As 2023 comes to a close, one thing remains constant: artists are making more music, and successfully engaging fans on a wider scale than ever before. The advancement of direct-to-fan tools across the globe has resulted in musicians having ownership over their art, their fan base, and their business activities, and the whole damn pie.
All of this hasn’t gone unnoticed; independent artists are seeing a historical level of recognition, taking over half of 2024 Grammy nominations. It’s clear that consumers understand the importance of supporting their local artist community, artists are getting better about asking, and even that has even caused a clear shift in how corporate music values and recognizes the working class artist.
The tools available to musicians have expanded quickly, and artists have effectively applied them, harnessing powerful options like Smart Links and Landing pages for marketing campaigns, or using data to determine tour dates and merch items to sell–all right at their fingertips.
The importance of creating authentic connections with fans is as important as ever, and websites remain a powerful tool to create a professional homebase online, to express creativity, and to market music. With many smaller updates in 2023, we’ve been setting the stage to help artists meet all of the big things that are coming.
Here’s a look back at 2023:
Bandzoogle members reach $100,000,000 in sales
2023 started out with a bang for Bandzoogle members. We all kept an eye on the Bandzoogle sales ticker, and as more musicians sold more merch and music, we crossed the threshold of $100 million dollars in sales through member websites. All commission-free, and all that money going to the artists directly!
This is really an incredible feat and we are so proud of all of the artists who put in the time and energy to sell merch and music through their websites. Offering purchase options on your website is the best way to encourage support from your fans, and you have been doing an amazing job.
Rollout to the Fieri framework
To keep pace with the needs of musicians creating websites, our development team devised a plan to replace our Visual Editor with a new framework we’ve been lovingly calling Fieri. Over the course of 2023, we gradually released parts of Fieri in small chunks–mostly unnoticed for people using Bandzoogle, which is a good thing! Plenty of testing and fixes went into this work, and toward the end of November, we rolled out the final version to all users.
So if you’ve noticed a better user experience, faster loading speed, greater ease of use on mobile, and a more beautiful editor, you can thank our development team for the conversion to Fieri!
This massive project was mostly invisible to members, which speaks to the consideration with which it was released. It also means that next year we’ll be able to move ahead with updating features more quickly, while adding many more flexible, modern design options.
Feature updates
In 2023 while working on these under-the-hood updates, we also finessed a few features to help with ease of use. Here are a few prominent releases you may have noticed:
Free tickets for fans
Whether for a free event through your site, or because you want to offer free access to certain fans for a paid event, free tickets are a new option through the ‘Calendar’ feature (Pro plan).
Page PDF downloads in features
Share your one-page EPK or other downloads in your CTA header, using a ‘Button’ feature on any page, or even embedded as a link in a ‘Text’ feature.
‘Selling Tools’ product table
There is now a place to manage all of your products and stores in one easy-to-use table within your ‘Selling Tools’ dashboard.
Reports update
In addition to migrating users to the GA4 reports as mandated by Google, we also improved our ‘Reports’ tab by adding a bounce rate percentage and a heatmap displaying visitor details.
Page filtering and conversion stats
You can also now search for a specific page in reports, or filter by Landing pages, blog posts, track pages, album pages, and single pages. We also added conversion stats–very handy for measuring and adjusting your Landing pages and marketing strategies.
Mobile display
We streamlined many of our tables with mobile editing in mind, especially in the ‘Music’ and ‘Store’ features.
Downloadable photos from gallery
We gave the ‘Photo Gallery’ feature editor a new look and feel, and also added the option for users to download photos directly (great for a press kit).
Improved ‘Image’ feature
The ‘Image’ and ‘Image and Text’ features were updated to make editing and resizing images a lot easier.
Updated text editor
The ‘Text’ feature also got some love this year: images can be dragged and dropped into the content frame, and videos are much easier to embed. Plus, color swatches for your current theme will appear when choosing a font color, saving you time.
Get your own website up and running in minutes with these features and more. Try Bandzoogle today!
New website templates
Minimal design choices, bold fonts, and monochromatic color were a few of the design trends in 2023 that were echoed in our new website templates. Each template offers preset variations while still allowing you to customize your design and add your content to make a unique website in just minutes.
The Alma template: A template that focussed on aesthetics and user experience, while elegantly framing your content.
The Acid template: A website template that boasts bold creativity, and is perfect for artist portrait photos or live shots.
The Supro template: The best way to put your band name front and center, balancing imagery and creativity.
We also added a ‘minimal’ variation to available theme styles for many of our in-house templates. A minimal music website template will get you started with building a simple but effective website for your music.
Smart Links to promote music
In 2023 we continued to highlight the effectiveness of Smart Links. Creating a simple, shareable Smart Link for your music release is easy to do as part of the Bandzoogle pro plan, and we were happy to see many artists using Smart Links to promote music, merch, concerts, and more.
Landing pages for marketing campaigns
Landing pages continued to prove successful for artists marketing their music. In 2023 we narrowed down a few of the best uses for Landing pages, helping artists to focus on their goals for marketing campaigns. These uses were turned into page layouts, which you can quickly apply in the ‘Add Page’ menu, under the ‘Landing pages’ section.
EPK layouts
Artists need effective EPKs – this is as true in 2023 as ever. The variety of ways that musicians can use EPKs continues to expand, so we created 6 different EPK layouts to help artists grow their career. You can use an EPK to book shows, promote a new release, reach out to labels, and so much more.
Bandzoogle celebrated turning 20
While the needs of artists have changed drastically since Bandzoogle came into being in 2003, we’re proud to continue to support indie artists at every turn. We’ve evolved from simply powering websites to offering a multi-faceted online toolset for design and sales that any musician can use to build a career. And we couldn’t have done it without all of our amazing members!
We celebrated our 20th year by looking at the ways our website builder features serve musicians, and putting together a list of 20 of the most beautiful member websites built with Bandzoogle. We also released limited-edition Bandzoogle merch to help raise money for Canadian music education charity MusiCounts.
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In 2023, artists continued to use the power of interactivity and the internet to reach fans all over the world, setting the stage for great things to come. We’ll continue to create tools for artists to effectively promote and sell music through their websites, and we can’t wait to see where this takes us all next. Thank you, to the hundreds of thousands of artists who have trusted Bandzoogle as a place to hang your (digital) hat for the last 20 years. Being part of your journey has been nothing short of incredible for all of us. Here is to the next two decades, we are built to last together.
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