Your Music = Unique / Your Website = Derivative
Ask any band what they sound like and you can guarantee that they’ll tell you they’re unique. Sure they might give you qualifying reference points: Led Zeppelin meets the Eagles – Karen Carpenter on top of Diane Birch (Hmmmm!) but at the end of the day – when you listen to the band – there is no other soul on the planet that sounds like them.
So why would you want your band website to look like someone elses? I mean – you don’t dress like other bands do you?
There are loads of options for bands that are looking for a new site – companies are popping up every week with a new variation on the band theme template. However, when you look at the marketing that surrounds these solutions the one message that comes across very clearly is this:
“Spend your time writing and playing music and only spend a few minutes setting up your website – it’s Easy!”
Stop and think about that for a moment. Your website is your home – it is the place that the VAST majority of your fans will interact with you. Your website is international, no matter how many Volcanoes are hitting Europe. Do you really want the thing that differentiates you from the next band to be a different color background?
Here’s our view – your website is critical to your success and if you aren’t spending time learning how to use it and develop it then you may as well play your gigs onstage behind a black curtain. For every second that you spend on working out your stage plot, the set list – what the drummer’s going to wear…you need to double that on how you present on your website. We’re not saying that an awesome looking site is going to make up for lousy music – but a cool engaging site that screams who you are and makes it easy for a fan to interact with you and your music sure is going to help.
Now if you have the money – then you can skip that stage and hire us to come in and build a Kick Ass site for you – but we reckon that most bands starting out don’t have $550 lying around to blow on a website. But we reckon you do have time - learning tech is no different than learning an instrument – it all comes down to how many hours you put into it.
Kilted Chaos is working with DTF Works to build an affordable solution to this and yes – it involves you learning how to make shit work - more very soon.
Image Credit: Day 157 - Pasukaru76 on Flickr