Linktree is not a bad product. It does exactly what it was designed to do: give people one URL that leads to a page of links. For creators, small businesses, podcasters, and anyone who needs a simple directory, it works great.
But you're not a podcaster. You're a musician. And when someone taps your link-in-bio expecting to hear your new song, what they get is a menu. A vertical stack of platform logos. Spotify. Apple Music. YouTube. Amazon. Tidal. Maybe a merch link and your Twitter at the bottom.
That's not a music experience. That's a table of contents.
The listening experience that isn't there
Think about what happens when a fan clicks your Linktree. They see buttons. They pick a platform. They leave your page entirely. If they pick Spotify, they're now inside Spotify's interface, surrounded by Spotify's recommendations, Spotify's playlists, Spotify's algorithmic suggestions for other artists. Your fan's attention just got auctioned off.
Compare that to what happens when someone walks up to your merch table at a show. They see the artwork. They flip through the liner notes. You hand them headphones and they hear the thing right there. The whole experience is yours.
A link-in-bio for a musician should feel more like the merch table and less like a phone tree. Someone clicks, they see your album art, they hear your music, they're in your world. Streaming links can be there too, for people who want to add you on their platform. But the default experience should be listening, not choosing where to listen.
Everything is public or nothing
Linktree has one access level: public. Everything on your page is visible to everyone, always. There's no way to password-protect a link. No way to restrict access to specific people. No way to share something with press that your fans can't also see.
This matters more than you'd think. Say you upload your new single to SoundCloud as a private track and send the link to a few blogs as an advance. One of those blogs drops the link in a group chat, or a Slack channel, or a tweet. Now your “private” advance is circulating weeks before release. You didn't leak your own song, but the tools you used made it easy for someone else to. There was nothing between “here's my music” and “the entire internet has my music.”
A Linktree can't help you here because access control isn't in its vocabulary. It's all public, all the time. If you need to share the same music with different people at different levels of access -- and most musicians do, constantly -- Linktree has no answer for that. You either share it with everyone or you go find another tool.
Your release deserves context
A Linktree doesn't know what an album is. It doesn't know what a single is. It doesn't understand tracklists, credits, release dates, or artwork. It's a list of links. That's all it will ever be.
When you release music, there's context that matters. The artwork you spent weeks on. The tracklist in the right order. Credits for the people who played on it. Maybe liner notes, maybe lyrics. A Linktree flattens all of that into a button that says “Listen on Spotify.”
That might sound like a small thing, but presentation shapes how people receive your work. A release page with full artwork, a tracklist, and playable tracks says “this is a real project from a serious artist.” A list of streaming logos says “here are some places this exists.”
You look like everyone else
This one's harder to quantify, but it matters. Linktree is everywhere. Your dentist has a Linktree. The coffee shop down the street has a Linktree. The person selling candles on Etsy has a Linktree.
When your music sits behind the same template as all of those, it doesn't signal anything about you as an artist. It's fine. It's functional. But it's generic. And “generic” is the opposite of what you're going for when you're trying to get someone to care about your art.
This isn't about being snobby. It's about the fact that musicians have specific needs that a general-purpose tool can't address, and when you use that general-purpose tool anyway, you end up with something that technically works but doesn't actually serve your music well.
What a music-first link-in-bio actually looks like
The alternative isn't complicated. It's just purpose-built.
A music-first link-in-bio gives you a page per release with full artwork, a playable tracklist, and streaming links. Someone clicks your link and they hear your music immediately. They don't have to choose a platform first.
It handles access levels. The same page can be public for fans, password-protected for press, or locked to specific email addresses for industry contacts. One URL, different experiences depending on who's looking.
It gives you real analytics. Not “someone clicked your Spotify button.” More like “someone played track 3 twice, came back the next day, and listened to the whole album.” That's information you can actually use.
And it presents your music like music. Artwork front and center. Tracks in order. Credits where they belong. Not a list of buttons.
This is what I built Gatefolded to do. One page per release. Upload tracks directly or paste streaming links. Set access levels per audience. $49/year, everything included. But honestly, even if you don't use Gatefolded, the point stands: your music deserves a better link-in-bio than a generic directory page.
If you've been using Linktree because it's the default and it's free and it's fine, I get it. But “fine” is a low bar for something that's supposed to represent your art. The link in your bio is often the first thing a new fan, a blogger, or a label person sees from you. It should sound like something, not just point to a list of places where something exists.