Choosing Artist Website Builder
Making electronic music has been my primary hobby for almost two years now. As my repertoire is growing, I plan to create a separate artist website for my music. I have been posting about releases on this blog, and there is a music section. The blog has many themes, and I would like to have an official site dedicated to my music.
At first I thought about making a static site with Publii, but this requires setting up hosting and manually creating all the content. Then I stumbled upon Supertape, which offers a streamlined artist site experience. They have a free tier, which is good for testing the basic features and designs.
Creating the site with Supertape is effortless but limited. The free tier has a front page with an image and an info page with an image and text. The service automatically imports music from supported platforms, and album pages can work as smart links. Supertape has a single paid tier, which costs $12 per month ($9 if paid yearly) and adds front page posts, mailing list, custom domain and merch and video integrations.
The third option under consideration is Bandzoogle. Similar to Supertape, it targets t musicians, but it has more features and is more complicated. They do not have a free tier. Only a 14-day trial, which I hope would be enough to test the service. There are many more themes than Publii or Supertape have, and layouts are more flexible. The flexibility, unfortunately, makes it more difficult to use, and it reminds me of the WordPress block editor. So far, I have not found automatic import, and music and videos have to be manually added.
Bandzoogle has three paid tiers ranging from $9.35 to $18.70 per month ($7.79 to $15.58 if paid yearly), with lower tiers limiting the amount of content. If I do not include the tracks from the Short Ambient Loops music pack, I could use the cheapest tier, but would have to upgrade for the release.
Considering the effort needed for Publii and Bandzoogle, I am currently leaning towards Supertape. If start with a monthly subscription, I can quickly cancel if it does not suit my needs. As straight forward alternative, I could keep using this blog or make another Bear site. It is easy to add embeds from Bandcamp or other services, but the site design is simple. I like that for the blog, but the artist site could look fancier.
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