A booker opens your email on a phone, between two other things, standing up.
There is a nine-megabyte PDF attached. It does not open. They put the phone down.
That is the whole story of why the electronic press kit moved out of an attachment and onto a web page. An EPK is not a document anymore. It is a link you can send from your thumb, and the good ones answer a booker’s questions in the order a booker actually asks them.
The EPK Moved Online
Ten years ago a PDF made sense. Everyone was at a desk, and attachments were how things traveled.
Now the person deciding about your band is holding a phone in a loud room. A link opens instantly. A PDF asks them to wait, pinch, and scroll sideways through a page built for paper.
There is a second problem with the attachment, and it is worse. The moment you send it, it is frozen. Six months later a booker forwards that file to somebody else, and it is still advertising a lineup you no longer have and a phone number that stopped working. A page at one address gets updated once and every copy of the link updates with it.
So the EPK lives on your own site, at a URL you can say out loud. That is also the one thing a Facebook page can never give you.
Lead With the Draw
Open with the thing a booker is paid to care about: can you put people in the room?
Rooms you have played go at the top. Names they recognize, in your region, recent. If you regularly pull a crowd on a specific night at a specific type of room, say that plainly.
What does not go at the top is how the band got its name. Nobody has ever booked a band because of the origin story. That can live further down for the people who want it.
Specific beats vague every time. “Full horn section, four-hour cover set, two hundred songs on the list” tells a booker something. “A show you have to see” tells them nothing at all, and every band on earth has already said it.
The Short Bio
One paragraph. Maybe two.
Say who the band is, what you play, where you are based, and who tends to hire you. A booker is skimming for fit, not for literature. If your bio runs longer than the time it takes to pour a beer, it is too long.
Keep a short version and a long version. The short one goes in the EPK and in pitch emails. The long one is for a venue that asks for copy to put on its own event page, and handing them something ready to paste makes their night easier. People remember that.
Video and Photos That Sell the Show
One clip, chosen on purpose, above everything else.
The clip should show the band playing to actual people, and the people should be visibly into it. A crowd sells a room better than a clean mix ever will. Put it where a booker can hit play without scrolling.
Then photos. Three or four live shots, horizontal, well lit enough to use. A venue will pull one for a Facebook event or a poster, and if yours are hard to use they will grab something else. Make it effortless to promote you and you get promoted.
One press photo of the full band helps too, for the same reason.
Stage Plot, Input List, and Rider
This is the section that separates bands who work from bands who wonder why they do not.
A stage plot is a simple drawing of where everyone stands and what they need. An input list says what goes into the board. A short rider says what you need from the venue and what you bring yourself. None of it has to be pretty.
The sound engineer is the one who reads these, and the sound engineer talks to the booker. Handing them a usable plan before load-in is one of the cheapest ways to be remembered as easy.
Keep a downloadable version for the engineer, plus the same information visible on the page so nobody has to download anything to see it.
What to Cut
Old information hurts you more than missing information does.
A booker who finds a lineup that changed two years ago, or a “current” clip from a room that closed, learns something about how you run the band. Fair or not, they extend that to how you will run their night.
- Dates and lineups that are no longer accurate.
- Long lists of every venue you have ever set foot in. A handful they recognize beats forty they do not.
- Genre adjectives doing the work a clip should be doing.
- Anything a booker cannot act on, like streaming numbers or contest placements.
Set a reminder to read your own EPK twice a year, top to bottom, as if you had never seen it. Fifteen minutes. Fix what has gone stale, then send the link to somebody and ask what they think it says about your band.
The answer they give you is the answer bookers have been getting all along. That first impression is decided fast, and the EPK is where most of it happens.