14 WordPress Music Plugins to Help Musicians Grow Their Audience

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It’s a fast-paced digital world out there with savvy music fans knowing what they like but not necessarily how to find it. If you’re a modern musician, knowing how to market yourself and your band effectively is a critical factor in your success.

WordPress plugins are key in how you can interact with your fans. Plugins allow you to do everything from demoing your music to selling your gear.

While keeping your website 99.9% secure and achieving loading times under 1 second is important, making sure your website has the functionality to grow your fan base should be one of your top priorities.

No matter if you’re a rocker, a rapper, or a genre-defying genius, here are the best plugins WordPress has to offer for musicians to grow their fan base. They include music player plugins for WordPress, podcasting plugins, and plugins to help sell your swag.

1. HubSpot

You can’t properly get the word out about your music without some solid marketing tools. HubSpot’s WordPress plugin* brings the power of the HubSpot Growth Platform to the WordPress website. This plugin is built to handle and improve your marketing and even your music sales.

With it, you can build and add beautiful forms and popups to your website in minutes thanks to the easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder. These will allow you to collect email addresses and share newsletters, song releases, merch, and more with your newfound audience.

You can also send automated emails when someone fills out a form, allowing you to be in constant conversation with your potential fan. Every contact you capture and all your emails are automatically added to your free HubSpot CRM, a database where you can track and manage all of your contact’s information and interactions with your website. You’ll receive notifications any time someone opens your email or clicks on a link so you can track engagement. The built-in analytics help you improve your overall marketing efforts.

2. Audio Album

What good is your music if fans can’t listen to it? Simply install Audio Album, a WordPress music player plugin, to not only play but display the audio tracks of your newest album. It uses the default audio of mediaelement.js, which is included with core WordPress files. The plugin allows you to style a group of audio files as MP3s and display them as a single block that looks like an album. Colors can be customized with multiple albums available.

2. Soundy

Why bother to have fans go to the trouble of hitting a play button? Use Soundy to automatically play your favorite track. A great feature of this plugin is its ability to change the song for each page and post. Do you have a slideshow page? Use Soundy to play a song perfectly tuned to it. It also comes with a pause button for visitors who prefer a silent browsing experience.

3. Video Gallery

Why bother with a boring old YouTube embed when you can use Video Gallery to unlock an amazing array of video hosting tools? It allows you to create an unlimited library of videos that are fully responsive. It comes with seven different design views and is great for embedding videos from YouTube, Vimeo, self-hosted, and more.

4. Seriously Simple Podcasting

Got a podcast? The Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin is the best option to seamlessly manage your show directly from the WordPress dashboard you know and love. Easily upload episodes in a few clicks, view engagement analytics, and run multiple podcasts from the same site, each with its own unique RSS feed. It comes with shortcodes, widgets, and a customizable media player so you can display your podcast exactly how you want. With +20K active installations and over 160 5-star reviews, this plugin is preferred among new and veteran podcasters alike.

While you have the freedom to host your podcast media files where you’d like, Castos is fully integrated with Seriously Simple Podcasting. This powerful hosting provider gives your website a performance boost by offloading dense audio files to a dedicated host, giving your audience a better listening experience.

5. WooCommerce

WooCommerce allows you to sell music, fan gear, and anything else related to your music. Products for sale can be physical or digital. You can create different prices for different options. You can put items on sale for a limited time. You may have to pay a percentage of each sale and connect with a payment gateway, but this is one of the best ways to sell on WordPress. It also automatically creates an online store, shopping cart, user account, and more.

6. Simple Music Widget

Do you have one song by one artist you want your users to play? Simple Music Widget is an audio player plugin that creates a widget that can be used to display a piece of music with the details. The widget will show the artist’s name, and song title, and display a cover image. You can also add a short description of the song. A great choice for those who wish to feature a “song of the day” or similar option.

7. Event Manager

Are you going on tour or have a series of gigs coming up? Use Event Manager to add events, registration, booking, and more. It comes with the ability to create events on a single day, multiple days, and on recurring days. It also allows you to offer tickets, assign locations, integrate Google Maps, categories, and more. The Pro plugin also allows you to add PayPal, and Authorize.net, and to accept offline payments.

8. Apple Music / Spotify Embed

Apple Music + Spotify Embed by Mixvisor is a web music player that embeds Apple Music and Spotify previews on your WordPress site. It embeds Apple Music directly into your WordPress site, integrates with your content, and allows visitors to preview tracks without leaving a page. It also has an auto-detection system to identify artists mentioned in your site’s content and include them in the player. It can even automatically generate a custom playlist for the page. It is presently the only music player compatible with content from Apple Music.

9. WP Discuz

Have a page or post with a new track or video? Use WP Discuz to allow visitors to easily log in and comment on it. The default WordPress comment system is a pain to log in to. In addition, it also is subject to many forms of spam, which can drag down your site’s rankings on search engines like Google and Bing. Instead of signing in or creating a WordPress account, users simply need their name, email, and website. A captcha is also added for extra security.

10. Newsletter

We all sign up for news from our favorite singers, bands, and more. Use Newsletter to build a fan list and send them unlimited news. With it, you can easily create newsletters, send them out, track e-mails, and repeat them as needed. It comes with a drag-and-drop composer to easily create your mailings. You can also customize your subscriber preferences to let each one choose how they want to receive your letter without feeling spammed. This is especially important when trying to keep and grow an email subscriber list.

11. Amazon Associates Link Builder

Do you sell your albums or other items on Amazon? Use Amazon Associates Link Builder to get paid extra via an affiliate link. The program gives you a cut every time a sale is made from your site, whether or not it’s your item that is being sold, so feel free to make a list of your favorite albums, songs, etc. The plugin goes a step further and enables users to search for products in the Amazon catalog, access real-time availability, prices, and information, and create links with ease into your pages and posts.

12. Calendar Event

Got a lot of gigs coming up? Use this nifty calendar plugin to list them all. Calendar Event includes a widget on upcoming events that allows users to display a specific number of upcoming events arranged in order or even at random. An advantage is the option to add multiple events on a single date, which includes events from different categories. You can display the calendar in a variety of formats on the page. The Pro feature also allows you to further customize the calendar including color, width, and popup features.

13. Popup Builder

Use Popup Builder to give your visitors an urgent call to action. This can include a newsletter signup, song download, discount on merch, or others. The plugin allows you to build unlimited popups with a number of customizations and animations. You can use a popup image to redirect to another page, fill out a contact form, or even use a Facebook-themed popup.

14. Add to Any Share Buttons

What good is having a killer song and a devoted fan base if they can’t easily share your content? Add to Any Share Buttons allows you to easily install a host of sharing buttons to your pages and posts. It comes with impressive options such as customizing buttons, floating buttons, and even a share count. Musicians will appreciate the ability to share with dozens of sites and the option to add likes.

We hope this helps give you ideas on how to optimize your WordPress site. These plugins are perfect for musicians, so give some of them a try. Hopefully, they’ll help you rock out!

And if you’re looking for a hosting platform specifically created for musicians, check out Bandzoogle!

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