Best website builder for musicians

Why we believe Squarespace is the best website builder for musicians

The indie acts I've watched build a durable career over five-plus years all figured out one thing earlier than they wanted to admit. The Spotify monthly listener count doesn't pay the mortgage, doesn't show up for the hometown show, and doesn't pre-order the next record. The mailing list does. Everything else the website does is in service of getting an email address from the person who just watched you play on a Tuesday night. Which shapes what matters in a builder.

Where Bandzoogle earns the runner-up spot

Bandzoogle is the runner-up rather than Wix because it's actually built for musicians, and the purpose-built design shows in the right places. Three scenarios genuinely favour Bandzoogle over Squarespace, and outside them Squarespace stays the cleaner choice.

Zero commission on merch is load-bearing at your volume

Bandzoogle takes 0% commission on merch and digital sales. On a band moving real merch at volume (weekly runs of tees, vinyl drops, thousand-unit print runs), the no-commission model can outearn Squarespace's monthly subscription after a certain threshold. Run the math on your own sales; if you're clearing the equivalent of a couple of hundred merch items a month, Bandzoogle may be the cheaper platform over a year.

The feature set specifically tuned for touring acts

Bandzoogle's mailing list, tour pages, press kit templates, and fan club features are designed for working musicians, not adapted from a general builder. For bands that want the platform to understand what a "show poster" is and what a "press kit" needs to contain, Bandzoogle's opinionated defaults save setup time that Squarespace wouldn't.

You don't need deep design customisation

Bandzoogle's templates are functional rather than distinctive. For a musician who wants a credible site live this weekend without thinking about design, the opinionated defaults get you there faster. The ceiling is lower than Squarespace's, but that ceiling only matters if you were going to invest in design anyway.

The trade-off with Bandzoogle is real design ceiling and a smaller feature surface for anything outside music. The platform is great at what it does. It's also narrower than Squarespace, and if your practice spans music plus a coaching side-business or a podcast or a merch line that outgrows the music audience, the narrower platform starts to feel constraining. Squarespace grows with you. Bandzoogle stays inside the music frame by design.

How the other major website builders stack up for musicians

Scored 1 to 10 on the factors that matter for a typical working musician (solo artist, duo, or small band, mix of touring, streaming revenue, merch, and direct-to-fan sales).

Distribution, streaming, and merch: the platforms a musician site links to

A musician doesn't run a career on one platform, and the website's job is to be the hub that connects the others. Distribution, streaming, and merch each live on their own platforms, and the Squarespace site points at all of them. The decision to use Squarespace sits inside that ecosystem rather than pretending the website hosts the music.

Distribution is where your music gets pushed into streaming services. DistroKid is the volume player with a flat annual fee and unlimited uploads; CD Baby charges per release but offers more hand-holding; TuneCore sits between them. All three push your music to Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, and a long tail of smaller services. Picking a distributor is a separate decision from picking a website builder, and neither affects the other. Your website links to the streaming destinations, not to the distributor itself.

Streaming platforms give you free artist-profile tools that complement the website. Spotify for Artists lets you claim your profile, update photos, pitch songs to editorial, and pull listener data. Apple Music for Artists does the equivalent on Apple's side. Your website's "Listen" page links out to both. The streaming platforms generate the monthly listener numbers; your website captures the fans who actually want a relationship.

Bandcamp sits in its own category. It's simultaneously a distributor, a streaming platform, a merch store, and a fan community, and it's the one platform in this list that has a genuinely competitive relationship with a musician's own website. A lot of indie artists run Bandcamp as their primary direct-to-fan storefront because the community is real and the cuts are fair, with a Squarespace site as the public face that links to Bandcamp for purchases. That split works well. Bandcamp Fridays (when the platform waives its revenue share for 24 hours) remain the single biggest direct-sales day for many artists, and that doesn't change whether your site is on Squarespace or elsewhere.

Merch splits two ways depending on your volume. Low-volume artists (a tee design or two, occasional vinyl drops) can run merch directly through Squarespace Commerce without a separate platform. Higher-volume artists with bigger catalogues often move merch to Bandcamp's merch tools or to a Shopify store running alongside the main site. The right split depends on how much merch revenue you're doing and whether the merch operation has outgrown "band with a few items" into "brand with a full store".

For writing specifically on the independent musician business (touring, mailing-list strategy, merch, fan cultivation), the DIY Musician blog from CD Baby remains one of the longest-running practical resources, and Bandzoogle's blog publishes genuinely useful material on website strategy for musicians even if you're not using their platform.

What musicians actually need from a website

Seven features do the work. The first four separate a musician's site that grows a career from a URL that collects dust next to their Spotify profile.

Squarespace covers all seven without extra apps. Bandzoogle covers all seven too, with less design freedom; Wix covers five natively and the mailing-list integration in particular is weaker than Squarespace's.

Which Squarespace templates suit musicians best

Every Squarespace template runs on Fluid Engine and is broadly interchangeable, so the template choice is about the starting aesthetic and default structure, not a permanent commitment. These four sit well for working musicians.

