Music blogs come in all shapes and sizes. That’s why in this post, we’re rounding up the best music blogs from around the web.
We try to cover every base of the music industry while focusing on blogs that generate less than 1 million visits in traffic every month.
We used the following tools to uncover metrics for each blog:
- MozBar – Domain authority (DA).
- Similarweb – Traffic.
- Pingdom – Load time.
- Wappalyzer – CMS.
We listed these blogs based on the amount of traffic they receive per month. The traffic metric comes from the average of the last three months of traffic.
You’ll also find an analysis of their approach to content, social media, and monetization.
Let’s start at the top.
The best music blog examples
- Music Business Worldwide – A professional look into the inner workings of the global music industry.
- Lambgoat – A blog dedicated to publishing reviews and news for the metal industry.
- Guitar Lobby – A fantastic source for guitar gear and buying guides.
- EARMILK – A general online music publication that covers everything from music news and industry news to album and gear reviews.
1. Music Business Worldwide
DA: 73 | Traffic: 545,500 per month | Load Time: 645ms | CMS: WordPress
Music Business World is one of the most influential and professionally-operated music blogs to launch in recent years.
It was founded by London-based music journalist Tim Ingham, who’s written for NME, The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer and Rolling Stone, the latter of which he wrote 100 columns for.
Tim founded the site in 2015, sharing music industry news and information from around the world.
He now works with multiple editors and reporters as well as directors and consultants.
The site has even received testimonials from Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Atlantic Records, Live Nation, influential talent management agencies, including Adele and Glass Animals’ management company September Management, and more.
Content
As a news blog, Music Business Worldwide publishes quite a bit of content, including several new articles a day.
Even so, their content is well represented by the blog’s primary categories: News, Interviews and Analysis.
But remember, Music Business Worldwide’s focus is the global music industry as a whole, so you won’t find articles about the latest hits or best new artists here.
The blog’s editors focus on news related to record labels, management companies, ticket distributors and venues instead.
Even most of the blog’s interviews are with music industry professionals rather than artists.
The Analysis category has op-eds and heavily-researched articles that dive deep into the music industry’s inner workings., uncovering key statistics and hidden truths.
The articles themselves are typically written in short or medium format.
Many are light on images, although articles in the Analysis category have quite a few infographics depicting statistics.
Income streams
Advertising is an important income stream for Music Business Worldwide.
They insert ads in quite a few places: at the top of every article, on either side of the main content area, in the right sidebar and throughout the body section of each post.
Fortunately, the blog works with advertisers directly, so readers don’t have to deal with ads that aren’t related to the music industry.
The website also has a job board in which they advertise the latest jobs from around the global music industry.
The blog’s advertising rates aren’t available on the website, but they do encourage companies to contact their Operations Director to advertise job vacancies at “affordable rates.”
Finally, the blog publishes three magazines annually. These are typically collections of the blog’s best content throughout the year, only they’re published in a much nicer format (in print).
Readers can subscribe to all three magazines for $92.03/month.
Social media activity + other content ventures
Music Business Worldwide is active on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but they only receive a few dozen engagements across all platforms regularly.
Outside of written content, the blog publishes podcast episodes regularly, usually for interviews and short-form episodes on the latest music industry trends.
2. Lambgoat
DA: 51 | Traffic: 333,000 per month | Load Time: 2.21s | CMS: N/A
Lambgoat is an online music publication that focuses on news from around the metal genre of music.
It was founded by Alex Arnold in 1999, who launched the site as a way to publish album reviews to the broader metal community.
The blog still publishes album reviews, but they’ve expanded their content well enough to cover news and new music from the world of metal.
The team itself has even expanded to include several writers, executives, and in-house developers and video producers.
Content
Lambgoat publishes content to categories named News, Reviews, Features and Releases.
News articles are typically about a specific band or artist, such as album news, concert news and personal updates.
The site publishes about a dozen news articles every day.
Album reviews are published more infrequently, but the site still manages to pump out several reviews every month.
Album reviews have a score and the writer’s opinion of individual tracks and the album as a whole. This is usually depicted in a few paragraphs.
Articles published to the Features section are news, reviews and content, including interviews and reader comments, Lambgoat wants to promote more prominently.
The site also has an online forum readers can use to discuss Lambgoat content, music news, music recommendations and more.
It’s a great way to get readers to engage with a site, and it can even have SEO value for metal-related keywords.
Lambgoat publishes short (very short) articles with little to no images.
They often embed official music videos from YouTube to posts.
Income streams
Lambgoat inserts ads in several places on blog post pages.
The most obvious ad is the one that stays attached to the bottom of your browser’s viewport as you scroll.
There are also fixed ads at the top of the page, in the sidebar and in the content itself.
Lambgoat also dabbles in affiliate marketing, especially Amazon affiliate links.
They also partner with brands and regularly advertise those brands’ products on their site.
