Your Linktree Is Not a Website

We get it. You made a Linktree because it took two minutes and it works. But works is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. A list of links is not a website. It is a list of links, and the difference costs you money and shows in ways you cannot see from your own phone.

First, credit where it is due

Linktree solved a real problem. Instagram gives you one clickable URL, and you have five things you want people to click. Around 70 million people have signed up for the fix, and it is not a toy: by May 2024 Linktree was reporting 240 million commerce clicks in a single month, roughly $300 million in monthly sales flowing through those pages, and about $6 billion in annual gross merchandise value. The company raised $110 million at a $1.3 billion valuation in March 2022.

So this is not an article about how link-in-bio pages are stupid. They are excellent at the one job they were built for, which is routing traffic. The problem is that bands quietly promote them into a job they were never designed to do.

A Linktree is a patch for a platform limitation. It is not a home.

The five things a link page cannot do

1. Rank for your own name

Search your band name and look at what comes back. Spotify, Instagram, maybe an Apple Music page, maybe a listings site that scraped one of your shows in 2023. A link page is one thin page on somebody else domain with almost no text on it, which means it has almost nothing for a search engine to understand or rank. Your own site, on your own domain, with your name in the title and your city and genre in the first paragraph, is the only asset in this list that can actually win the search for you.

This matters more now that answers get summarized rather than listed. When something on the internet has to describe your band in a sentence, it pulls from pages that describe your band in a sentence. Your link page does not contain a sentence.

2. Tell Google when and where you are playing

Schema.org has types built for exactly this: MusicGroup for the band, MusicEvent for a show with a venue, a date, and a ticket link, MusicAlbum for a release. Structured data is how a search engine knows that the words on your page mean a concert on the 14th at a venue in Omaha rather than just a list of numbers. You cannot add it to a link page. You can add it to a website in about twenty minutes, and it is the difference between your shows being data and your shows being decoration.

3. Own the email list

Email is the only channel where reaching your fans is not a negotiation with a company. And the case for owning it keeps getting stronger, because the case for renting attention keeps getting worse. Metricool study of about 40 million posts across roughly a million accounts found Instagram post reach down 31% year over year, with Reels reach down 35%. Socialinsider puts the average reach rate at 3.5%, itself a 12% annual decline. Litmus, meanwhile, reports email returning $36 for every dollar spent, higher than any other channel.

A list of 300 people who asked to hear from you outperforms three thousand followers who might get shown a post. A link page can point at a signup form. It cannot be the thing that owns the list.

4. Look like your band

Every link page looks like every other link page. That is by design — the format is a stack of identical buttons, and the customization on offer is a background color and a font. Your record has an aesthetic. Your posters have an aesthetic. Then a booker clicks through and lands on the same gray stack of buttons as every other act on the bill. Nobody consciously thinks less of you for it, which is exactly the problem: they just do not think anything at all.

5. Survive the platform

Every rented page carries the same risk, which is that the terms change and you find out afterward. Bandcamp — the most artist-friendly platform in the business — was sold to Songtradr in late 2023, and roughly half the staff did not survive the transition. Nothing about that was malicious, and Bandcamp is still excellent. It is just a reminder that when the owner of your page changes, nobody calls you first. Your domain is the one line in your setup that no acquisition can rewrite.

The money part

The free tier is the expensive one the moment you start selling. Linktree charges a seller fee on the lower tiers — roughly 9% on the paid plans, higher on free — and that sits on top of Stripe or PayPal processing. Zero percent arrives on Premium, at about $35 a month. Which means the plan that stops taking a cut of your sales costs more than a custom website.

Read that table as three jobs, not three competitors. Nobody sane runs a merch operation instead of a website, or a website instead of a storefront. The mistake is owning only the first two rows and calling it a web presence.

The arithmetic, with real numbers

Say you have 3,000 Instagram followers, which is a genuinely respectable number for a regional band. Socialinsider puts the average Instagram reach rate at 3.5%. So a post about your show reaches somewhere around 105 people, and reach is not the same as read.

Now say 300 of those 3,000 people gave you an email address over two years — a 10% conversion that a well-placed form on a site you own will beat. That list is yours. It does not get throttled, it does not require you to post four times a week to stay visible, and it goes with you if the platform changes its rules, its algorithm or its owner.

That is the trade in one paragraph: a link page helps people leave Instagram, and a website helps you stop needing it. Metricool study of roughly 40 million posts found reach down 31% year over year. Whatever that number is next year, the direction has been the same for a decade.

The Bandcamp problem

Bandcamp deserves its own section, because when we say a link page is not a website, a lot of bands answer that their Bandcamp is. It is not, and the reason is instructive.

Bandcamp is the best storefront independent music has. Bandcamp Fridays alone — one day a month where the platform waives its cut — have moved more than $154 million to artists and labels since March 2020, including $19 million in 2025 and a single December day that cleared $3.8 million in 24 hours. That is real money going to real bands, and any argument that ends with stop using Bandcamp is a bad argument.

But a storefront answers one question: how do I buy this? A website answers the other four. Who are these people. Are they any good. Are they playing near me. How do I book them. Your Bandcamp page cannot host your press photos in a form a journalist can use, cannot tell a booker your stage plot, cannot rank for your name plus your city, and cannot look like anything other than a Bandcamp page. Use it for commerce. Use something you own for identity.

Three questions to ask about any platform

This is not really an argument about Linktree. It is an argument about which parts of your career you rent. Every platform you use is fine right up until it is not, and these three questions tell you in advance how much that will hurt.

1. If this disappeared tomorrow, what would I lose? If the answer is a link page, fine, rebuild it in ten minutes. If the answer is your entire audience and the only way anyone finds you, that is not a tool, that is a dependency.
2. Can I export what is mine? Email addresses, yes. Followers, no. Design, never. Build your setup so the irreplaceable part lives where you can export it.
3. Who decides what it costs next year? On a rented page, they do, and they can price it or take a cut without asking. On your own domain, the answer is a registrar charging about eleven dollars.

What to do this week

1. Buy the domain. $10.44 at Cloudflare Registrar, which sells at cost, against $15.88 at Namecheap and $21.99 at GoDaddy. Register it in an account the whole band can reach, not one member personal email.
2. Put one real page behind it. One page with your name, your city, your genre, a player, three photos, upcoming dates, and a booking address beats a five-page site you never finish.
3. Add an email form. MailerLite is free to 250 subscribers and 2,500 sends a month. The form goes above the fold, not in a footer nobody scrolls to.
4. Keep the Linktree. Point it at your site as the first button. It is still the right tool for the bio link — it is just no longer pretending to be the destination.

When a link page is genuinely enough

If you have not released anything yet, have no shows booked, and have nothing to sell, a link page is fine and a website is procrastination with a receipt. The same goes for a one-off side project, a covers band that books entirely through a phone number, or a producer whose whole business runs through DMs. Nobody is failing a test here.

The moment it stops being enough is specific and easy to recognize: someone you have not met needs to decide something about you. A booker filling a bill. A writer deciding whether to cover the record. A person at a show who liked you enough to look you up in the parking lot. That is when a stack of gray buttons starts costing you things you will never get an email about.

Control is the whole argument. You own the domain. You own the design. You own the mailing list. When the next platform gets sold, sunsets a feature, or quietly raises its cut, your website is still there, still working, still yours.

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