A label website has a smaller job than most people building one assume. It is not a magazine, it is not a shop competing with Bandcamp, and it is not a place anyone browses for pleasure. Four kinds of people arrive at it: someone who just heard a record, a producer about to send a demo, a promoter checking whether you are bookable, and press looking for an image at deadline.
Everything below serves one of those four. Anything that serves none of them is decoration.
A catalogue organised the way records are organised
Catalogue numbers exist for a reason and they are how your audience, your distributor and your discography on Discogs all refer to your output. A release page needs the number, the artwork, the artists, the date, the format and a way to play it. If someone can land on a release page from a search result and immediately press play and buy, the page is doing its job.
Streaming embeds do the heavy lifting. Pasting a Spotify or Beatport link should produce a working player without anyone touching code, because the person adding a release at midnight is you.
A roster that connects back to the catalogue
Every artist needs a page, and every artist page needs to lead back into the records they made for you. This is where labels most often stop halfway, publishing biographies with no route back to the music. The roster is a navigation system, not a credits list.
A demo inbox that you control
This is the part that decides whether the site is an asset or an ornament. A public email address turns into a folder no one opens. A form that dumps into the same inbox is no better.
What works is a queue: submissions arrive with a status you can change, notes only your team sees, and audio that is reachable without being publicly downloadable. Unreleased music from unsigned producers should never sit behind a guessable public URL, which is a mistake that is easy to make and embarrassing to discover.
- Links preferred over uploads, with uploads capped
- A status on every submission so nothing is reviewed twice
- Private notes for the team
- Audio reachable only through short-lived signed links
Booking and press, separated
Promoters and journalists want different things and neither wants a general contact form. Booking needs to say what you offer, club nights, open airs, festivals, private events, where you travel, and how fast you answer. Press needs images at usable resolution and a biography they can paste.
If you publish a response time, honour it. It is the cheapest credibility a small label can buy and the fastest to lose.
Events, with an archive that manages itself
A label night that happened four months ago should move itself out of the upcoming list without you remembering. Nothing makes a label look dormant faster than a homepage advertising a show from last spring, and it is the single most common reason label sites go stale.
What you can skip
A blog you will not maintain. A newsletter popup on first visit. A merch store before you have merch, when Bandcamp already handles it. A loading animation between pages. An audio player that follows the visitor around and fights the Spotify tab they already have open.
The part nobody plans for
Whoever builds the site is not the person who will update it at 1am before a release. If adding a record requires an email to a developer, the catalogue will fall behind within two releases, and a label site with a stale catalogue is worse than no site because it actively misinforms.
Self-serve editing is not a nice extra on a label site. It is the requirement that everything else depends on.
Common questions
- Do we need a shop if we already sell on Bandcamp?
- No. Link to Bandcamp and Beatport from each release. Running your own checkout adds tax, fraud and support work that a small label has no reason to take on.
- How many pages should a label site have?
- Enough that each release and each artist has its own page. A single scrolling page gives the whole catalogue one URL, so there is nothing specific for anyone to link to or for a search engine to rank for a particular record. Separate pages give each release and each artist a permanent address of its own.
- Should demo submissions be open all the time?
- That is a curation decision, not a technical one. Permanently open works if the queue is manageable. What matters is that the site states the position clearly instead of leaving producers guessing.