Somebody hears one of your songs, likes it enough to look you up, and lands on your page. You get about eight seconds to answer three questions before they leave: who is this, what does it sound like, and is there anything worth doing here. Most artist pages answer the first, half-answer the second, and forget the third entirely.
Who actually lands on your artist page
It is almost never a superfan. The people arriving are strangers who just heard you: someone who found the song on a playlist, someone who saw a clip and tapped through, a promoter checking whether you are a real prospect, a journalist deciding if you are worth twenty minutes.
Which means the page is not for your existing audience — they already know where your music is. It is for the person who is mildly curious and has not decided anything yet. Everything on the page should be judged by whether it helps that person decide, or gets in their way.
The second thing worth knowing: most of them are on a phone, often inside an in-app browser that behaves nothing like Safari. Whatever you build, open it on your own phone from Instagram before you point anyone at it.
What has to be on the page
- A current photo and your name, above the fold. Not a logo, not a moody crop where you are unidentifiable. People are checking they found the right artist.
- Music they can play without leaving. The latest release first, and links to it on every service — not just the one you happen to use.
- A short bio. Two or three sentences at the top, with the longer version further down for anyone who wants it.
- One video. A live clip or a music video does more to convince a stranger than any amount of prose about your influences.
- Every social account you actually use — and nothing you abandoned in 2022. A dead link is worse than a missing one.
- A way to join your list. The one thing on the page that gives you a relationship you own rather than one a platform lends you.
- A contact route. A booking or press email, clearly labelled. This is how offers reach you, and it is astonishing how many artists omit it.
- Anything time-sensitive, pinned at the top. A tour, a new single, a pre-save — the thing you would say first if the visitor were standing in front of you.
The order matters more than the list
Most artist pages contain roughly the right things in roughly the wrong order — bio first, then a wall of social icons, then the music somewhere near the bottom. That sequence is written from the artist’s point of view, not the visitor’s.
Put it in the order the questions arrive. Name and photo, so they know they are in the right place. Music, immediately, because that is the only reason they came. One short line of context. Then the current thing you want them to know about. Then the longer bio, videos and socials for the minority who scroll.
A Playloudr front page is arranged this way by default — your latest release and featured content at the top, a What’s New section for whatever is happening now, then bio, socials, video and contact underneath. It lives at playloudr.com/yourname, which is short enough to say out loud from a stage.
Writing a bio someone will actually read
The standard artist bio is a paragraph of adjectives with no facts in it — genre-blending, atmospheric, drawing on influences from Radiohead to Burial. It tells a stranger nothing, and it tells a journalist you have not thought about how you are described.
Write two versions. The short one is two sentences: who you are, where you are from, and what you sound like in words a person would actually use. The long one is three short paragraphs and can contain the things that are genuinely true and specific — the record you made in a cottage in Wales, the support slot, the sync, the fact you played bass in a band people have heard of.
Write it in the third person if it is going to be lifted for press, which it will be. And update it when something changes — a bio that still describes your 2023 EP as forthcoming is the clearest possible signal that nobody is home.
Artist page, link in bio and smart link: which does what
| Artist page | Link in bio | Smart link | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is about | You | Wherever you currently want traffic | One release |
| How long it stays relevant | Permanently, with updates | Changes constantly | For the life of that song |
| Best used for | Bios, press, booking, the URL you say out loud | Stories and posts pointing at this week’s thing | Every post and ad about a specific release |
| Answers “who is this?” | Yes | Barely | No |
| Collects email addresses | Yes | Sometimes | Optionally |
These are not competitors — most artists want all three. The mistake is using a link-in-bio list as if it were an artist page, and then wondering why nobody who lands there becomes a fan.
Decide the one thing you want a visitor to do
A page with five equally weighted buttons produces five weak outcomes. Before you build anything, finish this sentence: if a stranger does exactly one thing here, I want it to be ______.
For most independent artists the honest answer is join my list. Streams are rented — a platform decides who sees you and can change its mind on a Tuesday. An email address is yours, and it works whether or not anyone is feeling generous with your reach that month. Putting a sign-up on your front page is the lowest-effort version of this; a promo gate offering something worth having is the higher-converting one. There is more on both in how to collect fan emails as a musician.
If you have a release coming, the answer changes for those weeks: the one thing becomes the pre-save, and everything else on the page steps back. That is normal — the primary action should follow whatever stage of the release cycle you are in.
What to leave off
A splash screen, an autoplaying video, or anything that has to load before the page appears. On a phone, on mobile data, that is the whole visit.
Social icons for accounts you do not use. Every dead link is a small piece of evidence that you are not active.
A wall of press quotes from blogs that no longer exist. Two good ones beat eleven.
Your full discography as the first thing. New listeners want the current single, not a back catalogue to work through chronologically.
Anything you will not maintain. A tour section with no dates, a blog with one post from last year — an empty section is worse than no section.
Keeping it current without it becoming a chore
The most common failure is not a badly built page. It is a good page that stopped being true nine months ago.
Tie the update to something you already do. Every time you release, three things change: the featured release, the What’s New line, and the primary action. That is five minutes, once every release cycle, and it is the difference between a page that converts strangers and a page that quietly tells them you have stopped.
Once a year, do the longer pass: new photo, rewritten bio, prune the dead links, and check every button on your actual phone.