How to put your music on your site: Spotify, Bandcamp or your own tracks

A musician's site can open with the best photo and carry the most careful biography. Still, what people want above all is to hear you. There are three ways to give them that: link to a platform, embed its player, or upload your own tracks. Each one costs you something, and each one treats your visitors differently.

Linking

A link is a button that takes people to your music on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, SoundCloud or wherever else it lives. Whoever taps it leaves your site and listens on the platform they already use, with their account, their playlists and their own way of saving what they like.

What you gain: a link is light. It loads nothing from anyone else on your page, and every play counts on the platform, where followers and statistics build up.

What it costs: the person leaves. Say they came to check your dates or to book you. Now they are in another app, and whether they come back is up to them.

A link suits an audience that already knows you and wants to save you. It suits a booker less well. They are deciding whether to hire you, and you are sending them somewhere else for something that should happen on your own page.

Embedding

Embedding puts the platform's player inside your site: a Spotify, Bandcamp or SoundCloud box that plays without anyone leaving the page. Most musicians' sites do this.

What you gain: people listen where they already are, and the player comes with the cover, the track list and a link to follow you.

What it costs: that box is a piece of another website inside yours. It loads the service's code, which is heavy, and it can set its own cookies or learn that someone visited your page. Some services also play only a short preview to anyone who is not signed in, so your listener hears part of the track and nothing more.

Your own tracks

The third way is to upload your audio files and play them in a player on your site.

What you gain: the tracks are yours. You choose which ones go up, in what order and under what titles. They play in full, and no outside service gets in. You can also put up material the platforms do not have: a live take, a demo for promoters, a preview of a record that is not out yet.

What it costs: those plays do not count on any platform. You need the files and the right to publish them, and you prepare the versions yourself.

Privacy, in one sentence

When a page loads another service's player, that service learns about the visit, even if nobody presses play.

The same goes for embedded videos and maps. It also has a useful side effect: the page loads faster, because nothing comes in from outside until it is needed.

What a booker listens to first

People who book hear a lot of proposals, and they almost never listen to a whole record. They play the first track, hear how it opens and decide whether to carry on. Which track comes first matters more than how many you put up.

If you play in several line-ups, put the one you are trying to sell now at the top, and move the others further down or to another page. A jazz trio and a wedding band can both be part of your life, but in the same list they confuse people. And if what you sell is the live show, a live take says more than the best studio master.

So which one?

You do not have to pick just one. A common mix, and a sensible one: your own tracks, or a player that waits for a click, for people who want to hear you right there, and links to the platforms for people who want to save you. The booker listens without leaving, and your audience finds where to follow you.

For what people who book look at besides your music, read what a booker looks for on your site.

In Pages

Every Pages site has a player in a bar at the foot of every page, in your theme's colours. You give it a Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp or SoundCloud link, or you upload your own tracks.

With a link, the service's player does not load until the visitor opens it. Your own tracks play in the site's own player, without any outside service, and they keep playing while the visitor moves from page to page. A streaming service's player cannot do that, because it starts again on each page.

Videos and maps also wait for a click, behind a notice that says which service they load from. If your site has nothing to listen to, Health tells you and takes you to the player. To decide which details to share and which to keep back, read on in privacy on a musician's website.