What Type of Content Should You Put on an Artist Website?

Ask ten people what content belongs on an artist website and you'll get ten checklists. Biography, photos, concert calendar, recordings, press quotes, contact details — the lists overlap heavily, and none of them are exactly wrong. But every checklist quietly assumes that every musician's situation is the same. It isn't.

A conservatory student trying to land their first professional engagements and an established soloist with international management both need a website. They do not need the same website. The honest answer to "what content should I put on mine" is: it depends.

That sounds like a non-answer. It isn't — because what it depends on is knowable, and there are only a handful of variables. Once you can name them, "it depends" stops being a shrug and becomes a framework you can actually use.

This article walks through that framework: four questions that, answered in order, tell you what content your artist website needs — and, just as importantly, what it doesn't.

Question 1: Who Are You Targeting?

A website is a tool, and tools have jobs. Before you decide what goes on yours, you have to decide who it's for and what you want them to do.

For most classical musicians, the realistic audiences are:

• Concert presenters, agents, and promoters — people who might book you, or decide whether to represent you
• Audiences — people who already know your name and want to follow what you're doing, buy tickets, or listen
• Competition juries and panels — people evaluating you for a prize, a grant, or a position
• Students and their parents — people considering you as a teacher
• Journalists and media — people writing about you who need accurate material fast
• Collaborators — other musicians, composers, or ensembles considering working with you

These aren't mutually exclusive, and a good website serves several at once. But in almost every case, one of them dominates — and that one should drive your content decisions. A site built primarily to get you booked looks different from a site built primarily to keep an existing audience engaged.

So the first question isn't "what pages should I have." It's: what is the single most important thing I want this website to do for my career right now? Acquire new engagements? Strengthen credibility with people who already know me? Support a teaching practice? Build a following around a specific project? Be honest and be specific. Everything downstream depends on this answer.

Question 2: What Content Serves That Goal?

Once you know your primary target, the content you need stops being a guessing game. It's whatever moves a visitor in that group closer to the action you want.

If your target is getting booked, you need the material a presenter or agent uses to make a decision: a clear biography in multiple lengths, high-resolution downloadable photos, video that shows you actually performing (not just talking), repertoire lists or programme suggestions, selected press quotes, and an obvious path to contact you or your management. This is, in effect, a press kit built into a website — and it should be downloadable, because the people who book you often need to forward your materials internally.

If your target is audience engagement, the centre of gravity shifts. An up-to-date concert calendar becomes the most important page on the site. Audio and video are there to be sampled and enjoyed, not just evaluated. A newsletter signup, and perhaps a blog or behind-the-scenes section, start to make sense — because the goal is an ongoing relationship, not a single decision.

If your target is competition juries or panels, you want clarity above all: a precise repertoire list, well-recorded audio, a biography that foregrounds education and awards, and no clutter that makes the relevant information harder to find.

The principle underneath all of this: every piece of content on your site should be traceable to your target. If you can't explain in one sentence why a page helps the people you're trying to reach, it's probably not content — it's clutter.

Question 3: What Content Do You Have in High Quality?

This is the reality check, and it's the question most musicians skip.

It's tempting to treat the content list from Question 2 as a set of boxes to fill. But a website is only as strong as its weakest asset. One blurry photo, one phone-recorded video with bad sound, one biography paragraph that reads like it was written in a hurry — each of those undermines everything professional around it. A visitor's impression is set by the worst thing they see, not the average.

So the honest version of Question 3 is: of the content my target needs, what do I actually have at a high standard right now?

Sometimes less is more. Three professionally shot photographs are better than three professional photos plus five amateur ones. Two excellent recordings are better than two excellent recordings plus a shaky clip filmed from a concert hall seat. A short, sharp biography is better than a long one padded with filler.

Practically, this means doing an inventory before you build. Do you have professional photos? Properly recorded audio or video? A biography you'd be happy to see quoted? For each section your target needs, you have three options: you have a high-quality asset and you use it, you don't have one and you invest in producing it, or you don't have one yet and you leave that section out until you do. What you should not do is fill the section with something below standard just to avoid an empty space.

Question 4: How Much Time Can You Spend Keeping It Updated?

There is one rule that applies regardless of who you're targeting or what content you've chosen: the website has to be current.

An outdated site is worse than a smaller, current one. A calendar whose most recent entry is from 2023, a biography that still says "currently studying with…" when you graduated two years ago, a "latest news" section frozen mid-2021 — these are red flags. They signal a stalled career even when the opposite is true, and they quietly undo the credibility the rest of the site was built to create.

Which means the last question is about you, not your content: how much time can you realistically commit to maintenance? Not how much you'd like to. How much you actually will.

The rule of thumb is straightforward: the less time you can put into updating your website regularly, the less content you should put on it. This isn't a compromise — it's good design. If you know you won't keep a blog going, don't build a blog section. If you can't reliably maintain a manual concert calendar, either use one that updates automatically or don't feature a live calendar at all. A small website that is always accurate beats a large one that is visibly half-stale, every single time.

Putting the Framework Together

The four questions work in sequence. Your target tells you what content matters. The content that matters gets filtered by what you actually have at a high standard. And the result gets shaped by how much maintenance you can sustain. What survives all four filters is your website's content.

Two quick examples of how the same framework produces different sites:

A conservatory student whose primary target is landing first professional engagements needs press-kit material — but realistically has one good photoshoot, one solid recording, and very little spare time. The framework points to a lean, sharp site: a strong biography, the good photos, the one recording, a repertoire list, and clear contact details. No blog. No live calendar yet, because there's little to put on it. Small, current, and entirely professional.

An established string quartet targeting both audience growth and presenter credibility has years of professional assets and four members who can share the upkeep. The same framework points to a fuller site: an active concert calendar, multiple recordings, a downloadable press kit, a press section, a newsletter, perhaps a blog. The framework didn't change — the answers did.

That's the whole point. "It depends" was never a dodge. It's the beginning of a method. Answer the four questions honestly and the question of what content belongs on your artist website mostly answers itself.

If you'd like a starting structure built specifically for classical musicians — one that makes it easy to include exactly the content your situation calls for and leave out what it doesn't — that's what artist-websites.de is designed for.

Frequently Asked Questions

What pages does every artist website need? At an absolute minimum: a biography, some form of media (audio or video), and a clear way to make contact. Beyond that baseline, the right pages depend on who you're targeting and what you can maintain — which is exactly what the four-question framework above is for.

Should I include a blog on my artist website? Only if you'll genuinely keep it updated. A blog with three posts and a year-old last entry actively hurts you. If you're not sure you'll maintain it, leave it out — you can always add it later.

How often should I update my artist website? Your concert calendar should change as your schedule does. Your biography should be reviewed at least once or twice a year. The real rule isn't a fixed schedule, though — it's that the site should never be allowed to look visibly out of date.

Is it better to have a small website or a big one? A small website that is accurate and professional beats a large one that is half-stale. Scale your content to the quality of assets you have and the time you can spend maintaining it — not to a checklist of what other musicians include.