Wells

Grid-based gallery with editorial spacing. Suits musicians who want the site to feel curated without being precious. Works well for a hero image of the current record, a tour page, and a merch line presented as a small catalogue.

Alex

Minimal, typographic, magazine-feeling. Pairs with a single bold brand colour and a restrained design system. Suits artists whose identity is visual and who want the site to feel like a standalone piece rather than a typical band site.

Hester

Built around video in the hero, which suits musicians whose current moment is anchored on a music video or a live performance clip. The long-form page structure handles a longer bio and release notes well.

Pacific

Quiet, clean, typography-first. Works for singer-songwriters, jazz and classical artists, or anyone whose brand leans contemplative rather than loud. Low visual noise lets the music do the talking in a way heavier templates don't.

All four handle the checklist above without modification. The template is the starting aesthetic, not the feature set, and I'd discourage anyone from spending a week agonising over the choice. Pick the one whose tone matches the music, launch, revisit in month three. For writing on the musician website side, Musician Wages publishes material on the business side of the working musician life, and Hypebot covers the industry side with occasional direct pieces on artist website strategy.

Common mistakes musicians make picking a builder

The most expensive one is treating streaming metrics as the scoreboard. A musician optimising for Spotify monthly listeners instead of mailing-list subscribers has a career that falls off the day the algorithm stops featuring them. The website is how you build the thing that survives the algorithm. The rest of the mistakes below are cheaper to fix.

Treating Spotify follower counts as the business. Streams don't convert. Mailing-list subscribers do. A thousand emails collected at shows over three years is worth more than fifty thousand Spotify followers, because the emails still work when the algorithm changes. Build the site around list capture, not around vanity metrics.

Hosting music files directly on the website. Don't upload MP3s to the site. Your music lives on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, and wherever your distributor pushes it. The website links out. Native uploads slow the site down, eat storage, and don't match the platform where fans actually want to listen.

A tour page updated three times a year. A tour page with dates from 2023 on it signals a dead project. Update after every show. Add new dates the day they announce. Fans check the tour page monthly, and the freshness cues them that the band is active.

Skipping the merch line because "we're too small". Even a single tee is an excuse to collect an email address at checkout. The merch line isn't primarily a revenue line at small scale; it's a list-building tool and a signal to fans that buying from you directly is an option. One item beats zero items.

Over-designing the site and under-writing the bio. A musician's bio is doing more work than most musicians realise. Bookers, promoters, press, and festival curators read the bio before everything else. Two strong paragraphs that tell the project's story beat a gorgeous template with three placeholder sentences.

Tour announce windows and album release cycles

Musicians don't have one peak; they have announce windows. January is when summer festival announces drop; September is when fall and winter headline tours get revealed. Album release cycles add their own spikes around the announcement week and the release week. The website has to hold up during those brief surges and stay useful during the long quiet between them.

The announce week is the single biggest traffic event of the year. When a tour or a record announces, traffic to the website can spike ten or twenty times its baseline over 48 hours. Test the site on mobile the week before an announce. Make sure the tour page loads fast, the ticket links work, and the email capture block is positioned where a visitor actually sees it. A broken site on announce day is a mailing-list signup you'll never get back.

Pre-sale codes and email-only drops. Venues and ticket platforms often give artists a pre-sale window before the public on-sale. A mailing-list email with the pre-sale code is one of the highest-converting emails you'll send all year, and it's how you turn a list subscriber into a paying fan. The Squarespace Email Campaigns integration makes this a fifteen-minute job, not a project. Set up the workflow before your next announce.

Album release week layout. On release day, the homepage becomes a focused landing page. A hero image of the record, a prominent "Listen Now" link, an email capture with the pitch ("get the lyrics book, b-sides, and tour priority"), and a merch tile with the vinyl pre-order. Simplify the nav. Move the tour page below the fold. The release week homepage is a temporary marketing surface, not the permanent home.

The post-tour email is the list's most loyal moment. After a tour run, fans who attended shows are at their highest emotional peak for the project. A post-tour email with a few photos, a thank-you, and a small ask (pre-order the live EP, join the fan club, review the show on Spotify), converts better than any other message you'll send all year. Map out the send before the tour begins, so you're not drafting it exhausted the week after the last show.

What I'm less sure about. What I'm less certain about is how much TikTok's role in music discovery will shift what a musician's website has to do over the next two years. TikTok-discovered artists often have audiences that didn't arrive through a traditional path (album, tour, press), and their relationship to an artist's website is looser than an older fan's. Whether a TikTok audience converts to a mailing list at the same rate as a show audience is an open question, and the answer may change what the site needs to do. My current bet is the website still matters for the durable audience (the people who stay), but the path to getting them there is more varied than it was.

Get the hub site live before the next announce

A website that's live the week before a tour announce captures fans the announce brings in. A website that's still being built the week of the announce loses them. Squarespace's free trial is enough to put up a homepage, a tour page, a "Listen" page, a merch tile, and a mailing-list capture, all in a weekend. If Bandzoogle is the right call for your merch-volume math, start there instead. Either way, the site that exists is doing the work that builds the list, and the list is what builds the career.

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Or start with Bandzoogle if you want a musician-specific builder with no commission on merch.