Just let my website expire

[PopTodd]

Although, it was nice to be able to have a centralized location for all the news/media and stuff, I'm not so sure that it was generating enough traffic to make it worthwhile to maintain. Most of it was 'bots and spiders.

Plus, with a Facebook page and a Bandcamp page, and all the other sundry deposits for band stuff...

 

Have any of y'all had a website that you let expire? Or have you never had one?

 

If you do have one, is it really worth maintainting?

Why?

[ckc]

Don't forget to change the web site you list on your Twitter profile. It still links to your, now expired, web site.

 

I'm biased, web sites are my business, but I'd recommend that any musician who is trying to reach an audience to have some kind of web site. Even if it is just a domain name that redirects to your Bandcamp page. It is good to have a domain you own. If you build an audience on Bandcamp, what happens if Bandcamp dies. Don't think it can happen? Well, remember back in 2006 when we thought MySpace was going to be serving bands forever?!? Well, now some artists I work with don't even bother with MySpace. When you have a domain, you control your "home base". When you don't, you rely on Facebook, Bandcamp, Reverbnation, etc. I'd rather own my home.

[deepseacatfish]

I have a site on virb.com that I like, I probably will keep it around regardless. Facebook and Bandcamp are fine, but having a clean and centralized location for stuff is what I prefer.

[ckc]

I have a site on virb.com that I like, I probably will keep it around regardless. Facebook and Bandcamp are fine, but having a clean and centralized location for stuff is what I prefer.

 

Yeah, Virb is great. They integrate with a lot of musician-related services, as well.

 

Not sure this is well publicized or not, but they are having a promotion to encourage Topspin users to use Virb. The promotion may work for anyone, even if you aren't a Topspin user. First 6 mos. for $5.00.

 

http://virb.com/topspin

[mahinty]

Yeah, it’d be nice to think that bandcamp will be around forever, but that’s fairly unrealistic. Just look at myspace.com, and mp3.com before that. Nothing is forever. Especially on the internet.

 

Bandcamp is great for making your music available for all to hear/download/buy, but it doesn’t really provide the full band website service. It has slowly expanded from that core music service though, first with the gig guide relationship with songkick.com, and then more recently with the addition of the short artist bio and photo. But I don’t think they’ll go too far with this sort of stuff, as it is at odds with their clean and simple design aesthetic. Which is great – anyone seen a myspace profile lately?.

 

It seems mad that every band should keep re-inventing the same websites over and over, though. I reckon, what you want is some sort of aggregating service that pulls together content from whatever other fashionable websites you are currently using to host your stuff (eg music from bandcamp, photos from flickr, blog feed from blogger, gig guide from songkick, etc). I haven’t really played with it much, but flavors.me looks like it could do the job.

 

And do we still need our own URLs? Do people still bookmark links? Isn’t the first thing that people do to find a website, is to just google it? So if your service de rigour (eg bandcamp) is doing a good job, then your stuff should be near the top of the google results anyway.

 

And ckc – I’m not trying to do you out of a job here. There will always need to be custom, professional websites for big bands, and businesses. It’s us DIY/indie musicians who will always look for something free and flexible that might somehow, miracuously connect us with an audience.