SXSW bands—your sites still suck! (and what you should do about it)
Sorry but it has to be said. This was something I was talking about last year around this time but the situation hasn’t improved much. If you go through the list of bands playing at SXSW, you keep seeing the same thing happening: terrible websites where it’s hard to find anything, especially music (which is the point, right?). To be fair, some of them are pretty good but I gotta say that most of them just stink up their virtual real estate.
Instead of picking on any particular band and their site, I’d like to offer up some tips about making a good website for your band.
* Make the music easy to find!
It’s sad that this ain’t more obvious. If a user comes to your site and has to fumble around for a few minutes just to find one of your tunes, you’ve failed. They don’t have the patience to dig around for it and they have plenty of other sites to visit online. Make it ridiculously obvious to them- have a nice big button or graphic that says MUSIC right up front or a music player embedded on the home page, ready to pump out your tunes. Also horrible- a link to ‘music’ that says ‘coming soon’- no one’s coming back to see when you get your act together.
* Make everything else easy to find
Just common sense, right? You can use all kinds of fancy language to say ‘pictures’ or ‘tour dates’ or bio’ but why make people have to guess where that is on your site? They want info so give it to ‘em right up front with links on your homepage to all of these things. Going along with that, have links at the top and/or bottom of all of your pages that let users easily get to all the sections of your site. If you make your site user friendly for your web audience, you’ll get rewarded with more interest and web traffic (assuming that you have some good music…).
* Leverage MySpace wisely
If you can’t get any music on your site for some reason (space, bandwidth, lack of knowledge), you have to let peeps hear your music somehow. Have a link to MySpace at least. You’ll want a presence there anyway so the bottom line is that you need a MySpace page along with your own website. But… it’s better to keep people at your website ‘cause you have a lot more flexibility about how you can set it up with some nice graphics, photos, links to merchandise, etc.. Nothing wrong with having a presence on the web in more than one place (it helps get your name out) but ideally, you should have your site as a home-base for fans and potential fans.
* Ditch the splash page
Your techie friend talked you into have a cool graphic pop up that takes forever to load, just so someone can enter your site. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It’s annoying as hell and again, your online audience won’t sit through it. Just have a homepage that’s actually a homepage with all the info about your band easily accessible with obvious links to everything.
* Even with high-speed access, don’t pig out on pics
Now that modems are almost a thing of the past, you’d figure that you can load up as many pictures, songs, videos and media on your site as you want, right? Nope. Even on high-speed connections, some web pages are still so bloated with huge pics and media files that they take a while to load. Again, your audience ain’t gonna like that. The ol’ rule of thumb was that if it took more than 15-20 seconds to load your page, your user was gone. That still seems about right and why would you wanna piss ‘em off anyway? If you have a lot of media stuff to show off, break it out into different pages with links to everything instead of loading it down all in one place.
* Mailing lists are good to gather fans but don’t get carried away
Have a link on your homepage and everywhere else on your site for anyone to sign up for your mailing list. If you can’t get one going on your own, you can start one up for free at a place like Yahoo Groups without being a techie. Tell ‘em about upcoming shows, your album coming out, other appearances, etc.. But don’t get carried away and flood ‘em with mail- once or twice a week’s good enough if you’ve got lots of news about the band. Even in down times where nothing’s really happening, maybe send them some holiday greetings or such, just to keep them in the loop.
Sad to say, I can’t help you with advice about licensing, contracts, etc. but hopefully this’ll give you food for thought about your site. So please clean up your act, OK?
Comments
Yep that’s exactly why myspace got so big, because bandwidth ain’t cheap plus they simplified and standardized the streaming audio management and playback. Even I with my distrust of Rupert Murdoch must admit when given the choice of links to a band’s website versus their myspace, I choose the latter because that’s the one where I’m guaranteed to hear their music right away.
