FOR MUSICIANS & BANDS
YouTube for Musicians: Channel Set-Up, Shorts and Live Sessions
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A section-by-section guide to the electronic press kit: what journalists, promoters and bookers look for, how to present it and what to leave out.
An EPK, or electronic press kit, is one page or document that gives journalists, promoters and bookers everything they need to write about or book you. Include a short bio and a long one, a link to your music (private or public) and high-resolution press photos. Add live or session video and press quotes. End with key facts and contacts.
Sending music to blogs, approaching promoters or applying for festival slots? Then somebody at the other end is deciding, fast, whether you deserve any more of their time. A good EPK makes that an easy call. One missing photo or a broken link can be all it takes for them to move on.
Below we work through an EPK section by section. After that come format and design, and the mistakes we see most often.
An EPK answers the questions industry people have about you before they’ve had to email you. A journalist wants to listen and read a bio, then grab a photo. A promoter wants to know how you sound live and whether you can pull a crowd. A festival booker wants all that, plus a contact who’ll actually reply.
Youth Music’s PR guidance for independent artists describes the EPK as the place for the key information someone needs to review your music. Its checklist runs: artist name, release details, private streaming link, biography, photos, social links, quotes, previous press and contact details (Youth Music: PR tips for independent artists). It’s a sound checklist to start from.
Open with your name and where you’re based, then one line that sums up your sound. Be specific. “Indie band from Leeds” tells a reader next to nothing. Name the mood and the influences, maybe the setting too, and you’ve handed them a hook for their own piece.
Give the title and the format (single, EP or album), plus the release date and your label if you have one. If it isn’t out yet, include a private streaming link so they can listen before release day. If they can’t hear it easily, they can’t write about it.
You need two versions. The short one is two or three sentences that a journalist or promoter could paste straight into a listing. The longer one runs to a few paragraphs, for anyone who wants the full story. Youth Music suggests including your influences and “for fans of” comparisons. Write in the third person and keep it honest. Lead with what’s interesting now. Your whole history can wait.
Put your latest release first, followed by your best two or three tracks. Only link to the platforms where you’re active. A long list of every service you’re distributed to adds very little.
Include two to four high-resolution images that download in one click, ideally in both orientations (horizontal and vertical). As Youth Music points out, lots of publications favour one orientation, so a set of vertical shots alone might not fit their layout. Credit the photographer on each image and say how the images can be used.
Photos are where a lot of EPKs fall down. Our guide to press photos for musicians covers how to plan a shoot, and professional photography is one of the fastest ways to make a kit look serious.
Add one or two clips that show what you’re like as a performer or as a person. A live set works, as does a stripped-back studio session or a short interview. For promoters in particular, a decent live clip can count for more than anything else in the kit. It needn’t cost much. Clean sound and stable footage will get you a long way.
Pick two or three short quotes from reviews, radio or well-regarded blogs, each with the publication’s name and a link. No coverage yet because you’re just starting? Leave the section out. Padding it looks worse than an empty space.
Keep a short list of the things that help someone make up their mind. That might be notable support slots or festivals you’ve played, radio plays or streaming milestones, sync placements, awards or funding. Only include what you can back up, and put a date on anything that’ll change.
Give upcoming dates and your line-up, along with any technical basics a promoter needs early on, such as how many people will be on stage. A full technical rider can go in a separate download.
List separate contacts for press, bookings and management if you have them. Add your website and main social profiles. An email address beats a contact form. Put contact details at the top of the kit and again at the bottom, so nobody has to scroll looking for them.
| Section | Length | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Name and one-line description | One line | Essential |
| Current release and private link | Three or four lines | Essential |
| Short bio | Two or three sentences | Essential |
| Long bio | Three or four paragraphs | Recommended |
| Press photos | Two to four images | Essential |
| Live or session video | One or two clips | Recommended |
| Press quotes | Two or three | When you have them |
| Key facts | Five or six bullets | Recommended |
| Contacts | Two or three lines | Essential |
Usually a web page. It can hold music and video that play right there, it’s always up to date, and you send everyone the same link. The obvious home for it is a press page on your own site. Our guide to whether musicians need a website explains how that page sits alongside the rest.
Keep a short PDF too, for anyone who asks for one or wants to pass it round their office. Make sure the file is small enough to attach to an email. Link to downloadable photos instead of embedding huge images.
Whichever format you pick, test every link before you send it and look at the page on a phone. Plenty of people will open your kit from an email on their mobile.
Clean and consistent. Use the photography and colours from your release artwork and social channels, and the same typefaces, so a reader recognises you the next time your name crops up. Put the music and contact details where anyone can spot them in seconds. Don’t fill space with decoration.
If your images will also appear on streaming profiles, check each platform’s rules. Spotify’s artist image guidelines, for example, ask for avatars of at least 750 × 750 pixels and headers of at least 2660 × 1140 pixels, and say images should avoid text and busy backgrounds (Spotify: Artist image guidelines). If you shoot with those crops in mind, you’ll save yourself trouble later.
Keep unreleased music off public links. Use a private link until release day.
Don’t give numbers without context. A one-off spike in streams is only worth mentioning if you explain what caused it. And leave out anything you can’t back up, because inflated claims are easy to check and they wreck trust.
You don’t need every photo from the shoot either. Choose the best few, since too much choice slows people down. Make sure you’re allowed to share the ones you use. In the UK the photographer is usually the first owner of copyright in commissioned work unless you agree otherwise in writing, so check your agreement covers press use.
Finally, drop the long lists of links. Point people to the places where you’re active and leave it there.
Before every release, and any time something significant changes, like new photos or a new line-up, a notable gig or fresh press. Date the page or the PDF so readers can see it’s current.
An EPK supports your press and booking work. It won’t do that work for you. Pitching to journalists is a separate job. So are radio plugging and playlist pitching, and plenty of artists either do them themselves or bring in a specialist. The EPK’s job is to make sure that once someone is interested, everything they need is already waiting.
Applying for funding to cover some of this? Read the guidance carefully. Help Musicians’ Next Level guidance, for instance, lists content creation such as video and promotional photography among the eligible costs (Help Musicians: Next Level award application guidance). Check the current terms before you apply.
We design and build personal brand websites with a press page that works as a living EPK. We also photograph artists for press and streaming profiles, and for social. Our brand videography covers interviews and documentary-style films as well as short social clips. Every project starts with a clear brief, scope and fee, agreed before any creative work begins. We can also shoot and film your EPK, and design every part of it: see marketing for musicians.
EPK stands for electronic press kit. It’s the digital version of the printed press pack that artists and labels used to post out to journalists, and these days it’s usually a web page, a PDF or both.
Short enough to scan in a minute or two. On a web page, that normally means one screen of essentials up top, with the long bio and extra photos further down beside the full press quotes. As a PDF, one to three pages is plenty.
Yes. An EPK is how you get press in the first place. Drop the press quotes section and lead with your music and bio. Then add photos and a live clip, and bring in coverage as it arrives.
You can write a good bio yourself if you keep it short and specific, in the third person. Ask someone who knows your music to read it and tell you whether it sounds like you. If you struggle to describe yourself, sort out your positioning first and the bio gets much easier.
No. A link-in-bio page is a list of links for fans arriving from social media. An EPK is written for the industry. It holds the bio and photos they need to make a decision, and it carries video and quotes as well, plus your contacts.
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