This is a real Bandzoogle review. I use Bandzoogle, and I've used a lot of other website builders through my work in digital media.
I'm an independent singer-songwriter, and I've worked in digital media for 10+ years now, for the most recent 6 years at BWZ, a leading media tech company based in Vancouver, BC.
I've got years of experience using different website builders (Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, Bandzoogle, and selling platforms like Etsy) so I thought I'd share my opinion and review about using Bandzoogle.
This is for other musicians or bands who are thinking of using Bandzoogle but wondering if it's worth it and how well it works before investing all the energy into migrating your site or building it for the first time.
So, I'll walk through how Bandzoogle compares to other website builders I've used, and who I would and would not recommend it for, and why.
What Is Bandzoogle?
Bandzoogle is a simple music website builder and CMS designed primarily for musicians and bands. The themes that it comes with have features that are useful to bands and music artists, such as track players, preset EPK (electronic press kit) layouts, music selling tools, ticket selling tools, crowdfunding features, and a few other tools.
Why I Am Using Bandzoogle
I have used the Premium version of Bandzoogle for 3+ years.
The other website builder I'm most familiar with is WordPress, and this website "sarahtolle.com" was originally on WordPress before I discovered Bandzoogle.
When I learned about Bandzoogle, I thought it had some cool features, plus it was cheaper than my WordPress plan. Worth a try!
I'm using Bandzoogle at the time of publishing this post, and I don't plan on moving back to WordPress. The only reason I'd move would be if and when I need more advanced conversion, tracking, and marketing tools.
Bandzoogle Features
I have used or played with most of Bandzoogle's features. Here's my experience and opinion on each of Bandzoogle's features that they promote on their pricing page.
Pre-made Theme Templates
Bandzoogle advertises a great selection of templates, and they deliver. I don't like doing anything design-related so I was happy that the templates were attractive and easy to sort through.
Compared to WordPress, where choosing a theme is like choosing a life partner, or Shopify, where you need to figure out how to install a bunch of apps in order to sell music downloads (for example), choosing a theme in Bandzoogle was 1000x easier.
Where Bandzoogle's themes are all designed to be useful only to musicians, WordPress themes are this massive library of insanity, themes for every business imaginable—it takes forever to read each theme's specs, you have to make sure your theme is well-supported by the developer...for me, choosing a WordPress theme is the worst and hardest part. By comparison, Bandzoogle's themes are utilitarian, look great, not bloated with features, easy to understand, easy to preview, and easy to customize.
SSL Security
It's 2024, so SSL security is a must—and a default for most web builders. You shouldn't build any website in 2024 without SSL security, and almost all web builders offer this now.
Web Hosting and Domain Name
If you want to host and register a domain name on Bandzoogle, you can, and it's included in your plan. Hosting and registering a domain name can cost a total between $30 and $200 per year, so there's a pretty significant financial advantage in using Bandzoogle to register your domain and host your site. Even the the most expensive Bandzoogle plan is only $180/year.
I'm currently using Bandzoogle for hosting my domain, and I like it a lot. I originally bought my domain through GoDaddy and ended up switching it to Bandzoogle's registrar because it was simpler for me to manage all in one place, and Bandzoogle's customer service and support with technical things is MIND-BLOWINGLY good, so if you're a beginner, I highly recommend registering your domain with Bandzoogle (or switching it to Bandzoogle).
Beginner Tip: If it's your first time buying or hosting a domain and you don't know what this means or why you have to pay for it, buying a domain means you're buying the web address, like “sarahtolle.com”. You have to pay a “registrar” to own the address and renew your ownership of it each year. This will be an expense no matter what site you use—WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Wix, etc. Some platforms wrap the cost of the domain into the overall subscription, but either way you're paying for it. Expect to pay under $20/year for a domain.
Fan Data
Hard to know what this means until you use it. Fan data refers to some basic audience analytics. You can see where your website visitors are from, for example. I think the fan data is pretty lean.
Probably the most useful fan data for me is the data about how fans interact with music players on your site:
Beyond that, the fan data is pretty basic: number of visitors, location, length of visit, etc. You'll be able to tell some basic facts like which of your website pages recieves the most visits. For advanced tracking like seeing which path visitors take when they go from URL to URL in your site, you'll need to use Google Analytics or another tool like that.
Custom Design Tools, Custom Fonts
These work just as they're described. I'd say the tools for customizing your design are really more about customizing how things look, not how things function.
