SONIK Theme Review: A Modern Music WordPress Theme

SONIK is a WordPress theme for creating music-related websites. Therefore, if you need to build a website for a singer, band, DJ, radio station, club, or music label, then be sure to read our SONIK theme review to find out if this the right tool for your project.

It has been created by QantumThemes, a company specialized in music wordpress themes, with a deep knowledge of the music market. It comes from a broad study of all the functions that a professional musician, label or radio station may have.

In this review, we’ll be exploring the features that make up this theme. After that, we’ll take a look at the user experience on offer from SONIK.

By the end of this review, you’ll know exactly what this theme is capable of, as well as how easy it is to use.

Who Should Choose the SONIK Theme?

Anyone building a website for a music-related project should consider SONIK. Some ideal candidates for this theme include singers, bands, DJs, producers, music labels, radio stations, clubs, event promoters, music magazines, online stores, and more.

SONIK WordPress Theme Features

As well as its music-focused design, SONIK has plenty of features to help make your website a success. Let’s explore the best features in more detail in this section of our SONIK theme review.

4 Music Website Demos

To help you get your new website online as quickly as possible, every good WordPress theme needs at least one stylish demo. SONIK actually has four website demos for you to choose from. While this is less than some of the other best-selling WordPress themes on the market, as this is a niche theme, built for creating music websites, four is a good amount.

The demos cover the majority of cases that you may encounter while building a music website, as music label or agency, a single musician (dj or singer), music bands or radio stations.

Demo One: music labels and artist agencies

The main SONIK theme demo has been built for creating a music label or agency website. Therefore, if you do want to build a website to help promote your music, this demo is a great choice. The default homepage layout features a stylish music player that’s ideal for showcasing your latest tracks.

Your visitors can scroll through the different music your site hosts, all at the touch of a button. The rest of the default homepage layout gives you the ability to display video content, a discography, your choice of featured artists, upcoming events, and much more.

The main demo of the SONIK theme is very impressive. It’s fair to consider it a multi-purpose demo for websites in the music industry. Whether you want to share your music, promote your artists, display event details, or any combination of those options, this demo is a great choice. This demo isn’t too tightly focused on a single purpose. Therefore, it’s a good choice for a wide range of different projects.

Demo Two: music bands

The second SONIK demo is described as a website for rock bands. This option certainly has the right look for that purpose. From the font choices to the background images, this demo is perfect for creating a WordPress rock band website. However, as you can customize most aspects of this theme, this demo can easily be adapted for other projects.

Again, like the main demo, as your visitors scroll down the homepage, they can view a range of content. This can include music players, tour information, and even products from your ecommerce store. These homepage modules are all optional. Therefore, if there are any that won’t be needed for your project, you’re free to disable or remove them.

Demo Three: dj producers and singers

The third SONIK demo is aimed at DJs and producers. Therefore, if you want to find an audience for your music, get more gigs, or simply connect with your followers, this could be the music website demo for you. This demo has a design and style that is well suited to its purpose.

For every musician the most important thing is showcasing his music, so the author had a special attention for providing an engaging and yet usable experience, tempting the visitor to explore the tracks through the animated player.

Each release in fact, have the possibility to display the player at the top of the pages, and you can easily embed the player for a particular album in every part of your website using a shortcode.

Every track of the album can be completed with Title, Artists, a purchase link and an optional preview from Soundcloud or youtube.

An automated function of the theme will link each artist of a release to the appropriate artist, and in each artist page will be automatically listed all the releases where his name appears, adding some extra interaction and SEO optimization to the site.

As well as the music player that takes center stage on your homepage, you can also display the latest charts, gig information, store products, and more, using the built-in “archives widget”.

Demo Four: radio stations

The fourth and final (so far) SONIK demo has been created for a radio station website. This demo uses background videos to great effect. As soon as your visitors arrive at your website, they will be drawn in by the auto-playing background video content.

Visitors can then either hit the large play button or scroll down the homepage of your site. On the default homepage layout, you’ll have the opportunity to display the radio station schedule, show content from your video and image galleries, and introduce the members of your team, plus a lot more.

In the picture below you can also have a preview of the innovative “TripleView” template, which is a special function of the Sonik theme allowing you to create a horizontal scrolling layout, useful showcase the latest entries of different contents as releases, events, podcasts, news and more.

These four demos are quite specific in their purposes. However, it’s best to look at them as examples of what this theme can do, rather than how you should use it. Thanks to the flexibility of this theme, no matter what type of music-related website you want to create, you shouldn’t have a problem. Think of these demos as starting points for your website that can be customized to better meet your needs.

Theme Customization Options

Whether you use one of the four SONIK demos or create your site from scratch, you’ll be able to customize many aspects of this theme. All of the modification work takes place through the WordPress Customizer tool. This is great as it’s an intuitive way of working. Results are displayed in real time, with instant feedback on your choices.

Through the SONIK theme Customizer controls, you can modify the following areas of your WordPress website:

• Color settings
• Social networking profile links
• Site menus
• Header settings
• Typography choices
• Footer settings
• Content layouts
• Widgets
• Google Maps settings
• Plus more

We’ll cover how easy the Customizer is to use in the user experience section of this SONIK theme review. However, it’s fair to say that this theme gives you a straightforward way to personalize many of its different elements.

Unlike many other WordPress themes, SONIK doesn’t use a back-end control panel for its settings. This approach simplifies things considerably as you now only have one place to look for settings and options.

Music Player

As this is a music WordPress theme, it’s no surprise to find a music player. However, the SONIK music player works really well. You can add playable content throughout your website. When a user hits the play button, it’s streamed in the background.

Each release can feature unlimited purchase links, and for WooCommerce you can simply put the product ID and the album or single song will go straight to the shopping cart.

