By now you should know I frequent Rudy’s weekly to experience the greatest Texas cuisine a gas station can offer: breakfast tacos.
And while I’m often in a mad dash to taste and partake of bacon, egg, and cheese, or potato, egg, and cheese tacos, I can’t help but to get sidetracked by Rudy’s Bulletin Board. ?
As I scanned the board to discover any unique domains to write about, this given day in January my scanning was rewarded to find a band debuting its new album via a .BAND domain.
Personally, I’ve never heard of SINE, but I find their use of a .band domain to promote their brand appealing, yet is clever and challenging at the same time.
It’s clever because it allows for symmetrical design — dot lands dead center of domain name, yet challenging because the average person is not likely to recognize SINE.BAND to be a domain name unless displayed as WWW.SINE.BAND (as shown above) or http://www.sine.band.
That said, a person is likely to inadvertently append .com to the end of SINE.BAND due approximately 140 million websites (per DomainState.com) using .com as their extension of choice to represent their digital presence.
But with a changing of the guard coming to the web — generations y and z coming of age — more and more online searchers are caring less and less about the domain extension due to the rise of voice search.
With Austin being the “Music Mecca of the World”, we’re inundated weekly with new bands and music acts by the hundreds, especially those targeting generations y and z as their target market.
Nevertheless, most artists and bands take the traditional route of acquiring a .com domain to promote their brand online.
It’ll be interesting to watch over time to see whether or not the .band domain extension will resonate with artists in the music world. Which begs the question of how many .band registrations and websites are active?
Based on stats provided by NTLDStats.com, the .band extension currently touts 13.6K domain registrations since January 2015, most registrations (~48%) are parked with a little over 2% nearing delete status.
It appears that annual .band registrations are trending upward year over year, having GoDaddy (~30%), Tucows (13%), and NameCheap (~10%) in their respective order garnering most registrations.
By all means, please don’t take the chart above as a sign to go drop hundreds and thousands of dollars registering .band domains in hopes of striking it rich.
There will be a small percentage of the domain investing world to strike it rich investing in new domain extensions, but most are going to lose shirt, car, and home blindly investing.
In my humble opinion, it truly takes acute data analysis and discipline to profit when investing in new domain extensions. And while .com domain investing is a bit more forgiving to a certain extent, the same cannot be said for investing in new domain extensions. Domain investors MUST know what they’re doing to exacting standards to truly be a profitable success.
In closing, the world of music is black and white with a number of broke artists, musicians, and bands alike. The same can be said for domain investing — the small percent that make it big, and everyone else that doesn’t or barely keeps their head above treading water trying too. 😉
As a domain investor and business consultant, Alvin actively participates in daily domain auctions. Outside of auctions, he passionately shares his views, opinions, and vision for how businesses should and should not use domain names to generate greater customer growth and revenue.
