Do you still need a website if you have Spotify and Instagram?
Not always. If your music is on Spotify and your life is on Instagram, most people who care about you can already find both, and a website will not get you a single extra stream. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What a website does is different work: it answers the people who are deciding whether to book you, sign you or write about you. Whether you need one depends on whether those people are already looking.
What Spotify and Instagram already do well
Spotify is where listening happens. It has the audience, the playlists and the algorithm, and your artist profile shows your releases in order without you doing anything. No website competes with that, and none should try.
Instagram is where you are a person rather than a catalogue. It carries the photos, the clips from last weekend and the conversation with the people who come to your sets. For a lot of artists it is the most important thing they own online, which is exactly the problem described further down.
The four things neither of them can do
Both platforms are built for fans. The people who make decisions about your career use them too, but they are looking for things those platforms have no place for.
- A booking contact that is not a DM. A promoter will not negotiate a fee in Instagram messages between your fans, and Spotify has no contact field at all.
- Press assets. Photos at print resolution, a short and a long biography, a technical rider. There is nowhere on either platform to leave them for someone to download.
- A record of what you have done. Past shows, the labels you have released on, who you have played with. Instagram buries it under this week, and Spotify only knows about releases.
- Search results you control. When someone types your name into Google, you want the first result to be a page that answers their question, not whatever the platforms decided to rank.
Search finds more than your name
Of the three, a website is the only one you can shape for search, and every page on it is a separate way in. A page for each release can be found by its title, its catalogue number and the label it came out on. A page for each show is found by people searching the venue or the party. A biography that says where you are based and what you play is found by someone typing “techno DJ” and your city, which is exactly the search a promoter makes when booking in a city they do not know.
Spotify and Beatport pages rank for release titles too, and that is fine: they send listeners to the music. What they cannot do is put your booking email, your dates and your press kit in front of the person who searched. Your own page can, and it is the only one of those results you control.
This builds slowly. A new site takes months to rank for anything beyond your name, and each release and each show you add gives it one more page to be found by.
The account is not yours
Instagram accounts are hacked, suspended by mistake and locked every week, and recovering one can take months or never happen. Reach changes when the platform decides it should. None of that is a prediction about any one company. It is a reason not to keep your whole career at one address you do not control.
A domain you registered yourself cannot be taken away by an algorithm or a support queue. If the worst happens to an account, the link printed on every flyer still works, and it still has your booking email on it.
When you genuinely do not need one
If you release occasionally, do not play out much, and nobody has asked you for a press kit yet, you do not need a website. You need a good Spotify profile, an active Instagram and a link page in your bio. That is the right amount of internet for where you are, and a site you never update would be worse than none.
Register your name as a domain anyway. It costs around fifteen dollars a year, it stops anyone else taking it, and you can point it at your link page until you need more.
The signs that you have outgrown them
- Promoters or labels ask you for the same photos and biography more than once a month.
- You are booked often enough that dates change faster than your Instagram highlights.
- People search for your name and find an old profile, a different artist or nothing useful.
- You have started sending a press kit as a PDF attachment, which is out of date the moment it is sent.
What the minimum looks like
Not a big site. One page on your own domain with a player, upcoming dates, a short biography, press photos to download and a booking email does almost all of the work. Everything else is optional until somebody asks for it.
Keep Spotify and Instagram exactly as they are. The website does not replace them. It is the place they both point to when someone needs more than a song or a photo.
Common questions
- Will a website get me more streams?
- Almost certainly not, and it is not what a website is for. Streams come from playlists, the algorithm and your audience on social media. A website helps with bookings, press and labels, which tend to be worth more than the streams anyway.
- Can people find me on Google without a website?
- By your name, usually yes: your Spotify, Instagram and SoundCloud profiles will rank for it. By a release title, a venue you played, or a genre and your city, mostly not, or they will land on a store page with no way to book you. Those searches are where a site of your own earns its keep.
- Is Spotify for Artists enough of a profile?
- For listeners, yes. For a promoter it is missing a booking contact, press assets and any record of your shows, which is what they came for.
- Can my Instagram be my press kit?
- It can be part of one, because promoters do look at it to see whether you are active and who comes to your sets. It cannot hold print-resolution photos, a rider or a biography they can copy, so it cannot be the whole thing.
- What is the cheapest way to have a website?
- Register your name as a domain for about fifteen dollars a year and point it at a free link page. When you need more, a one-page site on a builder costs a few dollars a month. Both keep the address yours.