Bandzoogle Upgrades Web Site Builder And Music Marketing Platform
5 Hypebot Readers Get Bandzoogle Free For 6 Months
Bandzoogle.com, the self-service web site and marketing platform for musicians, has launched a major series of upgrades. A new "Custom Style Editor" enables any artist to create a robust custom website using their own domain name without the help of a web designer. They can add their own images, typefaces, and backgrounds for a custom look.
"This is the first time musicians have been able to create a completely custom website, right in their web browser. No other musician web site builder offers this design flexibility." said Bandzoogle founder Chris Vinson. "Hundreds of amazing sites have already been built with this new tool." (Watch a demo video after the jump.)
Free Integrated Music Marketing Tools
Other new features include:
- Full integration with ArtistData.com – In addition to Bandzoogle's existing tools integration with ArtistData enables members to easily post content to dozens more sites such as Last.FM, PureVolume, and Eventful.
- Mobile fan clubs – Send text message blasts to fans from within the Bandzoogle c
- A new $9.95 per month Lite Plan includes a free .COM address
The video overview:
To get six month of the new Bandzoogle free just be one of the first 5 to use the promo code "hypebot" at checkout.
Congrats to BZ on this. Site looks great. We’ve really enjoyed working with them getting the ArtistData integration up and running.
Video isn’t working though, fyi ..
Thanks. Just tested the video and it works fine. I agre with you. BZ is onto something.
I really like how Bandzoogle is shaping up…really clean wysiwyg.
It would be cool to see them partner with topspsin & mobbase /mixmatchmusic.
Thanks to Chris and his team for a great upgrade to the service.
All ReverbNation users get access to most of these upgrades via our partnership with BZ on the ‘Sitebuilder’ product available in the ReverbNation dashboard. So far the response from our customers has been very positive.
Well done!
Jed Carlson
Co-Founder, COO, ReverbNation.com
Are you saying that using sitebuilder, you can do the same as with bandzoogle, but for free at reverb nation?
No, I am not. Sorry for the confusion.
‘Sitebuilder’ is the web hosting product that ReverbNation offers in partnership with Bandzoogle. It is powered by the Bandzoogle software, and is automatically integrated with the Artist’s ReverbNation profile. i.e. content posted at RN flows automatically to the Artist’s ‘Sitebuilder’ website. In addition, certain RN functionality flows to your sitebuilder website automatically, like widgets, the Reverb Store, Fanreach email collection, etc. And stats from sitebuilder flow back into your Reverb Dashboard, .
Sitebuilder costs $17.95/month.
It’s really good to see Bandzoogle continuing to add new functionality. My initial hesitance recommending it as a resource for musicians was that while they would quickly establish an online presence, they were then beholden to Bandzoogle’s speed of innovation and feature addition schedule. For bands that consistently audition new technologies to incorporate into their business model this is a potential speedtrap. But for those artists incapable of setting up and maintaining their own WordPress site it’s the perfect solution that gets them back to working on other aspects of their career.
I’m a web developer, so I see these things differently than a lot of folks, I believe. I looked at one of the Bandzoogle websites a band created and the code Bandzoogle generates is pretty awful. Now this can affect how websites look in certain browsers and although most normal folks don’t think about that, us web developers have to.
One of those websites had a tiled background that didn’t tile correctly and looked pretty bad, as well. There are also a ton of sites with frames, which is great if your website exists in the 90’s, but not so great in this day and age (of course, I doubt artists even consider things like SEO, although they should).
Also, who owns the copyright to the finished website? Does it sit on Bandzoogle’s servers or an artist’s own web hosting? That could also be an issue. Especially if Bandzoogle decides to pull a MySpace and randomly accidentally deletes sites.
I guess this is a nice inexpensive solution, but it still doesn’t beat hiring an actual web developer. And in the long run, it’s probably cheaper to hire a developer because $09.95 per month may not sound like a lot of money NOW, but after 12 months, that adds up. And you still don’t get a good custom solution that an honest to goodness web developer can give you.
So an artist can pay Bandzoogle for something generic, or they can find a good web designer/developer and get something that’s custom made to fit their brand (and again, artists rarely think about branding, but a website is 100% part of that).
And I am apparently the only person in the industry with this opinion.
I agree with you Robin
Hi Robin,
Sorry, I’m I don’t believe that hiring a web developer is better than building your own site with Bandzoogle. I should know. I was a web developer for a major label for 10 years. I built over 500 sites for multi-platinum artists, and was in charge of promoting them.
I know first hand that giving artists the tools to manage and update their sites themselves results in pages with a lot more personal and frequently updated content. Pretty, flashy custom sites that are rarely updated have few return visits.
For a designer to match the features built-in a Bandzoogle site would require a lot of third party apps, or a ton of WordPress customization. (We have a built-in mailing list, music player, posting to social networks, store, music download system, stats, SMS text messaging, and a lot more.)
In terms of price, $9.95/month includes your domain name registration AND all of the features above. Sure there is hosting alone that is a buck or two cheaper, but that doesn’t include the expense of hours of configuration.
And yes, because we offer tools that let bands make their own design, it isn’t always possible to have perfectly validating CSS/XHTML. (Web designers love to use this against Bandzoogle)
The fact is, it makes no difference to Google. The majority of our members, even with common names, rank at the top of their search results. Yes, even with the optional music player frame enabled. Do a search for any of our featured artists and you’ll see they are in the top 5 of their results.
Re: accidentally deleting sites… well, we’ve been around 7 years and that has never happened. We host at a top tier data center and backup all sites to Amazon S3. We have redundant everything. The benefit of charging for our service is that we can invest in the best quality hosting.
Re: Bandzoogle sites as generic; the whole point of our custom site builder is that you can build whatever you want. There isn’t anything generic about it. It lets you put in your branding. Here’s an example of a custom site that a member with NO html skills created; http://sheenagrobb.com/ . I’d say that site reflects her brand.
A lot of designers have emailed us positive comments about the new system, and have made great websites around it. I think that as DIY tools improve, they will be used more and more by designers as a platform to build even better band sites.
Chris
founder, http://www.bandzoogle.com
Thanks Matthew. Though we do have a full range of features, it is always possible to paste in HTML/CSS/JS code for external features. This gives members the flexibility to add outside services easily.
Chris
Hi my name is Beatmaker E.I. from Uplifted Productions, LLC
I agree with Robin. I used to have an account with Bandzoogle, and yes they are a great company for what they do. And they do it better than any other company I’m aware of, but I decided that the cost over a long period of time just doesn”t do it for my pocket. I found it more financially sound to just get a web host account with Ble Host (or any one you prefer) and put up my own site. Granted not everyone has the skill to do that, but if you do, or are up to the challenge, it will come out cheaper it the long run.It’s not the best design, and I did use a template, but I got the hosting dirt cheap for a crazy amount of years and the template was FREE!
Sorry, for the typo, that was suppose to be Blue Host.
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I would be carefull before signing up with BandZoogle. When you cancel your hosting account they will keep your domain name.
When you cancel, your domain is instantly transferred to your name. If this didn’t happen for you, we have very easy ways to contact us, by email (chris at bandzoogle.com) or live chat during business hours. We would *never* hold a domain for any reason. If you are in fact a former customer and had trouble, I would be very interested in learning more about the details.