10 Big Music Stores on Shopify and Shopify Plus

More and more music brands are turning to Shopify as their ecommerce instrument of choice. From selling instruments and audio equipment to  digital downloads and merchandise, Shopify is now the platform of choice.

Why is Shopify a good fit for music brands?

Shopify has become the go-to platform for many bands and artists across the globe. The user-friendly interface makes it easy to build and maintain a fully customisable online store, whilst providing fans with engaging merch discovery experiences. Musicians can create a go-to spot for fans to flock to, giving them immediate access to tracks and official merch.

As well as bands and artists using Shopify to sell music and merch direct to consumers, there are an increasing number of brands within the wider music industry using the platform to sell things like audio and recording equipment.

The platform enables complete visual customisation to make every store feel unique. This is so important for the music industry, particularly bands, who often work hard to create special, creative and occasionally very unusual artwork and brand identities.

Shopify also has a proven track record of managing exceptionally high levels of traffic – perfect for handling large numbers of eager fans rushing to a site following an album launch or new merch drop.

Within Shopify’s esteemed orchestra of clients, here are 10 big Shopify music stores worth sampling:

1) Foo Fighters Official Store

Offering branded apparel, accessories and vinyls, this Shopify store is the place for Foo Fighters fans to get their hands on official band merch.

The design of this ecommerce store is ‘grungy’ but clean, which is very on-brand, reflecting Foo Fighters’ ‘mass appeal rock’. The typography is very cool, keeping things simple by focusing solely on one minimalist font.

The store features multiple products on the homepage with simple purchase flows, meaning customers can purchase within just a couple of clicks from landing on the site. This simplified purchase flow facilitates super-fast sales, which is an ideal set-up for selling music merch.

2) Eastwood Guitars

Eastwood Guitars is a Canadian guitar manufacturer, specialising in vintage-style instruments including electric guitars, basses and acoustic guitars, among others. The brand has been going for over 15 years and has a strong base of bands and artists who use their instruments.

Due to the vast range of products that Eastwood stock, they have used a filter on their collection pages to help users easily search for the right product for them, including adding a price slider so that customers can identify options within their price range. 

Intuitive site search is a vital element of any ecommerce store, as you aim to guide your customers to the best product for them. Here are 8 top tips for designing your ecommerce store’s search and filtration functionality.

Once customers have narrowed down their search, there is a quick view option on the collection page, allowing customers to view the product in more detail without navigating away from the collection page. This helps customers to browse options in more detail before settling on a product.

The product quick view shows key USPs each paired with a dropdown arrow that can be expanded if desired. This keeps product information streamlined and easy to digest, whilst also giving more thorough customers easy access to detailed information if they need it.

3) Lady Gaga Official Shop

The official home of Lady Gaga merch, her ‘Little Monsters’ all over the world can purchase clothing, vinyls and accessories from this Shopify-Plus-powered store.

The design of the site is minimalist, which allows for quick page load times – great for keeping eager fans happy. Design is bold and monochrome, maintaining a “grunge” vibe rather than something too slick or commercial. There is also a good use of GIFs to keep the site engaging with constant movement.

The sign up form for the newsletter features clearly at the bottom of product pages, as well as in a side tab, encouraging fans who aren’t yet willing to purchase to sign up to a mailing list. Email marketing is one of the highest converting marketing channels at any ecommerce brand’s disposal, so getting your site visitors to sign up for a newsletter is well worth the effort.

4) Gibraltar Hardware (Shopify Plus)

Swanky client Gibraltar Hardware is a manufacturer of drumset and percussion hardware. The company sells their range of products direct to consumer (D2C) from their Swanky designed Shopify Plus store. 

Selling to a previous customer is far easier than winning new customers to your brand. So rewarding loyal customers through a loyalty program is a must for increasing the lifetime value of each of your customers. 

Gibraltar Hardware offers VIP membership to their loyal customers, where they can gain rewards not only for making purchases, but also for interacting with the brand on social media or leaving a review. By encouraging social interaction and feedback in this way, you not only increase the customers’ connection to your brand, but also turn them into ambassadors of your brand, allowing you to connect with yet more people. 

5) Bastille Store

British band Bastille sell music and merch via this Shopify store, which runs as a subdomain of their official bastillebastille.com site.

From a branding perspective, the use of the logo font across the store reinforces Bastille’s brand identity and creates a cohesive overall look.