For example, you can change your fonts, social icons, background colors, buttons, headers, footers, spacing, etc.
It's harder to change or add interactive design elements, such as adding an exit pop-up with a downloadable lead magnet to encourage fans to subscribe to your email list. I've figured out how to set up a subscriber pop-up using Mailchimp HTML, but customizing its placement, timing, and who it appears to doesn't seem to be possible.
Mobile Optimization
You don't really have to think about this with Bandzoogle—the website usually displays great on mobile without having to finagle anything. The site builder provides limited customization when you're desinging your pages, but it means that you're already locked into layouts that will display properly on mobile devices. It's great.
Commission-Free Crowdfunding
The feature works pretty well, although I don't use it. Here's a video describing how crowdfunding works on Bandzoogle.
I don't want to put in the effort for a crowdfunding campaign right now, so I don't use this feature.
It's certainly less involved than using a crowdfunding platform like Indiegogo, and if you use Bandzoogle's crowdfunding feature, it means you're working outside of the ecosystem that major crowdfunding platforms provide. I think some of the benefit in using major crowdfunding platforms is that you have access to the network and the visibility of the platform itself, so I probably wouldn't use Bandzoogle for crowdfunding.
Subscriptions
Haven't used this feature. It's mentioned on their pricing page, but I honestly don't know what it refers to. Maybe the mailing list? I go over that in the Mailing List section below.
Sell Music Downloads
It's really easy to set up the music downloads, hook up a payment thingy, and start selling. This feature works well and it still simple enough to use very quickly. I like it.
There are also tools that let you sell gift cards (also easy to set up) and let fans use discount codes to download music, which is a cool feature if you plan on running social media or in-person campaigns where you reward fans with exclusive discount codes.
You can connect the selling tools to either PayPal or Stripe, and the way Bandzoogle is set up make it super easy. You just press a couple of buttons.
Sell Merch
I don't sell any merch, so I haven't used this. Looking at some examples of the merch stores people have set up, it seems pretty sweet.
Mailing List
I have used 3 different email senders for my music fans – Mailchimp, Modern Musicians' StreetTeam tool, and finally, Bandzoogle. Bandzoogle's mailing list is very, very basic. You can't design fancy emails with buttons, and you can't set up automated sequences or trigger-based workflows (for example, if someone purchases an album, you can't trigger an automated workflow that pitches them a related merch email).
For now, I am using Bandzoogle to email my fans because I had been using a huge amount of complicated automations in my email marketing, and I decided to do a deeeeep simplification in my business. If deeply simple, with nearly no design customization and zero automations, is what you're game for, then Bandzoogle's mailing list works great. Super simple, and you can set up a template that you can re-use over and over.
So I use Bandzoogle for email marketing right now, but If you need any kind of automation whatsoever, don't use Bandzoogle for email marketing. The features are not advanced enough.
Press Kit (EPK)
The EPK templates are pretty standard. It saves you a bit of time when designing how your EPK will look. I wouldn't say this feature is a deal-breaker, because you can always look up other templates online and sorta copy those. But it's a nice feature!
SEO Tools (I'll include "blogging tools" here, too)
I work full-time in SEO, so my standards for SEO customization are very high. That said, the lack of SEO customization is one of my least favorite things about Bandzoogle.
My main complaint here is that it doesn't seem possible to customize your URL slugs—the part of your URL that goes after your main website name. It's pretty standard to be able to customize slugs, and it's supposed to have an effect on indexation and SEO, so I really wish Bandzoogle would let you do this.
The blog's SEO features are also a little odd. The headings aren't named in the way most other blogs' headings are named. In SEO world, an H1 heading usually means a Title, and H2 is the largest heading available in a blog post. However, in Bandzoogle, the headings in blog posts start at H1. Nerding out on SEO here, but yeah, there are some small wierd things with Bandzoogle's SEO. However, I've written a couple of articles like this one which are meant to rank in Google results and earn organic traffic, and they're doing just fine, so I'd say for 99% of musician's purposes, the SEO Tools of Bandzoogle are sufficient—especially for beginners, where the less you mess around with, the better.
Blog
Formatting and embedding media in blog posts in Bandzoogle is just okay. Whereas many other CMS have block-style builders that let you drag and drop elements into your blog articles (drag and drop a video into your article, for example), Bandzoogle offers a more old-school text-based blog. It's okay, but it honestly doesn't make your articles look that great. It looks a little old-school.
