The year in review 2024: building the artist-fan relationship

As online trends shift, one thing stays constant: to have a sustainable career in music, you need to work on building meaningful connections with your fans. Despite the boom and bust of social media platforms, streaming trends, and viral moments, musicians who prioritize genuine connections with their audience are nurturing a strategy that is fundamental to building a sustainable music career.

Part of this process is sitting down and thinking: what will work for me? How much effort and energy can I put into not only making music, but running my music career as a business, and making enough money to continue?

We tried to help you answer these questions, and create a career path out of your music, with all of the updates rolled out in 2024. Here’s a look back:

Building the artist-fan relationship

A huge part of ensuring that you will be successful at carving out a sustainable music career is cultivating that all important fan-artist relationship. 

Using your own professional website is key to driving fan engagement. Social media is important but fleeting, and capturing those fans correctly will position you to inform them about shows, merch drops, and more, building a true audience that cares about your music.

Using your website

Your musician website is not only a curated space on the web, but should also be the main source of your direct-to fan tools. 

Domain name

Part of having your own music website means using a custom URL where fans can always find you. In 2024 we opened up Bandzoogle's domain registration options, offering many different custom domain extensions on a recurring subscription.

E-commerce updates

To maximize the revenue you’re making from your music, you’ll want to run sales through your website. This might mean selling your music online, offering merch products, or event tickets, crowdfunding, or fan subscriptions. There are a lot of ways musicians can make money - use your website to drive engagement and make sales.

To help you reach your sales goals, in 2024 we rolled out several updates to the online 'Store' feature. From a new Store display option to a searchable album update, there were lots of tweaks made to make sure your website store is easy to use, and as functional as possible.

QR codes

In a sea of options, it helps to get creative with your music business. To help with this we added QR codes that allow you to share your music in a modern way. Use the QR codes built into your website features to promote your music online, or at live shows.

Making it your version of beautiful

A functional website is absolutely key to making your direct-to-fan tools work as seamlessly as possible to give your fans the best experience possible. Once you’ve nailed down all of the ways to use your website’s tools to make money and leverage your career, you’ll need to consider your website's overall style and design. In a visual world, making sure your online presence stands out and represents who you are as an artist is important in creating a consistent brand.

Following modern trends of whitespace and sections is important in offering templates that are both mobile-friendly and beautiful. In keeping up with design trends, we added many new templates this year:

The Beatrice template: kitschy, colorful, and chaotic, this theme calls to mind music of the 2000s era.

The Amelia template: featuring a narrow header and strong color schemes.

The Benjamin template: offering a super-customizable header area.

The Odeum template: including a full-width header image or video to sit behind your call-to-action.

The Benily theme: introducing header shapes built to customize a unique look.

Each of our new templates use a color palette selected by our design team to make sure you’re using modern and coordinated colors out of the box if you’d like - or you can tailor the colors to compliment your imagery and music. Every design comes with both an out of the box solution, as well as the ability to customize and personalize for self expression.

We also released 6 Bold and Minimal theme variants this year, plus tips on how to best use them: Bold and minimal website templates

To round out the new design options, in 2024 we added section shapes - a powerful tool to give your website content stylish flair. We also added shapes to image features, alongside more fine-tuned controls. These options will allow you to experiment and create a look that you love before saving.

Making money with subscriptions

In 2024 we updated many of our fan subscriptions articles to help you create a commission-free option that puts more money in your pocket. If you’re invested in making your fans a part of your online community, starting a fan subscription service might be an excellent choice for you in 2025. The beauty of this option is that you can use all of the tools already within your Bandzoogle website to offer and promote fan subscriptions. 

If you’re ready to take your subscriptions service to the next level, see: 71 ways to reward your music fan subscribers and How to promote subscriptions to your music fans.

An EPK as a first step

Independent artists just starting out know that they need an online presence, especially if they plan to release music or book tour dates. An EPK is a great place to start to get a concise Onesheet ready, which will help you promote your music and yourself.

Once you’ve grown into using the direct-to-fan tools, an EPK can become an updatable page on your full music website, tailored to whatever your goals are for 2025 and beyond.

In 2024 we released an update to our best-in-class EPK product, including an EPK plan for those starting out. We also improved on the downloadable EPK options, revamping the PDF creator which allows you to make a stunning EPK right from your website, for print or easy sharing over email.

See Creating a Onesheet for your music: 8 tips for success and How to advance your shows the right way for more tips.

Taking your career to the next level

Our mission at Bandzoogle has always been to build the best tools for musicians to promote and sell their music online. We are committed to helping independent artists turn their passion for music into a thriving music career that generates money and reaches a broad fanbase. 

To help with understanding how best to use all of these tools, in 2024 we launched an advanced education webinar series covering topics like selling music effectively and optimizing your website for SEO. We add to these every month, and you can check out the recorded replays here: Musician Education video series.

Looking forward

It has never been more important for an artist to leverage the direct-to-fan tools available to them to create a following online. The options for artists to monetize what they do well —create music— offer endless possibilities. Our hope is that Bandzoogle can help you understand these tools and put them into use, so you can effectively grow a thriving music business that will carry your art forward to many more people over the next year.