When it comes to being an artist in the 21st Century, an online store is one of the most important things in your arsenal. A great online store such as Music Glue can be the difference between slugging it out as a starving artist and turning your passion into a sustainable career. What is MusicGlue.com you ask?
Well, in this article, we’ll delve into the service offered by MusicGlue.com and investigate how their platform can help you build a website and online store.
If this sounds good to you, keep reading for everything you need to know about Music Glue!
What Does Music Glue Do?
Music Glue, a UK-based company founded in 2007, is an easy-to-use website builder complete with an online store. Music Glue artists can choose from a range of base templates. The templates can be adjusted to reflect different colorways and an artist’s own logos and photos. The designer is really easy to use and no coding ability is needed.
Music Glue’s main unique selling point is the combination of a simple website builder plus an e-commerce platform for a really competitive price. It is one of the cheapest options for artists looking to have a simple website and an online store.
The e-commerce platform is pretty advanced. Supporting direct-to-fan concert and live stream ticketing, merchandise, and physical stores, artists fan clubs, and multi-seller artist marketplaces (so record labels can also take advantage of the platform). It even has built-in toolsets for fulfillment and warehouse information. This makes it easy for you to manage things such as stock levels and set different prices for shipping to different parts of the world.
Beyond the features listed above, there are also a couple of nice features beneath the surface. We go into these a bit more below.
Connect Your Own Domain
Through your Music Glue website, you can connect your own domain. This means that you can set your web address to www.yourbandname.com or whatever you would like.
Furthermore, it’s really easy to connect your social media platforms so your fans can easily navigate to those channels.
Embed Your Spotify Player
It’s also really easy to embed your Spotify player and Spotify follow button.
This allows you to grow your Spotify audience without your fans leaving your web page.
Manage Your Mailing List
Music Glue also helps you manage your mailing list. You can include a mailing list signup button on your webpage and signups automatically get imported into a text file. You can download them and import them into whatever system you are using.
Or, there is an additional Mail Chimp plugin that can seamlessly integrate your mailing list signups via Music Glue into the Mail Chimp platform. If you are using Mail Chimp to manage your mailing list, of course.
Music Glue customer service is also incredibly helpful and easy to contact via the website. The great thing is that they can support customers from both sides. Meaning they can help with issues an artist or record label is having with the platform. As well as helping with issues encountered by website users who are buying your products.
There is no Music Glue contact number as such but rather support via the chat function within the Music Glue account. Or, via a dedicated support email address. Responses typically come within a day or two, so it is a relatively quick turnaround on problems when they occur.
MusicGlue.com also offers specific Music Glue Jobs for musicians. These are typically partnerships with key festivals, etc. where artists can submit applications to play by submitting their Music Glue page.
Music Glue Pricing
Music Glue’s pricing has gone through a few different iterations over the years. When it was originally founded, artists could sign up for free and build their websites. Music Glue’s model was to make all of their profit by taking a cut of each sale.
As the business has grown and the market has changed, they have now landed on two distinct offerings – Premium and Lite.
Lite
At £4.99 per month, the Lite offering is pretty competitive. There is also a 2% transaction charge on all sales which Music Glue claim allows them to make sure they are able to maintain a low entry-level price point.
With the Lite offering, you have no minimum contract. You also have no limits on how many products you can sell and the templates are fully mobile optimized so work wherever your fans are visiting you from.
You can also create your online store in advance and only start paying when you are ready to go live and start selling. Therefore, you can make sure you are happy before you move forward with MusicGlue.com.
Premium
The Premium offering is much more comprehensive. It includes detailed analytics, dedicated customer service, no additional transaction fees, support for multiple types of products (including tickets and fan club subscriptions), pre-sale/pre-order campaigns, chart eligibility in key markets, and advanced online marketing integration with other platforms such as Google and Facebook.
However, the pricing for Premium users is bespoke, so it’s a case of getting in touch with Music Glue and allowing them to provide a quote specific to you.
Alternatives To Music Glue
So, what are the alternatives to MusicGlue.com?
Here are the three main alternatives open to you:
Music Glue vs Squarespace
Squarespace is arguably one of the best-known brands in the e-commerce/website-building market. Although they are not specific to music, they do offer a wide range of services for small businesses that musicians and labels can also make use of.
Squarespace has a wider range of templates that can be used to build a website. We think it’s fair to say that their builder is more comprehensive and more intuitive than Music Glues.
They have also expertly positioned themselves as a one-stop shop where you don’t need to utilize other platforms. For example, Squarespace offers a domain finder as part of the package. So, you can use your own custom web address and set it all up through Squarespace.
Squarespace also offers a platform for mailing lists. So again, rather than needing to tie lots of different services together as you do with Music Glue, you can do everything through the same platform.
However, you do pay for these additional features. Squarespace has 3 different e-commerce packages which range from £15 to £30 per month which is significantly more expensive than Music Glue.
Music Glue vs Wix
A few years ago, Wix was primarily a flash website provider. This was great in the early 2000s as an easy way to build engaging websites with no coding knowledge. However, as Flash is no longer an active product, Wix has had to diversify and has actually built a really solid platform that is great for musicians.
The templates are easy to use and there are a lot of choices. They also offer a domain connect service, search engine optimization, social media marketing platforms, and Google ad credits. As well as the ability to manage your mailing list directly through the platform.
The pricing is a little kinder as well. The most popular package comes in at £8.50 per month and will suit most musicians just fine. It is also easy to upgrade between packages as your needs change.
Music Glue vs Мusic Gateway Showcases
Hot off the press, we here at Мusic Gateway are in the process of launching our very own Artist Sites and Showcases service. Showcases is already available for those with a Game Changer membership but, it will also shortly be rolled out to other Мusic Gateway members and is totally free of charge.
Like MusicGlue.com, you can connect your social media and streaming accounts and you can also sell gig tickets and highlight specific things at the top of your page. it is totally customisable so you can give it your own flavor.
As you’d expect with Мusic Gateway, there are a couple of really nice features that make the Showcases offering stand out. It allows you to submit songs to projects and sync licensing opportunities through Мusic Gateway directly. You can also distribute music to all the major Digital Service Providers totally free of charge, which we think is a really unique and valuable option!
You can set your own unique Мusic Gateway Showcases URL, but there is also the ability to link directly to your own website. So, Showcases might be the kind of thing you’d use in parallel to other services to create a broad and compelling online presence.
That Was Our Review Of MusicGlue.com
MusicGlue.com is a really great tool and in terms of pricing, it is probably the cheapest e-commerce platform on the market where you can have your own web page and online store.
You can also sometimes get Music Glue Coupons for reduced fees for the first year. So, it’s worth staying close to their website just in case a deal emerges!
We would argue that in terms of features and functionality, it is not the strongest player. So, whether it is right for you as an artist will largely depend on where you are in your journey. If you are relatively early in your career and don’t have a huge catalog of merchandise and physical products to sell, Music Glue is a really good and cost-effective option.
On the other hand, if you are selling a lot of products and have a specific goal for your website, then perhaps Squarespace or Wix might be a better alternative.
Have you ever used MusicGlue.com? Let us know about your experiences in the comment section below! Most importantly though, don’t forget to check out our Showcases page so that industry professionals can discover more about you and the music you make!
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