Why an artist's links should live on a domain the artist owns

Every link you post is a small piece of infrastructure. Most artists rent it. The link says some company's name, points at some company's page, and if that company changes its terms, raises its price or shuts down, every post that carried the link now carries a dead one.

A link on a domain you own is different in three ways that matter.

It survives the service

A link at yourname.com/new-single is yours. If the service behind it changes, you point the domain at the new one and every link you have ever posted keeps working. A link at someservice.to/xyz123 belongs to the service; if you leave, it is gone, and the posts that carry it — the bio, the pinned tweet, the video description from two years ago — go with it.

For a catalog with years of releases, that is not a small thing. The old links are still driving traffic.

It carries your name

A link that reads yourname.com is a small act of branding on every post, and a small act of trust: the audience knows who they are handing the click to. A link that reads like a random string is the same format spam uses, and audiences have learned to hesitate over it.

It is the one address that cannot be faked

Anyone can register a lookalike short link. Nobody else can post a link on your domain. For an audience trying to tell whether a giveaway or a pre-save is really from you, the domain is the only signal that holds.

What it takes

You need a domain — yourname.com, or a short one you use only for links — and a service that will serve links from it. The service has to prove you control the domain (usually a DNS record), issue a TLS certificate for it so that the links are https, and then serve every link on your domain rather than its own.

After that, each link is yourname.com/slug. Move services later, and the domain moves with you.

Setting it up

The steps are the same on any service that supports it.

1. Choose the domain. Your main domain works if the links can sit on a path — yourname.com/l/single. A dedicated short domain — a short spelling of the name on a short ending — keeps the main site's configuration untouched and reads cleaner in a post.
2. Add it to the link service and take the verification record it gives you: a TXT or CNAME record with a value only you have seen.
3. Add that record at your registrar. It proves to the service, and to the certificate authority, that the domain is yours to serve from.
4. Wait for the certificate. Once the record is visible, the service requests a TLS certificate for the domain and every link on it becomes https. Without that step browsers warn on every click.
5. Move the old links. Update the bio links, the pinned posts and the descriptions on anything still driving traffic. The old short links can be left pointing at the new ones.

After that, every new link is created on your domain by default, and the analytics are the same as before.

The middle option

A shared branded domain — a short domain the service owns, used for many artists — is better than a random string and worse than your own. The link is readable and looks deliberate, and the service can still change or disappear.

What SNVRKOTICS does

NVR.to serves links from nvr.to on every plan, and on Pro and above from a domain you own: you add the domain, verify it with a DNS record, a certificate is issued for it, and every link in the workspace can be served from it. The links carry the same routing and the same analytics as they do on nvr.to, and they are yours.