25 of the Best Websites of Bands and Musicians
Published in GalleriesWebsites from various types of entertainment-related industries can often be a source of design inspiration. Bands and musicians need to have a website that is attractive to visitors and provides all of the necessary information that fans will want to find. In this post we’ll feature 25 websites for your design inspiration. Also, please see 35 Inspirational Websites Designs from the Music Industry.
Most band websites will have some things in common. Of course, they’ll usually include some prominent photos of the artist or band. They’ll probably include a bio, tour dates, a shop to buy or download music, usually some song samples, and possibly a blog. Take a look at this collection and let us know which ones you like best (or which ones you don’t like) by leaving a comment.
A soft blue background with a large photo that matches the cover of his latest album.
A little bit more of a blog style layout that features recent headlines, with upcoming tour dates also shown on the homepage. And of course, a large promo for the current album.
Darryl’s website has a nice wood and fabric background and a large photo to welcome visitors.
Justin Timberlake’s website is a lot different than most that you will see for musicians or bands. It has more of a news or magazine style layout, and the design style is more clean than most. It’s a nice stylish design that doesn’t follow all of the current trends for sites in the industry.
Anthony Hamilton’s site has a nice textured background and a welcoming color scheme. Video, audio, and newsletter signup are also featured prominently on the homepage.
Francesca Battistelli’s site is colorful and creative. The use of colors, textures, and graphics make it very welcoming for visitors. It also has a hand-drawn feel thanks in part to the fonts.
Rocket Club’s site’s most significant feature is probably the large, textured background. The large header image of the band also stands out, of course. The homepage features news headlines and upcoming shows.
U2′s site has more of a magazine style to it with thumbnails of different “highlights” leading to more content and videos.
Daughtry’s site uses a full-size background image, plus a faded photo of the band. A video is shown above the fold, along with some audio tracks.
The website of Death Cab for Cutie has a retro/vintage feel. The layout is also a bit unusual and interesting.
The main element on Jake Owen’s homepage is the music video. The design of the site is built accordingly around the video, with a large photo of Jake to the left. The site also makes good use of textures.
Zac Brown Band uses dark textures and a large header photo to make an immediate impression.
Brad Paisley’s site uses a colorful background and a hand drawn/painted skyline. The site also has a blog-type feel with the latest news section being the most prominent content area.
Darius Rucker’s site uses a large background photo as it’s primary design element. Latest news and tour dates are shown on the homepage, plus an audio player is available.
Madonna’s homepage has a pop art inspired photo of to the right, with some colorful splatter effects. The video is displayed front and center for plenty of focus.
The Specials have a simple layout. It consists of the logo, a band photo, and a vertical navigation menu. More content is located below. The design has a retro feel.
Jason Aldean’s site uses a large background image that also serves as the header, along with the logo and menu. Photos and video are shown prominently, and latest news is below.
Maxwell’s homepage is mostly a large profile photo. Of course, a navigation menu is also included in the header.
Jason Mraz’z site is one of the more interesting ones, like it or not. It has a hand-drawn look and some rollover effects.
The homepage of Rascal Flatts uses a large band photo, and a promo for the new album. A “jukebox” is available to listen to songs.
Tim McGraw’s site features a large background photo along with a promo for the upcoming album. The homepage is light on content.
David Cook’s sites uses a grungy font and a light textured background. The new album is promoted in the footer, and a photo of David is the first thing you see on the site.
Mat Kearney’s site uses a large photo as a background to the header. The new album is promoted in the header and video and news headlines are below.
Jennifer Hudson’s website is black a white, except for some purple text. The contrast of course helps it to stand out and makes the design a little more unique.
Kellie Pickler’s site also uses a similar approach with the pink on black and white. The header includes a photo, with media, news, and tour info below.
For more design inspiration please see:
40 Responses
that’s really nice listing for music lovers.
Nice selection. Thanks!
wow wow is my dream! Chris Cornell is a good site but I appreciate even more the album, fantastic. The collaboration with Timbaland is good. And the site is clean and easy to view. Anthony Hamilton and madonna and Francesca Battistelli are so nice too.
I just redesigned my music website, wish I had seen these before!
Very, very cool post… Thank you… I am being asked to design a site / blog by an up and coming actor, and this post is just the inspiration I needed to get in the zone…
Thank you again.
Some really nice sites in this list that I hadn’t visited before, thank you! I would like to recommend Tori Amos as well, her site is very well-designed.
Is it allowed to say that this collections sucks?! Sorry, that’s my opinion.
http://www.nin.com Nine Inch Nails
I must say that Chris Cornell hast nice photos showing him smashing a guitar, But that nearly all thats great about that website. Looking at the content the old soundgarden stuff is great off cause, but we are talking about design, inspiration, usability and functionality, right?
Alan Jackson (I don’t even know that guy – I’m glad): Okay, you can overview everything and find what your are looking for. good grid layout, usability is good…BUT the design sucks! and the big switching news banner under the navigation is annoying. looks horrible and is to fast. so good developer, bad designer!
Darryl Worley (maybe the author of this articles likes that kind of music
) The first thing you recognize is this mouse-moved-landscape-perspective-simulation-thing. Some website made a great effect with this sort of thing in the past…. but this site doesn’t. It moves to much and the layers looking not so good. Often less is more, when you’re using effects. This flash thing looks like 15 min. of work.
Justin Timberlake: nothing annoying. in contrast to the previous mentioned Alan Jackson this switching trough news/photo is okay. fading makes also a difference.
The structure of this website is nice, so usability is good. The design is clean, which is nice, but nothing special. I think he had once a website that was more interesting.
