The Short Version
Beautiful websites and stores are actually really inefficient at converting people to streaming, buying merch, or anything else you actually hope they'll do.
For Pushing Streams
You want a simple landing page that gets people to the streaming platform of choice as quickly as possible.
For Selling Merch
Stores offer too many choices and directions fans can go in, and people rarely make it through the process. I've never seen stores convert until the fanbase is large enough (~500k-1M monthly listeners) that some fans are passively browsing the store and making it through checkout.
What Works 100x Better
- Targeted ads that send people to an offer-specific landing page
- The landing page is simple. It has the personality of the band, but it's making a single offer, and the only buttons/links on the page take them to a simple cart/checkout experience.
- The cart is easy and minimizes any decisions they have to make. It's based on a single product/offer that they're locked into (i.e. they can't remove it from the cart, usually something small like a CD). It's easy for them to quickly add their payment info, add another small product if they want to (a "bump" offer, maybe another CD), and submit the order. Immediately after the order, we give them a chance to buy one more higher-value product (an "upsell" offer, maybe a t-shirt, hoodie, or vinyl) by clicking one button.
What I Recommend
Until a band/artist is sustainably posting 1-3x a day with 50-100k monthly listeners, I recommend just having:
- A link-in-bio page (like LinkTree)
- Simple streaming pages for new music (e.g. feature.fm or barely.fm pages)
- Specific landing pages for ad campaigns (I've found the barely.page ones convert really well, but BandZoogle and SquareSpace can definitely work too)
- Simple cart pages (ThriveCart is good at this, and you can kind of make it work with Shopify and a bunch of plugins, but barelycart is a simplified option that just works)
For building websites, SquareSpace and BandZoogle can both be used to build really nice looking websites -- but I've spent lots of hours in the past building beautiful websites and stores (for my own band and for clients), and the simplified approach converts better.