make it clear right on the main menu where they can find your music.

Your website is your hub, give people every reason to stay

Your website is your hub, and you should have everything available on it, including full songs to listen to. If your fans can listen to your songs on Facebook, Myspace, music blogs, etc., then they should be able to listen to them right on your website, which is where you really want fans to spend their time.

This way, they can stick around, listen to your music, look at your photos, read your blog posts, and hopefully sign-up to your newsletter or shop in your online store. If you don’t have any music for them to listen to while they’re on your site, they might leave and go to your Facebook page (or your rarely updated Myspace page), or worse, just leave your site and move onto something else entirely to pass the time (like watching an epic battle between a puppy and a robot).

Do you have your music available to listen to on your website? Is it easy to find? We’re always looking for nice websites, feel free to post your links in the comments below to show off how you display your music on your site.

Previous Website Quick Fix posts:

Musician Website Quick Fix #3: Focus on one Call-to-Action

Musician Website Quick Fix #2: Lose the Intro Page

Musician Website Quick Fix #1: Turn off auto-start music

★ Posted by DaveCool on January 11, 2012 | 14 comments ★

Comments

Posted by ClaytonWatson on January 11, 2012

Sounds like you recommend the site wide player to "Auto Start" then? Thanks

Posted by seanwright on January 12, 2012

Dave, thanks for the insights, so logical and obvious, and a must for muscians everywhere running their own site.

Posted by IBBC on January 12, 2012

Good stuff DaveCool. I agree with everything you said. www.ittybittybeatclub.com

Bandzoogle admin

Posted by DaveCool on January 12, 2012

Thanks guys, glad you enjoyed the post.

@Big Clayton: I wouldn't personally recommend auto-start for your music player, but I would recommend having the site-wide player available on the site. Btw, there's a good debate about auto-start on a previous Quick-Fix post:

Musician Website Quick Fix #1: Turn off auto-start music

Cheers,

Posted by davinarobinson on January 12, 2012

Always read Bandzoogle blogs with great interest; always looking to improve the site. Would be grateful for some feedback on my site. Thanks!

Posted by Sha_King on January 17, 2012

Hey DaveCool great info as always. I am always trying to learn new ways to better my site, so take in all the info you guys offer. My site is www.sha-king.com can you guys give me some feed back? Thanks I appreciate it. Keep up the good work.

Posted by AndrewRosciszewskiCo on January 18, 2012

Hi Dave

another nice article.... Now I'm starting to wonder if my music is too hard to find.
Thoughts?

http://andrewrosciszewski.com/home.cfm

thanks

Posted by markclear on January 19, 2012

Good advice. I'm allways on the hunt for new music. So I end up going to msypace or bandcamp
as many band website's don't make it easy to find/listen to their tracks. The 30 second sample
allways sucks too.

Posted by markclear on January 19, 2012

Posted by BROFRED on January 19, 2012

Hello all. I hope i posted this in the correct place. My name is Fred. I am a spoke word artist (KING) here in Atlanta. I am finally going to have my first cd/listening party and wouldl ove input as to how to make it a most successful one. I have questions such as do I provide food/drink or allow the supporters to purchase their own from the hosting restaurant? I kinda feel like I shouldnt charge for entry if they are buying the cd. honestly guys i really dont know alot about this since it is my first one. I will continue researching, but any input from the BandZoogle family would be great!
Fred
www.thekingstruth.com
king@thekingstruth.com
Thanks Bandzoogle!!!

Bandzoogle admin

Posted by DaveCool on January 19, 2012

@Davina & Sha_King : Thanks for the kind words! If you post a message on the "Website critique" forum, you should get some good feedback about your site there.

@AndrewRosciszewskiComposer: I will admit, I found it a bit hard to find your music, and when I tried listening to it, I was directed to purchase the wimpyplayer. I would suggest using the Bandzoogle music player or embedding music using Soundcloud.

@markclear: Thank you sir, appreciate the kind words!

@BROFRED: I would recommend posting the question in "The Biz" forum here on Bandzoogle, where you can get a discussion going with other members.

As always, thanks for the feedback everyone.

Cheers!

Posted by AndrewRosciszewskiCo on January 22, 2012

Hi Dave,

I tried (and wrestled with)the bandzoogle music player for a while and unfortunately it isn't set up the way I would like to use it. I may look into soundcloud though.
I see the confusion with the wimpy player (as it is a demo if you click it too far at the top it brings you to the wimpy page) were you able to get the music to play at all?

Andrew

Bandzoogle admin

Posted by DaveCool on January 23, 2012

@Andrew

Yes, after a few tries I clicked the link properly for it to play the music, very nice indeed!

As for the Bandzoogle player, what would you change about it?

Cheers,

Posted by AndrewRosciszewskiCo on January 24, 2012

well, I took your advice and tried out the soundcloud. Not exactly what I wanted but a little more flexible than the bandzoogle player and cheaper (i.e. free) than the wimpy player.

There really isn't anything wrong with the bandzoogle player, but I'm using the website to promote my classical music so I would like to have the audio files either right next to or right under the composition or movement title.
(Which is why I liked the idea of the wimpy player - the player was directly next to the movement you wanted to sample.)

Using the bandzoogle player (since you can only have 1 per page), I had to scroll down to see the list of compositions and then scroll all the way back up to sample the movement or piece that I wanted.

Does that make sense?