Built for the
slow burn between releases.
Independent artists, bands, small labels. Streaming platforms own the music distribution; the website owns the relationship with the audience between drops.
The honest answer for most working musicians is that Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube do the discovery job better than any website ever could. The website’s job has shifted from being where the audience finds you to being where the audience stays in touch with you between releases. That means the home page hierarchy isn’t “listen to my music” (they can do that everywhere else); it’s “join my mailing list, see tour dates, buy merch.” A site that gets this hierarchy wrong — emphasising the music discovery that’s already happening on Spotify — is doing the wrong job at the wrong level.
Do we still need a mailing list in the era of social media?
More than ever, in fact. Instagram’s algorithmic feed shows your posts to roughly 6–12% of your followers organically (that number has been declining since 2022). Email open rates for an active music mailing list are 35–55% — an order of magnitude higher reach. The audience that joined your mailing list opted in deliberately; they want to hear from you. Mailchimp’s free tier covers most independent artists; ConvertKit is the upgrade once you cross 1,000 subscribers and want better segmentation. Either way: the mailing list is the asset; the website’s job is to grow it.
The merchandise store on most independent artist sites is the third-highest revenue source after streaming and live performance. Many artists treat the store as an afterthought because the per-unit margin is low; the volume makes up for it. T-shirts and vinyl, mostly; CDs continue to sell to a stubborn minority that we shouldn’t mock.
42%
Mailing-list email open rate average across the four independent-musician clients we’ve worked with in the last two years. The lowest was 31%, the highest 58%. The 58% artist was the one whose emails were genuinely personal — not marketing newsletters — with one specific update and one specific link, written in their own voice.
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