Squarespace Adds Audio Collections For Musicians To Its Full-Featured Site Platform

Squarespace is a website-building and hosting platform with beautiful templates, excellent customer service and a variety of features including blogging and digital/physical ecommerce. They recently announced Audio Collections, the first of their musician-specific features. Audio Collections is an audio player designed for uploading and playing digital albums while displaying artwork. Squarespace was already a viable choice for musicians such as Chance the Rapper, Real Magic and The Lone Bellow. Now they're getting even better.

Squarespace is a website service that I should have written about before. It has an impressive array of features that include many relevant to musicians:

site management app for iOS and Android including options for multiple site management,

content display from Twitter, Instagram and more on any page, sidebar or footer,

single interface sales of digital and physical goods including delivery of digital downloads,

futuristic 3d packing visualizations for shipping estimates.

Plus more features for musicians said to be on the way as well as some thoughtful touches already in place.

Squarespace For Musicians

Last week Squarespace introduced its first music-specific feature called Audio Collections:

"With Audio Collections, you can upload music directly to Squarespace and easily share your albums from your website, complete with a beautiful, integrated player and album art display."

"To add an Audio Collection, log into your website and click 'Add Page' under the Content area of your site manager. Select 'Album', then upload your album art and music files by dropping them directly into the collection. Squarespace recognizes the metadata of your audio files, so information like song title and artist name will be populated automatically."

The announcement also mentions other features worth noting by musicians and namechecks a few artists currently using Squarespace:

Chance The Rapper

Real Magic

The Lone Bellow

My Experience of Test Driving Squarespace

I checked out Squarespace for a site I was working on back in the spring. I found their pricing fair, given what they offer, and that looks like it's only going to become a better deal for musicians.

The templates look great and you can also do your own design. Actually I found the design a bit much for Flux Research where I'm trying to forefront my writing (relaunch in progress).

Given the visual nature of music marketing and, arguably, visual elements as an extension of music itself, I think the templates could be the beginning of a great artist's website. I also found customer service to be some of the best I've encountered for such things based on over a decade of use of various blogging and webhosting platforms.

But, as I noted, the designs were actually a bit too elegant for my particular project. I also found their approach to site management, which splits things into a back-end control panel for certain aspects and a front-end editor for other aspects, to be a bit confusing. It was an awkward fit over the two weeks I spent creating a site and tweaking the template.

Nevertheless, I would put it on a shortlist of site services to check out for musicians in need of an official website.

More:

• StageBloc Launches Fansites For Justin Timberlake, Kid Rock and You
• Bandzoogle Acquires Onesheet To Expand Artist Website Platform
• CASH Music Launches Free Hosted Platform With Web Tools For DIY Musicians

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

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