Should a musician have a website or a Facebook page?

Should a musician have a website or a Facebook page? This is a question I’ve been asked many times.

As a musician or band, you need to have the best possible exposure online. It is simply essential these days but do you really want to spend time & money on a website if a free Facebook page will do?

Stories abound in the music industry about some act who just put a few videos onto social media and then suddenly became huge and famous. As you know, most of the stories are just that, stories. Regardless, as a musician or band you are still going to need an effective online presence to get your music out to the public these days. So if we know we need to do it, which way should we go? Our own site or a Facebook page?

In this article we will look at the pros and cons of both in order to solve the question once and for all.

Facebook Pros

• Free
• Easy to use
• A very large user base
• Tools to help find followers
• Helpful stats
• The ability to find & define a target audience (if you pay for it)
• Advertising

Facebook cons

• Facebook can go away, remember Myspace?
• The organic (unpaid) reach of your posts is becoming very small. Facebook is a business, they want you to pay for your traffic.
• You can’t easily move your Facebook page to another platform. You can’t “take it with you” if you decide to leave.

Your own website pros

• It’s not going to go away like MySpace
• You have complete control over the look and styling
• You can get comprehensive traffic stats
• It gives you credibility. You look professional with your own site.
• You can move it to another host at any time.

Your own website cons

• They can be hard to set up if you’re not technical.
• You need someone to build it for you which can be expensive. 
• They need to be maintained and the software kept up to date.
• They can be difficult to keep up to date.

So what’s the answer? Should a musician have a website or a Facebook page? In my opinion is that you need both. In fact you’ll need to be on multiple channels such as Youtube & Instagram as well but don’t think for a minute that you can survive on social media sites alone. You still need to have your own site. Your website needs to be the central hub of everything you do online and all of your social media efforts should work to find new fans and “funnel” them to your main site. From there you can work on building a solid relationship with them to turn them into long-term, loyal fans.

What next?

Okay, now that we know we need to have both a website and a social media presence, where do you start? If you’re starting from scratch I go with a simple Facebook page first. Chances are that you & a bunch of your friends and family are already on it so there’s a good headstart at your first audience. Concentrate on that first rather than trying to get lots of social media channels started all at once. Once you have a small audience then turn your attention to getting your own site up and running. 

For now, get yourself a simple Facebook page up and get into the habit of posting regularly. If you have any questions or comments then please leave them below. I’d love to hear from you.