SEO and Marketing for Bands
For touring bands who’d rather own their audience than rent it.
More merch sold. More tickets sold direct. More of the money staying with you.
We’ve been to over a thousand shows. Here’s what we keep seeing.
We’ve stood in a lot of merch lines. Small rooms, mid-size rooms, festivals, tours where the band drove themselves and tours where they didn’t.
And the same thing happens almost every time. The band plays a great set, people crowd the table afterward wanting to give them money, and most of that money ends up somewhere other than the band’s pocket.
Not because the band did anything wrong. Because every part of the setup was built by somebody else, for somebody else.
The shirt sells through a third-party store. The ticket sells through a platform. The new fan follows an app that decides whether they ever see a post again. You made all of it happen and you own almost none of it.
That’s what we fix.
Where it leaks
The merch store.
You designed the shirt. You spent five years building the audience that wants it. And you’re collecting a royalty on your own product because the checkout happens on a site you don’t control.
You don’t get the email. You don’t get the order data. Next tour, you want to tell that person about a new design, you’re paying a platform for the privilege of reaching someone who already bought from you.
Nobody can find your tour dates.
Somebody in Cleveland is searching your band name and their city right now, trying to figure out if you’re coming through. On most band sites there’s nothing there for them. Just an embedded widget or a link straight out to a ticketing platform.
That’s a fan actively looking for you, and you’re handing them to somebody else at the last second.
You can’t reach your own fans.
Here’s a question worth sitting with. Right now, today, how many people can you contact directly without asking permission from a platform?
For most bands the honest answer is zero. Every route to your own audience runs through somebody else’s app, and that somebody decides who sees what, and charges you when they feel like it.
That’s fine until the algorithm shifts or the deal ends. Then you find out how much of what you built was never yours.
About the label money
If you’re signed, you’ve probably been told not to worry about marketing.
Maybe that’s true. It depends entirely on your deal, and deals at this level vary a lot more than people assume.
Some are genuinely good. In a profit split, the label recoups out of the shared pool before anyone takes profit, which is much better math for you than a traditional deal where they recoup out of your share alone. In a licensing deal, the label usually only recoups against the music itself, and your touring and merch stay clean.
Others are less good. Marketing spend, videos, ads, tour support, publicists, outside contractors, all of it recoupable against your royalties before you see a dollar.
We’re not here to tell you your label is ripping you off. Plenty of them aren’t, and the good ones do things we can’t.
We’re saying go read the agreement and know which kind you signed. Then look at what’s left over when the campaign ends. Usually the ads have stopped, the press cycle has moved on, and there’s no asset sitting there afterward.
A site you own works differently. So does a list, and a store on your own domain. Those keep going after the record, after the tour, after the deal.
Spend on what you keep.
What we actually do
We’re not a label and we’re not trying to be one. Nobody here is going to tell you the chorus should come in sooner or that you should try writing something more accessible. Your music is yours. That part isn’t our business.
The business part is our business.
Build the site everything runs through.
Social gets you a snippet. Your site is the whole thing. Merch, dates, news, press, links, all of it in one place people can actually find.
Get the store onto your own domain.
Full margin instead of a cut. You keep the customer.
Make your tour dates findable.
So the person searching your band and their city lands on you first, and buys from a page you control.
Build the list and write it like you talk.
This is where a band’s audience turns into a band’s income. Not a newsletter. The jokes, the inside stuff, the running bits from the van. In these scenes that’s exactly why people open it.
Campaign Sell to the people who already like you.
Everybody’s out chasing new fans. Meanwhile you’ve probably got a few thousand people who’d buy something tomorrow and will never hear about it.
Show up when someone looks for you.
Google, and increasingly ChatGPT and the rest. Somebody asks where to buy your record, that should be you.
The best thing we’ve seen a band do
Member-only shirt. Sold at the table, that tour only, and you have to be on the list to buy it.
So people sign up standing in line, phone already out, wallet already out. The design disappears when the tour ends.
The shirt sells, the list grows at the exact moment somebody is most willing, and the list belongs to the band instead of whoever ran the checkout. That’s the whole idea. Find the places where a fan is already reaching for their wallet and stop handing those moments away.
Where to start
Free teardown
Send us your site and your socials. We’ll go through your store, your tour pages, your profiles, and how you’re capturing email, then send back three specific things that are costing you money.
No pitch on the back end. Go fix them yourself if you want.
Website build, from $2,500
A site you own, built to sell merch and tickets and to get found. Store, tour dates, press, email capture, and a back end you can actually run yourselves.
Where it lands depends on the store setup, how many dates we’re building out, and whether we’re pulling you off something you’re already on.
Ongoing growth, from $1,500 a month
This isn’t tour-only work. It’s growing your whole digital presence and keeping it growing.
Search visibility so people find you year round, not just when you announce. Your tour and city pages. Email as an actual revenue channel instead of a signup box nobody uses. Fixing whatever’s killing conversions on your store. Content and strategy that ties your socials back to something you own.
Reporting tied to merch and tickets, not stream counts.
Month to month. Pause it while you’re writing. Pick it back up when you’re on the road.
If you manage a band or work at a label
We’re not trying to replace anybody. Labels are good at things we’re not: getting a record made, working press and radio, running a release campaign, opening doors.
What often falls through the gap is the infrastructure the band keeps afterward. The site, the store, the list, the search footprint. That’s usually nobody’s job, and it’s the part that’s still earning two years later.
If you manage a band, nothing here goes around you. You’re on every call, you approve the work, and we’ll tell you directly when the band asks for something we think is a waste of money. Your commission goes up when merch and ticket revenue go up, so we’re pulling in the same direction.
If you’ve got bands who need this side handled, we’re happy to talk.
Why us
Our team has collectively been to thousands of shows. We travel for this. We’ve been in these rooms a long time.
Hardcore, post-hardcore, punk, metalcore, emo (second wave over third, and we’re prepared to defend it), mathcore, easycore, shoegaze, noise rock, deathcore.
This isn’t a vertical we picked off a list.