alternatives
A custom alternative to Bandzoogle
For musicians and labels deciding between staying on Bandzoogle and having something made instead. The honest version, including the part where Bandzoogle wins.
When Bandzoogle is the right answer
Bandzoogle is built by people who understand what a working musician needs, and it handles tours, mailing lists and merch without taking a cut of sales. For an artist who needs those things working this week, it is a sensible choice and a commissioned site would be an expensive way to arrive at the same result.
That is worth saying plainly, because most pages like this one are written by somebody who wants to sell you the alternative. If the description above matches your situation, stay where you are.
What tends to push a project past it
The release deserves its own environment rather than a page. A record with a world around it, a film, an installation, something that has to be entered rather than read.
The archive is now a decade deep and the structure it was given at the start has stopped holding it.
The visual language of the project is specific and the site is the one place it is being flattened toward a template.
You want the live thing and the site to be the same object, rather than the site being a listing of the live thing.
What a commission gives you instead
A release environment built for how this particular work goes out, rather than a page type that has to cover every artist at once.
Real time and interactive work where it earns its place, designed by people who model and build rather than by a subcontractor fitting assets into a brief.
An archive structured to survive a career, and held somewhere you control rather than on whichever platform is current.
The part that is not about features
Bandzoogle, like every hosted builder, runs your site on its own infrastructure under its own terms. That is the arrangement, and it is a reasonable one at the price. What it means is that the site is something you have access to rather than something you hold.
A commission inverts that. You get the repository, the design files and the accounts, and it can be stood up on your own server so there is no middle man in the stack at all. If you would rather not run infrastructure we will host it, and that stays a convenience you can walk away from rather than a dependency.
Whether it is worth it
Commissioned work costs more than a subscription and takes longer than an afternoon. It earns that when the site has to do something specific, when it is the first serious thing a client or an audience meets, or when the business has grown past the point where its front door should live in an account. If none of those are true yet, the honest advice is to wait until one of them is.
Other comparisons
A custom alternative to Squarespace
A custom alternative to Format
Questions people ask first, and guides on commissioning custom work.
use it. commission it. back it.