I based my electronic press kit off multiple examples on bandzoogle.com, various spotify profiles and websites from popular musicians, finding many common key characteristics of an EPK including: Artist background, strengths, accomplishments, certifications, accolades and just a general idea of what the artist is all about. Amongst all of these, artist backgrounds were a constant in every EPK I came across.
No matter what style, genre or popularity the artist had, almost all of them included their current living place or place of birth and what style of music they make. This is important to put at the beginning of an EPK as the first sentence (or paragraph) is essentially the whole pitch of the artist as a whole and needs to hook the reader in the same way a blurb on the back of a book does. If people aren’t interested in what you do from the first thing they read they won’t be bothered to invest more of their time into you. This is especially true for professionals in the industry who have looked through hundreds of EPKs and aspiring artists and simply don’t have the time or resources to look in depth into every single one of them.
Industry professionals or potential investors will also look for accomplishments or ‘milestones’ you’ve reached like having your music played on radio, winning awards such as Best New Artist or being mentioned in news/critic articles. These milestones mean you are already on the map or ‘known’ in the industry and have a career foundation to build upon with their resources. Having attention on you previously means you’re more likely to get mentioned by the same press or other outlets looking to cash in on the attention. (https://www.reelcrafter.com/blog/epks-101-what-every-artist-needs-in-their-electronic-press-kits para 13-14, by reelcrafter.com, accessed on 15.5.2025) These professionals likely will not want to waste their time on someone who doesn’t already have at least a small following.
I’ve included extensive information on my background as a musician from since when I was a lot younger, partly because I haven’t been lucky or alive long enough to have a collection of media attention and prestigious awards to draw upon as content for my EPK, and also because I think that including information on yourself as a young artist is a good selling point for showcasing your experience in the fields of music you are in. I haven’t won a BBC young musician of the year award but I have extensive knowledge of my instrument which anyone reading my EPK can clearly infer on just from the amount of time I have spent on it.
In a similar fashion I’ve also placed some of my tracks right at the top of my EPK and selected specific parts of the song to preview which is another common practice seen in most other EPKs I looked at. If they for some reason don’t have their music on their EPK its likely they are already famous enough that they won’t need to, and if they do have music it will likely be their newest single or a music video. (https://rayeofficial.com/, published by rayeofficial.com, accessed on 15.5.2025)
The audience I’m trying to reach and the people who are in the same field as me as a music producer might not necessarily solely have their original tracks on their page, as a lot of the workload that comes with being producer stems with being commissioned to produce and work with other people to release the tracks under their name. This makes having those tracks all the more important to be placed there, as if the tracks aren’t under your own name you may not have as much recognition for creating them. (https://www.nelsonbrothers.co.uk/music-composition.html#:~:text=He%20is%20classically%20trained%20in,Ed%20Sheeran%20and%20The%20Who., para 4, published by nelsonbrothers.co.uk, accessed on 15.5.2025)
It’s also important to have the tracks right at the top as that is what 90% of people are even looking at your EPK for, especially if you are not a well known artist. If people don’t like your music why would they bother reading the rest of the profile?
I didn’t want to be overly flashy with the aesthetic of the EPK as I feel that something like that doesn’t really represent me as an artist and much less as a person. A lot of my work is home produced and I don’t think a super polished face really reflects that as opposed to a more candid picture of me like the one I selected. Despite this, I liked the sprawling blurred glow in the background that gives the picture the colour it needs, otherwise it would be too muted. I selected the text blocks and font to also match this style making the EPK look more like a mini blog, with the boxes switching sides to add variation to the scroll. However, I knew that I wanted the name title to be bold and in your face, so that the first thing you see when opening the EPK is the name.
In my opinion I think social media is a much better way for people to discover you for a multitude of reasons. For a start, unless you’re directly searching for the artist’s website, an EPK or website is most often attached to a social media profile in the bio section of the profile at the top of all their posts. This exposure is also multiplied from however many social media platforms the artist has, and if you’re just starting out it makes sense to be on as many as possible, commonly Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Youtube, Soundcloud and Spotify. Therefore, that’s six times as many times for someone to even view your EPK compared to if you weren’t on any of them in the first place.
As well as that, social media is a much more interactive and versatile way to gain a fan following compared to an EPK; press kits are static and pre-designed, which can be good for polishing and articulating exactly what you want to come off across as, but social media allows you the freedom to post what you want when you want a moments notice and adapt day to day with your fanbase. In the same vein this public profile has features like comments, the ability to share posts to other people, being able to immediately interact with other artists and professionals, polls and so much more.
In this day and age that we live in, having an active social media presence is borderline essential to sustain any sort of hype wave that appears; people being interested in an artist that is silent on social media is a luxury reserved only for the legends that already have made it in their career. Fan interaction through comments and direct messages lets them develop a connection with you and helps convey to people what kind of person you are, not just an artist. Furthermore, building up anticipation for a song or announcing an album is a modern art form in the music industry today, one that is best performed through different forms of social media like snippets and fan interaction.
Group Work
Our group started with drawing out concepts of how an EPK’s formatting and design would look on paper, then started drafting the first paragraph of the EPK, labelled as the artist intro and bio. We used a number of spotify profiles from Beyonce to Tori Amos to draw inspiration from. The main roadblock most of us agreed was the fact that most of us didn’t have a lot of content to actually include in the EPK which made it difficult to show our professional development, yet it didn’t seem like a largely significant problem as all of the EPKs we came across weren’t actually that lengthy. We also came to the conclusion that high quality photos and videos that have a binding aesthetic were an important part of a display like this when we would come to do them later in our careers. Linking as much social media possible to the page was also a key factor we considered.
Bibliography
(https://www.reelcrafter.com/blog/epks-101-what-every-artist-needs-in-their-electronic-press-kits para 13-14, by reelcrafter.com, accessed on 15.5.2025)
(https://rayeofficial.com/, published by rayeofficial.com, accessed on 15.5.2025)(https://www.nelsonbrothers.co.uk/music-composition.html#:~:text=He%20is%20classically%20trained%20in,Ed%20Sheeran%20and%20The%20Who., para 4, published by nelsonbrothers.co.uk, accessed on 15.5.2025)
