Music streaming websites allow people to listen to their favorite tracks on the go. It doesn’t matter where they are as long as they have a suitable device and a stable internet connection.
Services like Spotify, Pandora, and SoundCloud have established themselves as the go-to places for people that wish to stream music. Their services allow anyone to enjoy and share their favorite music artists with just the click of a few buttons.
You might think that there is little opportunity for new services to compete with the established giants. However, you couldn’t be further from the truth. The music streaming industry was valued at $14,4 billion in 2019, and it’s expected to reach $19,6 billion by 2024. These numbers suggest there is plenty of money to be made with a music streaming website.
Furthermore, it can be surprisingly simple to create your very own streaming website without writing even a single line of code. In addition to that, music streaming sites can be quite profitable because of the low expenses to set up and maintain the site.
Are you curious to know how? You would need to go through several steps to create a music streaming website, which are:
- Buy a domain and hosting
- Set up website
- Add features
- Optimize, and
- Monetize
Let’s go through each of the steps in a bit more detail.
1. Buy a domain and hosting
Regardless of its purpose, every website needs to have a domain name. Yet, using the first name that comes to mind isn’t the best idea. You should carefully consider a domain so that it is simple, relevant, and easy to remember.
Furthermore, you could opt for a music-related top-level domain that ends with .music, .radio, or something similar. Of course, you can use a .com or .net domain, but you will likely have a hard time getting the name you want. Still, it doesn’t hurt to try.
Next, you have to find yourself a suitable hosting provider. However, it’s not a good idea to use just any host. Otherwise, you risk having your website taken down due to a DMCA complaint. To avoid that, you will need to get the proper licenses for every single song you offer on your site.
Needless to say, that is a costly requirement that will stop most newly-made music streaming websites.
To avoid all the hassle, you should do yourself a favor and find an offshore hosting provider. It will protect your privacy and ignore any DMCA claims against your streaming site.
After you get a domain name and an offshore hosting provider, you need to set up your website.
2. Set up Website
As mentioned before, you can make a streaming site without the need to write a single line of code. One of the best ways to do that is to use WordPress. It is one of the leading content management systems (CMS) that exist. In fact, it’s so popular that almost 36% of websites on the Internet use WordPress as their CMS.
In addition to the ease of use, you can take advantage of the numerous ready-made templates and plugins. They will immensely boost your music streaming site’s functionality as well as save you a lot of time and money.
Naturally, it will be a breeze to find a music streaming template for you to use. Such a theme will often have most, if not all, of the features your website will need to function properly. The ones that are missing, you can simply add with a plugin. Moreover, it’s an easy task to personalize the music theme to suit your taste and add your personal flair to it.
Now that you know how to go about with your music streaming website’s setup, it’s time to talk about its features.
3. Features
When it comes to features, there is a staggering amount of them you could implement to your site. However, it’s not always the best idea to add them all at once. Therefore, let’s list the ones you absolutely need to have.
Track Searching
Track searching is a must-have feature, the lack of which will lead to visitors leaving as soon as they come. Thus, you will need a comprehensive search feature with various filtering options like the year of release, language, genre, mood, place, and so on.
Profile Creation
Next up, you should allow visitors to create their own profiles on your website. If you decided on a template that doesn’t have this feature, BuddyPress is an excellent plugin to use.
However, that’s not enough. After visitors create an account, they must be able to create their own playlists and rate tracks. Furthermore, users must have the ability to add songs as their favorites, as well as share them with friends and family.
Music Categories
To further improve your music streaming site, you have to add a categories page. It will list out all of the available music genres and subgenres someone can find on your website.
Artist Page
Another excellent addition to your site is to have a dedicated artist page. That will enable your visitors to quickly find a collection of their favorite musicians’ songs, albums, and relevant information.
These are only the essential features a streaming website needs to have. Still, you should take some time to think about which ones would make the most sense for your music streaming website’s target audience.
4. Optimize
After you have added the necessary functionalities to the site, it’s time to optimize it. That means that you have to make sure people can visit it from any device. After all, 52.6% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Thus, if your website isn’t accessible from a handheld device, you will lose a lot of potential users.
In addition, the best way to improve your site is to analyze how visitors use it. That’s a simple task to complete with a tool like Google Analytics. It will enable you to gather all sorts of useful information that will help you find out how you can improve the website.
5. Monetize
Finally, you have to monetize the streaming site to make everything worthwhile. There are several ways you can do that — ads, subscriptions, in-app purchases, or onsite promotion of new artists.
Ads are the easiest to implement, but they also provide the least amount of income. To do that, you should join an ad network as a publisher.
Subscriptions have the most profit potential. You can add a premium option for users that will allow them to listen without any ads or download music for offline use.
In-app purchases and onsite promotion might not be ideal for a newly-made streaming site, but it’s something to keep in mind as you grow. Of course, make sure it’s something your audience would appreciate. Otherwise, you will only alienate them.
Conclusion
Congratulations! You now have the fundamental knowledge to create a music streaming website.
To sum up, you first need to buy a domain name and find an offshore host. Then, you have to set up the website and add the necessary features. Finally, it’s crucial you continuously optimize it and add monetization to make it worthwhile.
As you have seen, it’s not that hard to make it, and you don’t even need to code. The essential requirement is to have the desire to complete it.
Good luck!
