is necessary to have personal music website? or in these days is social and soundcloud enough?
I am thinking when I finish my first disc if I need music website or just socials.
Is it worth it to own one? the effort and price? or is more waste of money?
(for beginner)
I never visit artist websites I don’t think. I’d prefer them to have a Bandcamp for listening and buying their music. Spotify artist page also
do you listen more on bandcamp or soundcloud usually?
Bandcamp and Spotify. I rarely use soundcloud any more
But soundcloud still hugely popular. It’s full of bots and fake plays though.
Not for me.
I use bandcamp. I have a soundcloud account, but since the bots and fake plays invaded, I dont bother with it any more. I tried Spotify for a while, wasnt worth it deleted my account.
thanks @Microtribe + @muzka I was about to only make soundcloud
I see more academic-minded musicians have websites.
I think Soundcloud is still plenty important in the techno/house scene, but I could be wrong.
For myself, I basically only use Bandcamp and Tidal.
I don’t think it’s necessary either - especially these days - but it does depend a little on your aims.
If you wanted to be a composer and sell your services then having a website could be useful for that - somewhere to showcase your work and a space to market yourself effectively. Similarly if you’re a musician that wants to play at weddings it might make sense to have something similar, as people will be organically looking for these things.
But if your aim is to make and release music I think it’s a waste of energy, focus on building an audience on the socials.
Don’t forget Blast Radio. I find it really exciting for broadcasting impromptu jams and works in progress.
I think having a website is nice. Not many people might look at it, but it can be a nice little side project to do away from all the social mayhem that just shows your voice isolated for what it is, and can be a nice archive or your key stuff independent of other platforms. Maybe not something to do initially but just something to do in the background if u feel u have a need for it.
A website would give you a artist@bandname.com email address too…
If you intend to release physical media then definitely have a website, assuming that you are self releasing, if releasing with a label then the label should have a website.
You might want to check out https://neocities.org/ if you just want a simple, “no bollocks” website.
Also maybe https://linktr.ee/
Your own website is a place to offer something beyond what you can do within the frameworks of social media platforms. It doesn’t force you to think in terms of “albums” or “tracks” and you don’t have to obsess over plays, pageviews or downloads if you don’t want to. Instead you can make your own structure, placing texts, sounds, and imagery side by side.
There are companies that will let you plunk your content into a generic website “form” but you can also make these things by hand. HTML is still very easy if you don’t mind learning a bit having your own style. You can still find Javascript that you can throw onto a page to get a desired function, you don’t need to use CSS if you don’t want to. Ultimately it’s something you control, and if you accept that someone might only visit it once, you open it up to the possibility that they might have to remember you exist and come back to check up on you, to see if anything changed.
The web evolved from individuals making their own presence on the web, with fans making websites for bands in the pre-social-media era, through a period of techno-wizardry and hyper-professionalization, finally to total irrelevance as social media became “the easy way” to stick some images on a page and get them onto people’s eyeballs via a feed. This was known as “push” technology back in 1998, when professionals vowed to change the web from a place of performance and exploration, to a television-like trough where we may scroll, infinitely, into oblivion. But the ability to make a website is still there, and might serve to demonstrate that you have more to say than yet another album, track or scrobbled playlist.
…well, if ur still thinking in “discs”, u defenitly need one…as a shop backend for those few who really wanna purchase a disc from u and maybe add a mech shirt something to their chart on the way out…
in streaming age, u don’t need a dedicated artist page…but still, it’s always good to have, to be honest…even given the fact that only 2 out of 10 will check it out…
but u need an instgram account and keep that fresh…u gotto be be present on all streaming platforms, including utube, run ur own bandcamp profile and have teasers on soundcloud…yes…pretty much a must these days.
or u got the time for rare exclusiveness…all that in ur face promo is getting cheaper and cheaper…u could also take the exact opposite of all that, just drop some rarest info snippets on utube and ig. tickle their intrest in some special way, ur way, so to say, and lead them to ur webspace only…
but that only worx for some genres and truu art beyond fart…usually u just need to be out there, available, like all the others…
but it’s priceless if u find a way to translate, comunicate that ur unique and not at all like all the rest… 
Yes. For me it is necessary to have a personal website.
My website is the repository of over 1000 play-along videos for beginning strings, band and recorder students. My website is hosted by Dreamhost. I haven’t run into any problems with the Gb’s of file transfer and storage I’ve made. I can use convenient utilities like ssh and ftp with my website. I don’t need to rely on some weird gui interface-control-panel. I can remotely perform small edits to my files using the Emacs distribution Dreamhost includes as a shared resource.
The main pages on my website are simple .html tables with a little bit of .css styling. I don’t use an external program to write .html (except for occasionally using emacs-org-html-export). I just do it by hand. No big deal. Tables are considered old-fashioned, but they are perfect for the static information I’m displaying. And my tables render very well on mobile devices.
I use no javascript. I wrote a few games/quizzes for students during Covid, and I used php and sqlite3 tables. That is all server-side. My website employs the “shttp” prefix, making it appear safe to browsers. I collect no cookies, I don’t care about IDing users. All this bullshit about data-collection as a means of improving users’ experience. Yeah, right.
My hosting service allows me to make the website as simple as I want it, rather than imposing their own organization on it. My wife thinks my website is great, but we’ve argued about aesthetics. My website isn’t pretty. Style vs. substance. The website has…and will get prettier as time goes on. But the material is what counts. A webpage on my site is only a brief stop on the way to playing a video.
It was never my plan to make money off my website. But, if a teacher or school district wants to convert some piece of music, for example, into a scrolling video, maybe they could pay me for it.
My website is also a backup for all the projects I’ve made on my computer. If I choose to ignore my website for days or weeks, it’s still there, working.
My use-case for having a personal website is pretty particular. Your mileage may vary.
You need to have a gear review and dawless jam channel on YouTube or instagram
Concentrate on writing great music. The rest is karma.
wow thanks putting time for response. I still am not sure how to make websites but I now have some better ideas thanks
If you are interested in having a website, my recommendation is to start simple. Use basic tools that have been around for years, rather than relying on DreamWeaver or Wix or whatever to make the website for you. Think of your website as a long journey, rather than something you want up and running in a slick fashion in a short amount of time. Unnecessary complexity is going to confuse you to the point of abandonment. Avoid delusions of grandeur about how much traffic you’re going to get. Rather, focus on the website as an opportunity for you to learn some new, useful things. Beware of free hosting providers; they will purposely cripple your experience, pushing you toward paid services.
Regarding the content, if you have something useful to share, make that your content. Make your website a gift to the world.