Adding audio content to your site is relatively straightforward. Whether it’s your latest audio tracks or a new podcast episode. You can either upload the files or link directly to a file hosted elsewhere.

The audio players are all well integrated into the theme design. They never look like additional features that have been added to your site. This is true even if they are hosted on services like SoundCloud or YouTube.

The theme is also compatible with the free Soundcloud importer plugin from QantumThemes, which allows you to easily import each Soundcloud set as single release, with an option to import the music sample directly into your WordPress media.

Events Manager

Whether you’re creating a website to promote a band, DJ, or club night, you’re probably going to want to share the details of upcoming events. Thankfully, SONIK includes a powerful events manager tool. Through the Events custom post type, you can add multiple events to your website.

As well as simply listing the details of the events, you can also link to ticketing services. You can also add the event location on Google Maps to help your visitors.

The theme features as well the powerful “QT Places” plugin, which allows you to create maps from every post type. With this plugin, you can create beautiful maps of your next gigs, as the custom fields will automatically geocode your address, and the map is easily embeddable with a shortcode.

Music Charts Publisher

Thanks to the Charts feature of SONIK, creating and publishing your own charts is very straightforward. Through the Charts custom post type, you can create multiple charts.

Each chart can contain multiple songs or tracks, complete with a link to where visitors can make a purchase. This could be through the ecommerce section of your site or an external vendor.

Custom Post Types

As mentioned, SONIK uses WordPress custom post types to organize and publish the different types of content. This covers the charts, artists, podcasts, events, galleries, and other types of content you can publish with SONIK.

As each custom post type can have its own post editor and options panels, they are each configured to make it easy to publish certain types of content. This could include the chart tracks, the podcast content, or the event listings, to name just a few.

Drag-and-Drop Page Builder

To help you customize the page layouts that make up the SONIK music theme, the Visual Composer page builder tool is included in the package at no extra cost. As Visual Composer is a drag-and-drop page builder plugin, you should have no difficulty editing any of the demo content. Creating your own advanced page layouts is also an option with this tool.

Ecommerce Support

If you want to sell music directly from your website, then you’ll be pleased to learn that SONIK is fully ecommerce ready. Thanks to the full support for the leading WooCommerce plugin, you can easily list items for sale and collect payments from your customers.

Whether you want to sell physical items, such as band merchandise, or digital downloads like audio files, WooCommerce makes it possible.

Other Features of the SONIK Music Theme

As you can see, SONIK has all the features you’ll need to make a professional music website with WordPress. Some of the other features you get access to include:

• Extensive documentation
• Over 600 Google Fonts
• Search engine optimized code
• Fully mobile responsive and retina ready
• Custom footer, header, and sidebar widgets
• GridStacks content design solution

You can view the full list of features on the SONIK theme page.

About the SONIK Theme Author

SONIK has been created by QantumThemes, a ThemeForest author with Elite status. QantumThemes has created three music-related WordPress themes so far, including the SONIK theme. They’ve also produced three WordPress plugins, all of which have positive feedback ratings from users.

SONIK WordPress Theme User Experience

In this section of our SONIK theme review, we’ll walk through the process of setting up the theme. This will demonstrate how you can create your own music website with SONIK and WordPress.

Importing the Demo Content

As mentioned earlier, the SONIK theme includes four pre-built website demos. To import this demo content into your WordPress website, the developers of this theme have provided four separate plugins. Each plugin will help you import one of the pre-built demo websites, simplifying the process considerably

After deciding which of the demos you want to import, you can upload the corresponding plugin into your WordPress website. This adds a new menu item to the WordPress sidebar menu. From here, you can run the installer and start the import process.

Once the demo content has been imported, you can begin replacing the stock content with your own material.

To start editing the demo content, you can open the posts and pages in the standard WordPress editor. Alternatively, you can launch the Visual Composer page builder tool and edit the entire layout and design of the content.

Once you’ve explored the demo content and started editing it, you might want to move onto the theme options.

Customizing the Theme Settings

SONIK uses the WordPress Customizer to allow you to modify the appearance and settings of your theme. Through the Customizer, you can change the color, typography, layout, and widgets settings, plus much more.

Thanks to the intuitive user interface of the WordPress Customizer, you get a live preview of your changes as you make them. There’s no need to save your settings, switch browser tabs, and refresh windows. Instead, you can see instantly in real time, what effect your choices have had.

SONIK uses WordPress custom post types to organize the different types of content you can publish. This means the various forms of content your website contains is organized more efficiently on the back-end of your WordPress website.

Once you’ve added your own content and defined your theme settings your new music website should be ready for launch.

SONIK WordPress Theme Pricing Information

The SONIK music WordPress theme is available from the ThemeForest marketplace for $63. This price covers the premium plugins included in the SONIK theme package. You also get lifetime access to theme updates and improvements. This price also includes six months of access to the theme support team. You can extend this support period by a further six months for $19.13. This brings the total support period to 12 months.

SONIK Support service

Qantumthemes puts user satisfaction at first, providing a support forum updated on daily basis, where you can post your requests and receive help within few hours, to have the certainty that your project will work slick and smooth.

SONIK Theme Review Final Thoughts

SONIK has a unique and original design that helps it stand out from the completion. If you want to create a music-related website with WordPress then this theme definitely has the right look and feel.

However, this theme also has an impressive set of features that will help you build almost any type of music website with WordPress. From simple band sites to music magazines and even online stores and event promotions sites, there isn’t much you can’t do with SONIK.

Thanks to the inclusion of the Visual Composer plugin, you can easily modify this theme to ensure its perfect for your project. The detailed theme settings will help too.

If you’re looking for a modern WordPress music theme, SONIK should be at the top of your shopping list.

Find out more about SONIK today