Having a solid black background means that the white text and colourful images really stand out. The product photos pop – letting the images do the talking. The same can be said for the calls to action as well – the grey add to cart buttons stand out against the black background of each page.

On product pages, Bastille have included a “you may also like” recommended products bar underneath each item. Cross-selling is an important step in increasing average order value for each sale made on your site. Find out how Swanky used cross-selling to increase revenue when we migrated RC Geeks onto Shopify.

6) Neural DSP Technologies

Neural DSP Technologies is a Finnish brand that creates cutting-edge sound processing software and hardware. Their cutting-edge products include state-of-the-art plugins and a recently-launched AI-driven floor unit. Swanky helped migrate Neural DSP’s ecommerce store from WooCommerce to Shopify Plus in just one week. 

The ecommerce store uses full screen imagery and video to create an immersive onsite experience, even on their product pages.

Since the products are digital, users have the option to have a free trial before purchase. This is a great advantage of selling digital products online, and there is an increasingly broad list of use cases for selling digital products on Shopify.

7) uDiscoverMusic. 

uDiscoverMusic curates and sells music from a vast number of artists, aiming to cater to all tastes. As well as selling music, uDiscoverMusic is primarily a news site, following news stories about the most influential musicians around the globe. The site is operated by Universal Music Group, one of the largest record labels in the world.

The editorial style of this brand is one of its great strengths, since it offers far more to its users than simply transactional sales. Creating a community around your brand and offering value beyond your products is a great way to build brand awareness and gather a following of loyal customers. Done well, you’ll develop a strong customer base who visit your store regularly for information and entertainment, as well as to make purchases. 

What’s more, a blog can be used to improve your SEO ranking effectively by appealing to popular search terms. Once you have brought traffic to your site, you can merchandise your blog articles to convert this website traffic into sales.

8) Loog Guitars

Another guitar brand, but this time for kids, New York based Loog Guitars makes guitars designed to get children playing, learning and falling in love with music. 

The design of the site is fun and lighthearted, with bright colours and rounded edges to add a softness to the brand, making it very child friendly. 

The use of lifestyle imagery across the website is a powerful way to help customers visualise their children using the products. Collection pages use large images which capture attention, with the product image changing when hovered over, to give customers a better understanding of each product before navigating onto a product page.

Once on the product page, there are a range of different photos, including both product imagery and lifestyle imagery, which showcases the product from multiple angles and in a range of settings.

With so many brands resorting to generic stock photography for their website, prioritising your own ecommerce photography is a fantastic way to stand out in a crowded market. 

9) Newbury Comics

Newbury Comics is an independently owned retailer specialising in music and pop culture merchandise. With an extensive offering of vinyls and CDs from all manner of musical genres, this is the site to visit for music enthusiasts. This Shopify Plus music store receives between 200-300k visits per month on average.

The store has an established feel to it, thanks to consistent use of imagery, good use of high-quality product photography, and extensive product details to appeal to the ‘music geek’. You can tell this is a brand who know their stuff about music and pop culture, simply through the well thought-out design and professional presentation of products.

The slight movement of images when hovered over creates a micro-interaction with the user, drawing their attention to the page and helping them feel more connected to the content. Micro-interactions like this are known to improve conversion rates since they increase customer engagement with elements of the site. 

10)Weezer Web store

Weezer is an American rock band from California. They have sold 10 million albums in the US and more than 35 million worldwide, and use Shopify to power their official merchandise store.

Since Weezer has fans all over the globe, its website caters for multiple different regions. When landing on the store, you are served with a helpful pop-up guiding you to the correct store for your region. 

Image: Weezer webstore

Localising your store is important if you sell to customers all over the globe, as it means international customers receive the correct currency and shipping or returns information wherever they are based. 

With the launch of Shopify Markets, Shopify merchants are able to quickly and easily cater for an international audience. Customers can select their preferred currency and language, and all this can be managed from a single backoffice.

If you want to learn more about how to internationalise your Shopify store, check out our complete guide to internationalisation on Shopify. 

Build and grow your Shopify music store with Swanky

If you’re feeling inspired by this ensemble of Shopify music stores, then why not talk to our friendly team of experts about how we could help jazz up your ecommerce site!

As well as experienced ecommerce experts, the Swanky team is composed of many musical maestros, so we’d love to hear from any ambitious music brands who want to find out more about Shopify Plus migrations, web design, optimisation or marketing strategy.

As an international agency, we work with brands across the world including North America, EMEA and APAC, and can help you sell your products across the globe.