Comment by Kenric L. Ashe from Portland, OR — February 28, 2009 @ 4:17 pm
www.toyhorsesmusic.com
very simple - lots of music by the band
catch them at Latitude 30 SXSW Wednesday 18th March 8pm
Comment by Tom Williams from Wales — February 28, 2009 @ 4:27 pm
Also I would add to Jason’s list some kind of content management software or service is good so you don’t have to wait for your webmaster to update every little thing. They’d rather be working on cool graphics and widgets anyways.
Oh and by the way ... yes this is a plug I guess but Jason is a friend of mine so I’m sure he won’t mind if I suggest using dBMonkey instead of Yahoo Groups for your email list because it has the same advantages (free for most bands anyways) plus unique features such as integration with your calendar, myspace, etc. One point of data entry for all is how I like to put it. And yes that includes the aforementioned website content management. :-)
Comment by Kenric L. Ashe from Portland, OR — February 28, 2009 @ 4:33 pm
Great article, making great points. Our website: www.thedumbingofamerica.wordpress.com has been doing an a to z preview of SXSW. We talk about the best bands and include a video. The obvious bands are listed, but we’ve gone through the un-official torrent and tried to write up the bands that generally fly under the radar. Bands that don’t “get” this internet thing are a pain in the a—. In some cases we do the work for the band and put together a nice package on our website. But sometimes we get frustrated and just blow it off. Sad.
Comment by todd from Dallas — February 28, 2009 @ 7:54 pm
Excellent post Jason!
I’ve been thinking for a while about how as a fan (who also writes about music and cruzes bandsites often for review bio info), I don’t usually go to the band’s site for their info or music anymore mainly because it’s to hard to find and listen to a lot of the time.
I’ve always thought that that is so strange for a band to do that on their own site. Is it because musicians have a hard time seeing their music as a product and their fans as consumers? Is it lack of funds, resources or web marketing know-how?
If that’s the case then bands had better get over that myth and/or take a few lessons from the ecommerce rule book and make it super easy for fans to find, listen to and purchase their music when on their site and go easy on the artistic expression.
Myspace is the current king at selling the bandwidth music site business module but there’s definately a market out there for any designers who want to teach and help bands make their sites more effective by implementing the funtionality and effectiveness of ecommerce and social media.
Great list, hope the bands take some notes!
Comment by Chris Catania from Chicago,IL — February 28, 2009 @ 9:42 pm
Best Tip: At least keep your BIO updated so when people like me come along…well - it’s fresh stuff!
Mike Cameo, Host
Indies’ Top 10
www.indiestop10.com
Comment by Mike Cameo from US — March 2, 2009 @ 3:27 pm
Is it lack of funds, resources or web marketing know-how?
I think they actually do know what their fans want and that’s exactly why they use myspace. I know from experience, having lost web design and hosting clients to myspace (even when it’s just a trade deal), the #1 reason why most bands don’t have streaming audio on their own websites is not so much lack of funds but they’d rather be spending that money on equipment (or drugs ... depends what kind of band they are haha). Prices are coming down but bandwidth does cost $$$ and band websites look pretty cheezy when supplemented by advertising revenues, so it pretty much has to come out of pocket. Most web hosts promise unlimited bandwidth per month (total data transfer) but the catch is they throttle it per second (the size/speed of your pipe) so as soon as your band becomes popular you get hit with too many concurrent users and then they all get the infinite buffering status and that’s almost worse than not being available at all.
So what’s a band to do? Well there are already alternatives to myspace for free streaming audio services and I imagine that sector will continue to grow. In fact I’m thinking my company needs to start offering that soon just to keep up with the competition. I wonder though how long that business model will hold up when ad rates keep declining, plus more and more people (especially Firefox users) are implementing ad blocking technology in their browsers.
Only thing for certain, even if the shit hits the fan and the whole world goes spiraling into economic oblivion with soup lines and everything (if we can be so lucky) ... no matter what happens at least people will keep making music, and during the worst of times is often when the best music is made. So hey we have so much to look forward to!
Comment by Kenric L. Ashe from Portland, OR — March 2, 2009 @ 5:54 pm