Your Artist Page Goes Live July 1: What VPORT's Free Portal Means for Independent Electronic Artists

If you are a DJ or a producer in 2026, your link in bio is probably a Linktree page that has not been touched since 2022. A purple gradient. A SoundCloud link that opens in a webview. A Spotify link that opens in a different webview. A booking email that someone copies into their Mail app, types one sentence, then forgets to send. The page works. It also looks like the page worked five years ago, because it did.

We built VPORT for artists who deserve better than that. On July 1, 2026, the VPORT Artist Portal goes live to the public. It is free. It has no ads. It does not upsell you to a Pro tier to remove a watermark from your own URL. We are building it because the link in bio is the most under-served piece of an artist's marketing stack, and because we want to be the company that gets it right.

I am Shayan, founder of VPORT. This is the first time we are talking publicly about the Artist Portal, and the timing is deliberate. You have 37 days until public launch. That window matters, and I want to use this post to walk through what the portal does, why it is free, and what claiming your page before July 1 actually gets you.

What the Artist Portal Is

It is the page your fans hit when they tap the link in your Instagram bio. The same role Linktree plays today. We rebuilt that page from the ground up for artists in our world, which means melodic techno producers, house DJs, Afro-house heads, anyone whose music sits inside the long-set culture that streaming was never designed for.

The page has three components that earn their place:

Native music embeds. SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Music, Mixcloud, Beatport, YouTube. Embedded inline on the page itself. A visitor lands on your URL, sees your most recent set, and presses play without leaving the page. No webview. No new tab. No "open in app" prompt. The music plays where the visitor is already standing.

Tour dates and show announcements. Baked into the page. You do not need a Bandsintown bolt-on. If you have a show next Saturday at a venue in Berlin, you add it once and the page shows it. When the show passes, the page archives it. When you add the next one, it surfaces. The whole tour widget is one less SaaS you have to log into.

A reserved handle on a platform that is about to be public. The portal sits on top of VPORT, which is a music experience company that publishes spatial concerts on Apple Vision Pro. Your portal URL today is your future link to whatever VPORT-hosted content you publish. Reserving the handle now means it stays yours when the platform starts shipping artist-side tooling later this year.

There is a live example you can look at: Sahar Zin's portal. Same shape as the page you would build for yourself.

Why We Made It Free

The honest answer is that the Artist Portal is not how VPORT makes money. The platform makes money on the consumer side, through pay-per-minute credits that fans spend watching concerts on Vision Pro and on the web. The artist side, for now, is a supply problem. We need artists on the platform. We need them to like their experience. We need them to feel like the page they built with us is actually theirs, not a beta to extract a subscription from.

So the portal is free. No ads, no tier wall, no "upgrade to remove the VPORT logo." If we eventually charge for something on the artist side, it will be for paid distribution of a recorded set, not for the right to host a page. That decision is in writing internally. I am putting it in writing publicly here.

We are betting that the goodwill of being the page independent electronic artists can land on softly compounds into something larger over time. Linktree charges $5 to $24 per month to remove their branding. Carrd is $19 a year for a custom domain. The portal is none of those. If we are wrong, we eat the cost. If we are right, you get a page that does not become hostile to you at the moment your career starts working.

What Claiming Before July 1 Actually Gets You

The claim URL is portal-beta.thevport.com/claim. Three real things happen when you claim early:

1. Your handle is reserved. If your stage name is Lola Reaper and you claim before July 1, your URL is thevport.com/artist/lola-reaper on launch day. After July 1, the public scramble starts. You do not want to be the person who got their handle taken by a parody account.
2. You get the staging ground before the audience does. When the portal launches publicly, fan traffic starts. Setting up your page in front of zero visitors is calmer than setting it up while the page is being shared in DMs. Embed the three SoundCloud sets you want pinned. Pick the tour dates you want visible. Do it while it is private.
3. You get the first version of the artist-side tooling. Anyone who claims before launch gets early access to the analytics dashboard, the embed builder, and the tour-date import flow as we ship them. Public-launch users get them too, but a week or two later.

There is no contract, no exclusivity, no payment information collected at claim. You enter your stage name, you set a password, you connect your music platforms. We do not ask for distribution rights or a publishing split. The portal is a page, not a deal.

How the Claim Walkthrough Works

Five steps. Under three minutes if you have your SoundCloud login handy.

Step one. Open portal-beta.thevport.com/claim. Type your stage name. The form tells you if the handle is available. The system reserves it the moment you press continue.

Step two. Enter an email and set a password. We do not market to the email beyond the launch announcement.

Step three. Connect your music platforms. SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Music, Mixcloud, Beatport, YouTube. Connect one or all six.

Step four. Pick what you want on the page. Three pinned embeds, a tour-date widget, a bio paragraph, contact links. None of it is mandatory.

Step five. Press publish. Your URL is live. Edits land in real time.

That is the whole flow. If something breaks during claim, our help center has a VPORT login guide that covers the most common issues, and you can email founders directly at the address on the portal footer. I read those.

Where the Portal Fits In a 2026 Artist Stack

If you are running the standard independent artist setup, you have a Linktree in the bio, a Bandsintown for shows, a SoundCloud Pro for the sets, a booking inbox you check on weekends, and an email list living in Mailchimp. The Artist Portal replaces the first two and starts to nibble at the third when you embed a newsletter signup. We are not building a SoundCloud competitor or a DAW. We are replacing the worst-aged tool in the stack with something that respects the medium.

Down the line, the portal becomes the staging ground for VPORT-hosted spatial concerts. If you publish a 360-degree set with us, the link sits on your portal page like a regular embed, and fans on Vision Pro can open it in the player they already use. That is one or two product cycles out. For now, the portal stands on its own as a free, modern page that does what Linktree should have done in 2024.

The Honest Caveats

A few things the portal does not do yet, listed plainly:

• Custom domains. Your URL lives at thevport.com/artist/your-handle for now. Custom domains are on the roadmap, not in the launch build.
• Stripe payouts on tip jars. Tipping is in the next quarterly release. At launch, your page links out to your existing tip flow.
• NFT integration or token-gated content. We are not building this. If you need it, you need a different platform.
• Audio AI features like set autotagging or automatic mastering. These are not in the box. Other companies do them well.

We will ship the missing pieces in order of how many artists ask for each one. Tell us what is missing in the in-portal feedback form, or in any reply to the launch email.

What Happens Next

Between now and July 1, the goal is simple. Claim your page. Set the three embeds you want pinned. Add the next show on your calendar. Share the URL once on Instagram so your audience starts associating your name with the new link.

On July 1 the page becomes public. Search engines start indexing the URLs. We will publish an updated post here with the launch numbers, the artists who have claimed, and what we shipped in the first week. According to IFPI's 2025 Global Music Report, independent artists captured a record share of streaming revenue last year. The Artist Portal is one small bet on the proposition that the next year is going to keep moving in that direction, and that the tools we use for the link in bio should reflect it.

If you are an artist reading this, claim your page. If you are a fan reading this, send this post to the artist you most want to see on Vision Pro this year, and tell them you want their portal up before July 1.

Shayan Founder, VPORT