An electronic press kit has one job: let a busy stranger say yes to you without a second email. Most EPKs fail that job not because the artist lacks material, but because the kit answers questions nobody asked while burying the ones everyone asks.
We talk to bookers, promoters, and playlist editors about what they actually open. This checklist is what survives contact with them.
The must-haves#
One short bio, written to be stolen#
Bookers copy your bio into event listings, verbatim, minutes before publishing. Give them 80 to 120 words in the third person that they can lift without editing. Save the long-form origin story for your website's about page.
Music they can hear in one click#
Two or three tracks, streaming inline, no login walls. Lead with the track that sounds most like your live set, not your most experimental work. If a booker has to leave the document to hear you, half of them will not come back.
Photos at usable resolution#
At least one landscape and one portrait press photo, high resolution, with your name in the filename. Include a live shot if you have a good one. Screenshots of Instagram posts are the fastest way to look unready.
Live evidence#
One unedited live clip beats a produced music video for booking decisions. Promoters are buying your show, not your post-production.
The factual block#
Genre, city, lineup size, and contact. Riders and stage plots belong here once you have them. This is the paragraph that answers the practical question: can this act physically play my room?
The nice-to-haves#
Press quotes with sources, notable past shows, and streaming numbers if they help your case. A quote from a local blog is worth including; a quote from your bandmate is not. Round numbers honestly: an editor who catches one inflated figure distrusts the whole kit.
The mistakes that end conversations#
- The 40MB PDF attachment. Send a link, never a file. Attachments get blocked, go stale, and cannot be updated after sending.
- The kit that disagrees with the website. If the EPK says quartet and the site says duo, the booker's next click is the back button. One source of truth, or drift wins.
- No date anywhere. A kit with no recent shows or releases reads as dormant. Timestamp something.
I book from the kits that answer my questions in the first screen. The rest go in the maybe pile, and the maybe pile never gets booked.
Keeping it current is the actual hard part#
Every EPK is accurate the week it is made. The failure mode is April: the kit still says last year's lineup, the photos are two haircuts old, and nobody remembers where the master file lives.
This is why we built press kits as a generated document rather than an uploaded one: your Artistplus EPK is assembled from the same catalog, photos, and bio as your website, so updating your site updates the kit. Pair it with a proper website and the booker's one link requirement is solved for good.