The blog also has an active Patreon account, but they only have 10 patrons at the time this article was written.
Even at their highest tier of $10/month, that’s only $100/month before Patreon takes their cut.
Lastly, Lambgoat has a small online shop in which they sell CDs, cassettes, vinyls and merch.
Social media activity + other content ventures
Lambgoat regularly posts new content to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
They receive most of their engagements on Instagram. They have over 9,000 followers, and most posts receive a few hundred likes.
The blog also has an active podcast in which they interview prominent figures in the metal industry.
3. Guitar Lobby
DA: 32 | Traffic: 294,400 per month | Load Time: 774ms | CMS: WordPress
Guitar Lobby is a great source for the technical side of the music industry.
That is, learning how to play an instrument as well as deciding which gear to buy.
Guitar Lobby focuses on all topics related to these two points, making it one of the best music blogs for musicians and audiophiles.
It was founded by long-time guitarist Chris Schiebel, who has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. This has allowed him to develop his own guitar amplifiers and effects as well as share his knowledge with the world.
He now works with a team of fellow writers and musicians.
Content
Guitar Lobby publishes new content a few times a month.
While their focus is song tutorials and music gear, they publish content to a long list of categories related to these two topics.
Their primary categories are Guitars, Gear, Instruments and Music.
The Gear section is home to child categories like Amps, Pedals, and Studio and Audio.
The Instruments category is filled with child categories for non-guitar instruments, including the piano/keyboard, the banjo and the violin.
The Music category is home to the blog’s tips on learning how to play the guitar.
Guitar Lobby publishes long-form posts with a lot of embedded videos.
They also tend to focus on list posts over other types of content.
Income streams
Guitar Lobby uses sticky ads: one at the bottom of the viewport and one in the sidebar.
There are also fixed ads in the sidebar.
The brand also uses affiliate links from Amazon and Sweetwater, especially in their gear roundups.
Social media activity + other content ventures
Guitar Lobby is not active on social media, nor do they take part in other content ventures.
4. EARMILK
DA: 61 | Traffic: 66,300 per month | Load Time: 3.04s | CMS: WordPress
EARMILK is a well-respected blog in the independent music space. It operates quite professionally, so well, in fact, that some consider it a proper online music magazine.
The blog operates via a team of contributors.
Content
EARMILK publishes new content several times a day, especially to their New Music and Industry News categories.
These categories are fantastic sources for music discovery, international music news, entertainment news and pop culture updates.
The blog also publishes op-eds and music reviews, specifically gear and album reviews.
You’ll also find interviews and features as well as numerous regular series. These can be thought of as being similar to columns in newspapers and print magazines.
Like most blogs on this list, EARMILK’s secret to publishing so much content is publishing short-form posts exclusively.
Most posts don’t have many images, either.
They do have embedded videos, though.
Income streams
EARMILK is an ad-heavy blog.
In fact, the posts are so short that some of them have more ads than content.
Sticky and floating ads appear at the bottom of the viewport, in the sidebar and to the bottom, right-hand corner of the page.
They’re also located underneath the site’s menu and between paragraphs in the content section of the posts themselves.
Social media activity
EARMILK has profiles for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but they don’t use these social channels that much.
Plus, their Instagram profile has hidden like counts, so it’s hard to tell how many engagements they receive.
Final thoughts
Starting a blog in the music industry is tough.
Every genre, from hip hop and indie rock to electronic dance music (EDM), already has several blogs dedicated to it.
Some even have millions of visits every month.
Even so, there’s plenty of room in this space for beginners.
It’s best to choose a genre, and stick with it as you grow your blog. This will allow you to target a specific audience and grow a loyal following from it.
Also, if you take a look at the blogs in this list, you’ll learn that publishing consistency plays a huge role in your site’s ability to appear in search engines.
Not only should you publish at the same time of every week, you should publish content to the same categories.
You can also make note of a few trends among these blogs and use them to improve your own site’s influence.
The first is the format most of these blogs write in.
Most successful music websites seem to publish short-form content, even for things like album reviews.
However, some of these sites have the luxury of having decades to grow their followings while others had connections prior to launching.
You don’t have that first luxury, and you may not have connections that can take your blog to the next level as soon as you launch.
What you can do, however, is publish authoritative content from the get go. This is content written in long-form format that targets keywords naturally yet effectively and includes a lot of high-quality images.
This is a strategy almost no successful music blog uses.
The second trend has to do with social media.
It’s clear that you don’t need an active following on social media in order to drive traffic to your blog.
However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t focus on this type of content in one way or another.
The blogs on this list aren’t paying much attention to social media. That means that, like blog posts, you can really make a difference in the amount of traffic you receive early on by focusing on social media as soon as you launch, and even before you launch.
With all that said, we wish you luck on your journey as a music blogger.
Finally, if you’d like to uncover insights from successful blogs in other niches, here are some other posts from this series:
