Editor’s note: This is adapted from a post on Toti’s personal blog. Toti is our CEO, and the argument was too useful for our artist readers to leave on a different domain than ours. Reworked here in the Event Booster house voice, with his blessing.
Social media is great for reaching fans. It’s also rented land. You don’t own your Instagram page. You don’t own your TikTok account. You don’t own your YouTube channel. The platforms do, and they remind you of this every time the algorithm shifts, the rules change, or someone in trust-and-safety has a bad morning and bans your account by mistake.
Your own domain and website is the one piece of your online presence that’s actually yours.
You don’t control social media
Every working artist eventually learns this, usually the expensive way:
- Accounts get hacked, and recovery takes weeks. Sometimes never.
- Platforms die. Myspace was the centre of the music universe. Vine made careers. Both are gone, and the artists who built everything there started from zero.
- Algorithms change overnight, and suddenly your posts reach a fraction of the followers you spent years earning.
- Platforms ban people. Sometimes by mistake, sometimes with no explanation, almost always with an “appeals process” that’s a black hole.
Your website doesn’t have any of those problems. No algorithm decides who sees it. No moderator can take it away. It’s just yours.
Professional email is the most underrated part
Most artists think of a website as the main event and email as a nice-to-have. It’s the other way around. Owning your domain means owning your email — and that’s where the real leverage lives.
Instead of yourband2024@gmail.com, you get:
booking@yourband.comfor gig inquiriespress@yourband.comfor mediamerch@yourband.comfor shop questionsyou@yourband.comfor everything else
A venue or a journalist takes booking@yourband.com ten times more seriously than a Gmail address. That’s not snobbery, that’s signalling — and signalling matters when someone’s deciding whether to spend twenty minutes reading your email.
It’s also durable. Google can suspend your Gmail account tomorrow — and they do, more often than you’d think — and you lose every contact, every conversation, every confirmation you ever sent. With your own domain, you point your email at a different provider and keep the address. Your career doesn’t reset.
Setting it up isn’t hard. Google Workspace gives you the Gmail interface with your domain. Fastmail is simpler, independent, and reliable. Zoho Mail has a free tier if you’re starting tight on budget. Pick one, point your domain at it, done in under an hour.
Your website is the home base
Social media is where you find people. Your website is where you bring them.
A useful site for an artist needs surprisingly little:
- Your music — embeds or links to wherever it lives
- Tour dates — kept up to date, please
- A bio and a press kit — so venues and journalists don’t have to email you for it
- Merch — sold directly to fans, not via a platform that takes a cut
- A mailing list signup — see below
- The professional email addresses you just set up
A single-page site beats no site, by an enormous margin. Carrd does beautiful one-pagers for the price of a coffee. Bandzoogle is built specifically for musicians and handles the merch and mailing-list pieces too. Squarespace if you want it to feel polished without thinking about it. None of them require you to be technical.
Build a mailing list. Treat it like the asset it is.
Your email list is the only audience you truly own. Social followers are borrowed. Subscribers are yours.
- No algorithm decides who sees the email.
- Open rates for musician newsletters embarrass social-media reach.
- If Instagram vanishes tomorrow, your list is intact.
- You can announce anything — releases, tour dates, presale codes, secret shows — directly to the people who care most.
MailerLite and Buttondown are both free up to a thousand subscribers and don’t punish you with weird limits. Pick one. Put the signup form on your website. Offer something for signing up — an unreleased track, presale access, a song-of-the-month — and then actually send the emails. A list you don’t email is a list that forgets you.
What this all costs
Roughly:
- Domain name: $10–15 per year
- Website: free to $20 per month, depending on tool
- Domain email: free to $7 per month per address
- Mailing list: free for the first ~1,000 subscribers
That’s the cost of one or two streaming royalty cheques per year for a professional online presence that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s mood. Compare that to the cost of losing a 50,000-follower Instagram account and rebuilding from zero. Easy maths.
The point isn’t either/or
This isn’t about quitting social media. Social media is the megaphone — keep using it. Your website is the foundation underneath the megaphone. They do different jobs:
- Social media: find new people, engage with the existing ones
- Website: convert curious followers into committed fans
- Mailing list: talk directly to those committed fans, on your terms
- Domain email: keep every professional conversation under one roof you own
You need all four. Only one of them is actually yours.
Go do it this week
You’ve spent years building your art. Spend an afternoon building the one piece of your online presence that nobody can take away. Buy the domain. Set up the email. Throw up a single page. Stick a signup form on it. The whole thing — start to finish — is shorter than a soundcheck.