About My Sound
Designing, building and growing a website platform for independent musicians.
- Product strategy, UX research, Product design, UI design, Product engineering
- 20% → 60%
- 8
The problem
Independent musicians know they need a professional website. It is where fans find their music, promoters check their shows, and industry contacts look for a bio, press photos and upcoming performances.
But most musicians are not web designers, and generic website builders hand them a blank canvas. That leaves an artist facing questions they are not equipped to answer: what belongs on my site? How should it be organized? What does a professional artist site actually look like?
The result is websites that go unfinished, become outdated, or never get started at all. We saw an opportunity to build something specifically for musicians, and About My Sound is RogueUX’s own product: designed, built and run by us, with paying customers and no advertising spend.
The approach: freedom through constraint
We made an early decision not to build another general-purpose website builder with hundreds of options.
Instead, About My Sound starts with the sections an artist website actually needs: music, releases, shows, photos, videos, bio, contact information and mailing lists. Artists can reorder, hide and edit them, but they never start from nothing.
That is a deliberate trade. Constraints meant saying no to features some users might want. In exchange, a first-time user gets a strong starting point, while an experienced artist still has enough control to make the site their own. The principle became the tiebreaker for every product decision since:
If a feature adds flexibility at the cost of clarity, it does not ship.
What artists say
“About My Sound makes it so easy, prompting me to add all my information needed to build out my EPK effortlessly.”
“Utilizing About My Sound’s platform to design a website for my band has been tremendously easy to work with.”
“I appreciate how easy it is to use and how it creates a space for connection, creativity, and sharing music.”
Organized around how musicians think
Artists do not think in terms of navigation, content models or components. They think: my music. My shows. My photos. My story. So we organized the product around those same concepts.
Instead of assembling pages from generic blocks, artists get dedicated tools for each part of their online presence: discography, shows and ticket links, photos, videos, mailing lists, contact forms, downloadable press kits and stage plots. Changes made in the dashboard flow straight through to the public website, which makes the site a living source of truth rather than a brochure that slowly goes out of date.
A continuous feedback loop
We built a research loop into the product. We email new users to learn about their experience, schedule interviews, and use Microsoft Clarity to watch real sessions and see where people get stuck. When we find a problem we trace it back to the root cause and ship the smallest change that removes the friction.
Several of the improvements below started with a single session recording of a frustrated artist.
Fixing onboarding: from 20% to 60% completion
The problem. Only about one in five people who signed up finished setting up their site. Four out of five abandoned the product before ever seeing their website.
Session recordings and interviews with musicians who had signed up but not finished showed a consistent pattern: people got stuck when onboarding asked for content they did not have to hand. Some were signing up on their phones without access to their press photos or bio. Others started on one device and came back on another.
The insight. Onboarding was asking users to do work before showing them any value. A musician’s first question is: what will my website look like?
What we changed. We rebuilt onboarding around one goal: get the artist to a finished-looking, live website as quickly as possible. We removed plan selection, broke the flow into smaller steps and made most information optional. Missing content has considered fallbacks: an empty bio gets default copy, a missing hero image gets stock imagery. An artist can skip almost everything and still see a website that feels complete.
Create your profile → Choose a template → Choose your visual direction → Add your content → Go live
~20%~60%
Show the whole photo
The problem. Artists told us their photo galleries were showing “only the torso.” Every image was forced into the same fixed frame and cropped from the centre.
The constraint. The ideal answer was image positioning controls. But that would add complexity and take time away from the problems that mattered more, such as activation and sign-ups. We wanted a solution that worked with images exactly as they were uploaded.
What we changed. We stopped cropping. Each photo is displayed in full, with the surrounding space filled by a blurred and darkened version of the same image, the way Apple Music and Spotify handle album art. Photos that fit the frame look unchanged. Portraits, landscapes and every other shape stay fully visible without the artist editing or repositioning anything.
The website editor felt broken
The problem. Editing was divided into tabs: to edit the hero section you clicked “Hero,” to edit About you clicked “About,” and so on. Recordings showed users scrolling the preview, clicking around the page and then closing the editor. They were treating the preview like a website; the interface behaved like a settings panel.
The insight. Users were not doing anything wrong. Their mental model was simple: I want to change the thing I am looking at.
The constraint. A fully visual, canvas-based editor would have been a significant project. We needed to support the same mental model without taking on all of that complexity.
What we changed. A new Website Editor tab lets artists scroll through their site and click directly on the element they want to edit. Clicking opens the editing interface for that section. We built it in staging first, so the interaction could be tested without disrupting existing users.
Growth through SEO and a small, useful tool
The problem. About My Sound was a new product and we needed to grow acquisition without spending money on marketing. We focused on two channels: search, and free tools that introduce musicians to the platform.
What we changed. Google Search Console data showed which topics were already bringing traffic, so we reorganized the blog around those content clusters. We also noticed that stage plot tools were frequently discussed on Reddit, while most of the existing tools felt outdated. So we built a free Stage Plot Designer that lets musicians create and download professional stage plots as PDFs, with conversion paths into the website builder.
Result. The Stage Plot Designer became the product’s highest-performing source of traffic and conversions. It also taught us that relying heavily on one acquisition channel is a single point of failure, which is why we keep looking for small, genuinely useful tools that solve specific problems for musicians and create a natural path into the product.
Building a site by talking to Claude or ChatGPT
Artists no longer have to start on About My Sound at all. We built an MCP server that connects the platform to AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT, so an artist can describe their music in a chat and get a website draft back.
Claude or ChatGPT
The artist describes their music
About My Sound MCP
Name, bio, links, style, colour
Website draft
Preview now, sign in to keep it
Drafts use only what the artist has said. They are not published or indexed, create no account, and expire after 30 days unless the artist claims them.
The assistant picks up what the artist has shared (their name, genre, bio, and streaming and social links), chooses one of the eight visual styles and a brand colour, and the MCP turns that into a draft site with a link to preview it right away and another to sign in and keep it.
It works in the other direction too. Assistants can look up an artist’s public profile (bio, links, upcoming shows and press kit) and their published stage plots, including stage size, input list and gear, so anyone planning a show can ask about a band and get answers straight from its About My Sound site. It is the onboarding lesson taken one step further: show artists their website before asking them to do any work.
How we build it
We designed the marketing site and blog in Webflow, and built the platform with vanilla JavaScript, Cloudflare Workers, Pages, KV, Durable Objects and Analytics Engine, Xano as the backend and API, Stripe for subscriptions and billing, and Claude Code for AI-assisted development.
Claude Code connects directly to a Xano sandbox, which gives us somewhere to review and test every change before it reaches production.
Implementation plan
Detailed, written first
Coding agent
Implements the plan
Review agent
QAs the output
Human review
The final result, by hand
Production
Pushed from the sandbox
Agents implement and QA each change in the sandbox. Nothing reaches production until a person has reviewed it.
Owning the whole stack means we move quickly from a research finding to a product change, which mattered most when iterating on onboarding. AI-assisted development makes that faster still, with a human review step and clear guardrails around what reaches production.
What we learned
About My Sound exists because RogueUX’s founder is a musician and wanted to make something useful for that community.
Looking back, we would spend more time validating the market before building, and research total addressable market and willingness to pay much earlier. Independent musicians have limited budgets, and the product asks them to spend money from an already crowded wallet. That makes sustainable revenue a longer road than we first expected.
We are now exploring a different distribution model: partnerships with music incubators and arts organizations, where the organization funds websites for the artists it supports. It keeps the product focused on the same problem while changing who pays for it.
See it live: aboutmysound.com