That said, if you have a media-rich and design-element-heavy blog on your existing site that you rely on for traffic, and you're wondering whether you can easily migrate to Bandzoogle, I would say "don't do it".
If you're just gonna type a couple of personal updates every month or so, or publish occassional SEO articles like I do, Bandzoogle's blog feature will work just fine for that.
Tour Calendar
I haven't used this, so I won't comment on it.
Customer Support Team
100% yes. This is one of the primary reasons to use Bandzoogle, in my opinion. The team behind Bandzoogle is great. While the website builder still lacks some important features (namely, better analytics, better UI customization and integration with other marketing tools, and a better blog builder), the team has truly designed something that is tailored to musicians and bands.
The customer service team has helped with really complicated stuff, including migrating my domain and setting up my DNS records multiple times (due to switching my email marketing tools a couple of times over the years)
If you're a beginner to website building, it's soooo nice to have a limited set of choices that's pre-designed for you, like Bandzoogle does, rather than having to wander through the forests of other website builders that appeal to mainstream users.
Plus, the FAQ articles on Bandzoogle are written with non-website-professionals in mind. Their support blog articles explain concepts in a more approachable way than a lot of other website builders. Even workng full-time in digital media, I really struggle with Shopify's “support” material. Meanwhile, Bandzoogle's support materials are usually sensibly written in plain language that I can understand.
Bandzoogle Pricing
Here are the 4 pricing tiers from the Bandzoogle website: EPK, Lite, Standard, and Pro. I'm using Pro. I'm currently spending the least on music marketing tools than I ever have before, because I've consolidated all my marketing into Bandzoogle.
For example, here are some things I used to run separately:
- Website = Wordpress
- Email marketing and social media marketing automations = StreetTeam
- Social media link in bio = Koji
Now I just do it like this:
- Website: Bandzoogle
- Email marketing = Bandzoogle (no automations)
- Social media link in bio = Bandzoogle
Bandzoogle pricing versus Wordpress and Shopify
Bandzoogle offers a little less customization than other builders, but it also does away with some feature bloat and narrows in on the marketing, branding, and ecommerce features musicians want.
Because of this, Bandzoogle is cheaper than any other comparable option.
In my experience, Bandzoogle ended up costing roughly 1/2 the price of a comparable Wordpress plan. Especially because you get a domain name (usually ~$15/year) and hosting (usually $2-15/month) included in your Bandzoogle plan.
I've also used Shopify, which was $50/month, so Bandzoogle is much less expensive than Shopify. It's also less advanced, but after using Shopify and dealing with the crazy amount of customization in the setup, I realized that Bandzoogle is really all I need, as long as I'm willing to sacrifice a few customization and tracking things for the sake of simplicity.
Summary
Is Bandzoogle The Best Website Builder For Musicians?
Yes and no. Here is a breakdown of who I would and wouldn't recommend use Bandzoogle:
Use Bandzoogle if…
- Your highest priority is to work with something simple—an all-in-one website where you don't have to learn how to use additional plug-ins, platforms, or apps
- You're completely new to digital marketing and running a website
- You don't plan on doing much custom development on your website
- You have an artist or band website, but it's connected to 5+ separate platforms and tools with separate paid subscriptions in order to function, and you want to reduce costs
- You don't need a lot of detailed analytics about your site—simply knowing how many people are visiting it, playing or purchasing music on your site, and joining your mailing list
If more than one of those things describes you, I think you'll like Bandzoogle.
Don't use Bandzoogle if…
- You're experienced in web design and want to customize the design a lot. I don't think the customization in Bandzoogle is flexible enough to please people who have more complicated ideas for things like pop ups, lead magnet downloads, customizable navs, faceted search, and stuff like that.
- You want access to more advanced tracking and analytics features beyond seeing the stats showing who's visited your site, played or purchased music from it, etc.
- You want to run your website as a media business—if you want to blog for a living, sell affiliate products, or do any fancy digital media stuff where you're really treating your website like a product of a digital media business, go with a major CMS like WordPress.
Conclusion
If you found this useful and want to sign up for Bandzoogle, you'll help me earn a month free if you use this affiliate link: https://bandzoogle.com/?memref=r8a30f
It's a nice perk and it's great to see Bandzoogle giving back and supporting musicians :)
Questions? Send me an email: sarah@sarahtolle.com
If you leave a comment asking a question, there's no feature for me to reply to it (I sent this in as a feature request to Bandzoogle). So, if you have a question, please just send me an email.
Get in touch, check out my music, and feel free to join my email list below.