PLP 076: How to Make an Electronic Press Kit (EPK)

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This week we talk about Electronic Press Kits, or EPKs. A good press kit is one of your most important marketing tools. In this shorter episode we examine what goes into them, different formats for EPKs, and we’ll review at a couple of different examples.

You’ll Learn

  • The purpose of an EPK
  • What you should include in your EPK
  • Two major formats
  • A comparison of several EPKs

Resources

Transcript

What’s up Heroes, welcome to the Producer Life Podcast episode 76.  With the U.S. economy opening back up, I’m in the process of updating my press kit so I thought I’d do an episode on Electronic Press Kits, or EPKs.  Why you need one, what goes into them, different formats, and a whole lot more.

But first, cue the intro music!

An Electronic press kit is a modern adaptation of a traditional press kit: a collection of documents used by the media, labels, booking agents, and managers to help talk about you.   It’s a good idea to keep this in mind as you start pulling together your materials; think about what those individuals need, and how your press kit can make their job easier.  

So to start this process, begin by gathering content.  Create a folder on your computer with subfolders for pictures, logos, press write ups, and your biography.   If you don’t have professional photos, hire someone to take a few of you both casually and during performances.  These should be high resolution photos, and include some choices in PNG format with a transparent background so they can easily be incorporated into event venue’s materials.  

For the biography, keep it relatively short; no more than a couple of paragraphs.  If you’re not a really good writer, hire someone to do this for you. It’s worth a little money because you can use this across all of your social media platforms. If you’re doing it yourself, try reading it outloud and you’ll catch a lot of grammatical errors.  

Some of the other things your EPK will need include: 

  • Artist name
  • Artist location
  • Contact information, to include your manager or booking agent
  • Website and social media links, but only link to social media you’re active on!
  • Links to recent mixes on SoundCloud or Mixcloud
  • Videos of your performance, perhaps as embedded YouTube videos.
  • A short list of your biggest shows to date.  
  • Quotes from notable blogs, magazines, or press.
  • Logos, preferably in vector file format so they scale well for posters

Technical riders are frequently as separate document, although I’ve seen several examples where it’s included in the EPK.   A technical rider covers things like the gear you need, your expectation for the setup, a stage plan, and any other requirements for you to play at a venue. 

Whew, that’s a lot of stuff. Now that you’ve gathered everything, think about your branding.  Your EPK should have a consistent feel with the rest of your brand. Think about common fonts, color schemes, and themes. For example, my current one-page EPK has a comic-book feel which matches my heroic branding, and uses the same fonts that my website does to give it a consistent feel. 

There are two main formats for EPKs, and it’s probably a good idea to have both. Many websites like Bandzoogle or Wix will offer to create a website-based EPK.  I use WordPress with the Elementor plugin to build mine. Whatever you use, you should definitely have a webpage that you own with all of those previously mentioned essential elements for the EPK. 

Many of the DJ websites I reviewed offered both an online EPK as well as a PDF download.  One example of this I’ve got linked in the show notes is Krushendo.  His website EPK has a prominent bio and notable shows as soon as you open the page, and then links for events, marketing assets, videos, images, promo mix, and a booking link.   Clicking his Assets tab gives you two options: download the PDF EPK or the entire press package, which then takes you to a Google Drive folder with lots of images and assets. Remember, we’re trying to make it easy for booking agents, promoters, and journalists to say “yes” and to help hype you and your shows.  

I’m not crazy about his bio; while it’s impressive it’s pretty choppy to read.  Also, I’ve seen multiple artists link directly to a Google Drive or DropBox folder from their website, it seems a little unprofessional. I think as I’m revamping my EPK I’ll focus on the website with streamable assets, a downloadable PDF, and then have a sharable but private Google Drive link I can send out after someone contacts me.  While I’m not crazy about linking to a Google Drive folder, I do like to use Google drive to host some of my files, like my PDF EPK,  and then I create a direct download link so people on my website can click the link and open the file directly. I’ll have instructions on the shownotes page. 

PDF files are important because everyone can open them, regardless of platform and they tend to be very small as files making them easy to view even on a mobile phone.  PDFs also preserve fonts and formatting better than a Word document, and they can be easily printed and handed out when you’re marketing yourself in person.  I really like DJ King Arthur’s PDF EPK, although perhaps that’s because I’m partial to costumed DJs.  It covers all the topics we just mentioned as well as a technical rider for his DJing requirements.  At 14 pages it’s pretty long, but many of the pages are huge graphics with minimal text.  One of the cool things he does is includes some DJ themed pie charts with the estimates about how much music from several genres he tends to play, so even if you can’t listen to a mix in the PDF, you get a sense of the types of music he plays. His PDF also ends with a prominent link to download marketing assets. 

Another EPK example I reviewed was DJ Shawna, a multiformat Milwaukee DJ. Her EPK page has a slick looping video of one of her performances and prominently features reviews and testimonials. What’s a little unconventional is her PDF: it’s labeled a resume and done in more of a traditional business resume format.  She might be trying to reach a more corporate market… I’m not sure… but it seems a little dry for a performer.

I think the bottom line is that an EPK needs to generate interest, be on brand, and make it easy for others in the music industry to use.  Once you’ve got one built, it also requires ongoing attention to keep it up to date. 

If you’ve got EPK links you think are particularly good, send them my way, you can find me on social media @ HouseNinjaMusic.  I may add them to the running list on the show notes page at ProducerLifepodcast.com, look for episode 76.  

Thanks for listening, until next week, this is the House Ninja reminding you to be somebody’s Hero today.

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