Anthony Hamilton: I like the design, but really don’t like that iframe in the left bottom -know what I mean?!
Francesca Battistelli website is okay. It’s nice, but nothing that impresses you.
Rocket Club: I like how the logo/ name is integrated next to menu. I believe that not the verb I was looking for…. I hate the colors of this website. You got the visit it to see what I mean. This thumbnail here of it looks okay. But that maybe just my opinion.
U2 (yeah, a few great albums) They had better websites in the past. remembering that timeline U2-history thing? This is okay, but because it’s U2 you must expect something better… more unique….
maybe I find time to say more about the others later…
My point is that is collection doesn’t contain websites with unique intuitive navigation, great design working good together with the content or great ways to connect to the fans.
I think Orba Squara’s website kicks ass! http://orbasquara.com/
Wow, these are really good designs. It nice to see a band website that isn’t a myspace page.
The Specials have really nice website.
Great set.. I wish you made this 2 weeks ago when I was designing a site for a musician. Great photography is such a key for this type of site.
I would add
http://www.katyperry.com/
http://www.wilcoworld.net/
Cheers.
The fact that Daughtry’s Logo is simply the Bleeding Cowboy free font kind of ruins his site for me. Nothing against the font, but be creative and change it up some.
http://www.dafont.com/font.php?file=bleeding_cowboys&page=1&nb_ppp_old=10&text=DAUGHTRY&nb_ppp=10&psize=m&classt=alpha
Very interesting to see the commonalities here … and how few break away from convention. Perhaps it’s just the type of music/musicians being showcased? I guess coming from the now ‘old-school’ punk rock generation, so much of modern music related matters seems so safe.
These sites look rad! I found a band website theme site called http://www.bandthemer.com I might use for an upcoming project
The Specials have really nice website.
Some excellent examples of some great looking designs. Independent musicians can follow suit and get some great designs done too!
hello:
I think Depeche mode deserves to be included in these amazing sites
Thanks for those amazing blogs
http://www.depechemode.com/
A very stylish list of great web sites. Thanks for collecting all these links.
US Jazz vibes player, Joe Locke, recently had his site re-designed and I think it’s outstanding: http://www.joelocke.com/ (not just my opinion).
These are much more professional than other ones i’ve been looking at recently. I also like the design of http://www.rockhardfoundation.com . Although the font arrangements could be better.
The Specials have really nice website.
I love the selection, great sites! I think the following site is pretty good too for an indy artist:
http://www.webstarts.com/brianrivera
Check it out
I have a plan to design musician site. Thats very helpfull.
thanks
Really nice listing for music lovers.
check out the new rammstein website. Think this is an interesting approach too.
Wondering why the most artist websites run of the mill instead of beeing an important
part of artist identity.
most of these websites look horrible. boring. cheesy. commercial.
Very nice collection, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for a great article regarding music websites. We just stood up our site (www.semitonemusic.com) and have made some progress, but these sites really give us a good idea of ideas we can incorporate. As I click through the list, I notice more and more things that we will use to continue our pursuit of a top notch website!
Again thank you for a great article packed with resources!
-Ashley
Just about to design our new band website. Thanks for some inspiration!
I love Francesca Battistelli’s site nicely laid out.
Big fan of this one Dave Anderson and the Wine Merchants
http://www.daveanderson.com.au
That’s some good inspiration. Thanks for the post.
Some really nice sites in this list that I hadn’t visited before, thank you! I would like to recommend Tori Amos as well, her site is very well-designed.
Unfortunately, most of these have been updated since this post and aren’t nearly as cool! But thanks for the post!
To this day I haven’t found a musician’s website that is easy to navigate, has appropriate amount of content per page, and actually has all the content a fan would want to see. A sad reality considering so many options are available nowadays.
I have used Bandmo (http://bandmo.com) to create my band’s website and the results are awesome.
I find it much more simple than other solutions out there.
Good luck!
Nice clean sites but if creativity and interesting design was a factor, most of these wouldn’t factor into the top 20. I think Jason Mraz, Death Cab, The Specials, Rascal Flatts, Francesca and maybe U2 and Madonna have something here.
Just for comparison, try anything Jack White… thirdmanrecords, White Stripes or the Raconteurs for fun concepts and design.
I think there may be some bias here with the country music. Seems like A LOT of country and ironically, these are the sites that are lacking a unique design. The sites do have some nice photography, the layout is organized and easy enough to navigate with most of them but there isn’t anything fun or artistic, which isn’t surprising as I find most “new country” quite soulless and void of artistic value… =P
Wow, these are really good, but making one like this is probably way over my budget. We’re sticking to a theme, probably http://www.mybandtheme.com/
I love the use of color on some of the sites for example the Francesca Battistelli site, or the Anthony Hamilton site. But the black and white one is good as well, but basically you make anything B&W, and it’ll look stylish, so no surprise there
So a friend of mine wants me to make him a website for his band – good band tourning a couple provinces. Now, I don’t want to be doing all kinds of updates everytime he gets a gig so I was thinking wordpress. So I set one up for him and then it asked “do you wish to upgrade” and he clicked “yes” – it blew his site out and now the wordpress template guys want him to rebuy it…..and it wasn’t that easy to edit.
So any suggestions as to what I should do? SHould Itry another wordpress site for him – he doen’st know the first thing about coding, dreamweaver or ftpnig info. learning curve is too high.
Thanks!
Hi Doug,
In that situation I would probably look for a different WordPress theme. Sounds like the experience with that particular theme was not great, but WordPress is s good option because it can easily be updated with you, and there are some good themes available.
There are no black theme. But its good