Privacy on a musician’s website: what you show and what you don’t
Your town, your phone, your press kit: which details to publish, which to keep for the people who book you, and how to do it safely.
By Joan Subirats, founder of The Jazz Passport6 min read
In this article
Your website exists so people can find you. A promoter who opens it wants to know who you are, what you play, where you work and how to reach you. They don’t need your street, your children’s school or the number that rings on your own phone. Somewhere between those two lists runs a line: on one side, what helps someone book you; on the other, what only helps someone find your front door. This post is about where that line falls, what to keep for the people who book you, and how to keep it without making a project of it.
What belongs in plain view
A musician’s site needs very little personal information to do its job. This is enough:
- Your stage name, or your band’s, written the way you want it on a poster.
- A photo. A press shot, not one taken in your living room.
- What you do and what you play: the roles and instruments that define you.
- Your town or your area. A booker cares whether you are nearby, because travel costs money. “Manchester” or “Lisbon and around” tells them enough. They have no use for the street.
- A way to reach you that is meant for work: a booking form, or an email address you use only for that.
- Your dates, your music and what the press has said.
Everything beyond that is optional, and much of it is better left off the site.
What you do not need to publish
Your address
The venues you play have public addresses. Your home doesn’t need one, and neither does the rehearsal room if your instruments spend the night there. If you teach at home, the student gets the address when they book a lesson. It doesn’t have to sit on your front page.
Your personal phone number
Automated programs crawl the internet collecting phone numbers and email addresses for spam lists and sales calls, and a number on a web page is exactly what they are looking for. Once it has been copied, you can’t take it back. The phone still has its moment. When the conversation with a promoter gets serious and the details need settling, you give them the number yourself.
Your family
Photos of your children, the name of their school, your partner at soundcheck. On social media you may decide to share some of that. On your professional site it tells a booker nothing, and it stays on show for anyone who looks, for years.
Details nobody asked for
Your full date of birth. A passport or ID number in a technical sheet. Bank details on a sample invoice. It sounds obvious, and still they turn up in PDFs that get forwarded around without anyone noticing.
In plain view
- Your town or the area you work in
- A booking form or a booking-only email
- Chosen press photos
- Your concert dates
Better kept back
- Your home or rehearsal room address
- Your personal mobile number
- Photos and names of your family
- Your fee, contracts and tax details
The risks, without the drama
None of this calls for fear. It does help to know what happens to something once it is published.
What is published gets copied. Search engines keep copies. So do internet archives, and anyone can take a screenshot. Deleting something from your site doesn’t delete it anywhere else.
Small facts add up. Your neighbourhood mentioned in one place, a photo of your front door in another, your tour dates on the concerts page. Put together, they say when your home is empty. Your dates have to stay public, because they are your work. The rest of the picture is what you can avoid handing out.
Photos carry data inside. Many photos taken with a phone store the exact place where they were taken. Before you upload a shot from home or from rehearsal, look at the file information for a location and remove it.
So do PDFs. An exported press kit can carry your computer’s user name, earlier versions of the text, or comments you thought you had deleted.
A form rather than an exposed email
Write your email address on a page as plain text and sooner or later it lands on a spam list. A form keeps your address off the page. It also asks what you would ask anyway: what kind of event, which date, which place. The message that reaches you already has what you need to reply, instead of “hi, how much do you charge?”.
If you’d rather publish an email address, use one that exists only for bookings and keep your personal one out of it. If you later start working with an agency or a manager, you hand that address over and nothing else has to change.
Press material on private pages
The press kit, the technical rider, high-resolution photos, an early listen to the new record: all of that is for professionals. Some of those documents also carry other people’s details, like your sound engineer’s phone number or the name of whoever runs the lights. None of it should come up when someone searches your name.
A private page handles this. It isn’t in the menu or in search results, and it opens only for someone with the link or the password. You put the link in your email to the promoter and that’s the whole job. If the link travels further than it should, you change it. We explain how to put the kit together in the press kit guide.
Check your site in ten minutes
- Search for your name and look at what comes up besides your site
- Search for your phone number in quotation marks
- Open your site in a private window, the way a stranger would see it
- Open your PDFs and check their properties: author, comments, hidden data
- Check whether the photos you uploaded carry a location
- Remove old pages with details you no longer want on show
How Pages handles it
In Pages, none of this depends on you remembering every item on that list.
Your identity card hides what you decide. You can hide your roles, your instruments and your town, each one on its own. A hidden fact never reaches the browser. It isn’t on the page, in what search engines read, or on the card that appears when someone shares the link.
Private pages for the press kit and the rider. They open for whoever has the secret link or the password, and search engines don’t list them. Renew the link and the old one stops opening the page. Change the password and anyone who knew the previous one is locked out.
A booking form protected from spam. It asks for the kind of event, the date, the place and a message. The request arrives in your Studio Inbox and in your email, and when you reply, your answer goes straight to the person who wrote.
Statistics without cookies. You see how many visits you get, from which countries and where they came from, without identifying anyone and without a cookie banner. Your visitors’ privacy counts too; we explain how in statistics without cookies.
Your account is yours. You can download all of it as a single file whenever you want.
Your site, without the website work. Ask for your invitation.
Pages is the site and the Studio for musicians by The Jazz Passport. The technical side is done; you bring the music.