A few years ago I sat down to add up where my audience actually lived. Instagram. TikTok. Spotify. YouTube. A link-in-bio page holding it all together.
Then I asked a question I had somehow never asked: if any one of those companies changed its mind about me tomorrow, what would I still have?
The answer was nothing. Not a smaller version of what I had. Nothing. Every place my name existed online was a place I was renting, on terms somebody else wrote, that could change without anybody asking me.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you register a domain through one, it supports AlwaysBeOG at no additional cost to you. I only point at things I would tell an artist to do anyway.
What you actually control right now
Count it honestly. Your handle on a platform is not yours — it is assigned to you, and the terms say so in language you agreed to without reading. Your follower count is not a list, it is permission to be shown to people, and that permission is adjusted constantly by systems you cannot see.
I wrote about this from the money side in the piece on where streaming money actually goes — the part where a policy change in April 2024 meant tracks under a thousand streams a year now earn nothing at all. Nobody asked the artists. The rules moved.
That is the shape of building on rented land. It is not that the platforms are villains. It is that you are not a party to the decision.
What a domain actually is, honestly
Let me be straight, because most articles about this oversell it.
You do not buy a domain the way you buy a microphone. You hold a registration, and you renew it. Stop renewing and it goes back on the market like anything else.
What makes it different from a platform handle is who controls the terms while you hold it. Nobody can throttle your domain’s reach. Nobody can change what it shows. Nobody can suspend it because an automated system flagged something. It points where you tell it to point, and it keeps doing that for as long as you keep the registration current.
That is a smaller claim than “you own it forever.” It is also the only piece of your online presence that answers to you.
A link-in-bio page is not a website
I used one for years, so this is not snobbery.
A link page solves one real problem — platforms only let you post one link — and it solves it well. What it does not do is belong to you. The address has somebody else’s brand in it. If that company changes its pricing, its design, or its mind, your entire front door changes with it, and every place you ever printed that address now points somewhere you did not choose.
The fix is not to abandon the link page. It is to put your own address in front of it. Point your domain at whatever you are already using, and the address on your flyers, your press kit and your email signature becomes permanent even while everything behind it changes.
You can migrate the destination twenty times. The address stays yours.
What it actually gets you
- An email address at your own name. The difference between yourname@gmail and [email protected] in a promoter’s inbox is not nothing. It reads as a business rather than a hobby, and it costs almost the same as the domain.
- One address that survives every platform change. Print it once. Redirect it forever.
- Somewhere to send press and supervisors. If a music supervisor is deciding between you and somebody else at four in the afternoon, “here is my link tree” and “here is my site” land differently. I got into why speed and clarity matter to supervisors in the publishing breakdown.
- Your name, held. The cheapest insurance in your business is making sure that when somebody searches your artist name in three years, the first result is you and not somebody who got there first.
The four ways artists lose the domain they already had
This is the part almost nobody writes about, and it is the part that actually costs people their name.
1. They let it lapse
A card expires. A renewal notice goes to an email you stopped checking. The registration runs out.
What follows is a sequence worth knowing. First there is a grace period where you can still renew at the normal price — but partway through it, your site and any email on that domain simply stop working. After that comes a redemption period, where the domain is still recoverable but only by paying a redemption fee that is dramatically more than the renewal would have been. Miss that too and it is released, and anyone can register it.
The exact windows differ by registrar, so check yours. The lesson does not differ: turn on auto-renew, and put a card on it that does not expire before the domain does.
2. It was never in their account
A manager set it up. A producer’s cousin built the site. Somebody who was around in 2019 and is not around now registered it on their own card, in their own account, with their own email on the record.
Legally and practically, that person controls your name online. Getting it back ranges from an awkward conversation to genuinely impossible, and it gets harder exactly as your name becomes worth more.
Register it yourself, on your own account, with an email you will still have in five years. If someone already did it for you, move it into your name now, while everybody still likes each other.
3. The 60-day lock catches them out
Under ICANN’s transfer policy, a domain cannot be transferred to another registrar within 60 days of registration. Separately, changing the registrant’s contact details — name, organisation, email — triggers its own 60-day transfer lock, though some registrars let you opt out of that one at the moment you make the change.
Nobody warns you about this until you are trying to move a domain the week of a release and discover you cannot. Register it where you intend to keep it, and if you are updating your contact details, do it well before you need to move anything.
4. They put their home address in a public database
Domain registrations carry contact records. Without privacy protection enabled, the name, address, email and phone attached to your domain can be publicly queryable.
For an artist — a person whose whole job involves strangers becoming intensely interested in them — this is not a small detail. Turn on WHOIS privacy when you register. Most registrars include it now; confirm yours does before you pay.
What to actually register
Keep this simple.
- yourartistname.com. First, and if it is available, today. The .com is still what people type and still what press assumes.
- The obvious misspelling, if your name has one. Cheap, and it redirects to the real one.
- Your label or imprint name, if you have one and intend to keep it.
That is the whole list. You do not need eleven extensions of the same word. That is a thing people sell you, not a thing you need.
Checking whether your name is free takes about ten seconds — you can look it up here before you read the rest of this. If it is gone, better to know now, while you can still adjust the name, than after it is on a record cover.
What this costs, in context
A .com runs somewhere in the region of ten to twenty dollars a year, depending on the registrar and whether you are in a first-year promotion. Renewal is usually higher than the introductory rate, so read the second-year price rather than the headline one.
Put that against the rest of your business. I laid out a full home studio build at around $915. A pop filter is twenty-five dollars. One night of studio time costs more than a decade of holding your own name.
This is the cheapest line item you will ever have, and it is the only one that protects the asset every other line item is in service of. If you have not locked your name down, it is the highest-return twenty dollars available to you this year.
Frequently asked questions
Do independent musicians really need a website?
You need an address you control. Whether there is a full site behind it or your domain simply redirects to the link page you already use is a separate question, and redirecting is a completely legitimate place to start.
What if my artist name is already taken?
Try adding “music”, “official”, or “hq” before you consider paying a reseller. And take it as information: if the .com is gone, think hard about whether the name is distinctive enough to build on, especially if you are early.
Is .com actually better than the alternatives?
For most artists, yes — not technically, but because it is what people default to typing and what press and industry contacts assume. Newer extensions are fine as additions. Get the .com if you can.
Can I move my domain later if I dislike the registrar?
Yes, after the 60-day post-registration lock. Domains are portable by design — you are not marrying anybody. Just do the move outside a release week.
What happens if I forget to renew?
A grace period where you can renew normally, then a redemption period where recovery costs substantially more, then release to the open market. Auto-renew removes the entire question.
The part that matters
None of this makes your music better. I want to be honest about that, because there is a version of this article that pretends buying a domain is a career move. It is not. It is closer to insurance.
The thread running through everything I have written this year is the same one: the parts of this business that last are the parts you hold. Your masters and your publishing. Your catalogue and your paperwork. The relationships you built directly rather than rented through an algorithm.
Your name is on that list, and it is the one most artists leave sitting out on the street because it costs less than a dinner to protect and nothing bad has happened yet.
Go see if your name is still free. Register it, turn on auto-renew, turn on privacy, and put it out of your mind for a decade.
That is the next right thing, and it is enough.
