The EPK Is Dead. Long Live the EPK.

Nobody downloads a PDF press kit anymore. But every booker, every promoter and every writer still wants exactly the same information they wanted in 2009. The answer is not killing the EPK. It is understanding that the format died and the content did not.

Why the file lost

A PDF is a photograph of your band on a specific Tuesday. The moment your lineup changes, or you get a better photo, or the quote you are proudest of gets published, the file in that person inbox is wrong and there is nothing you can do about it. Meanwhile it is 14MB, it bounced off their mail server, the Dropbox link you sent instead expired, and the version they forwarded to the promoter is two lineups old.

A URL has none of those problems. It is always current, it never bounces, it opens on a phone in a green room, and when someone forwards it they are forwarding the live version rather than a copy. The EPK did not die. It stopped being a file and became a page.

A PDF is a photograph of your band on a specific Tuesday.

What still belongs on it

The content list is remarkably stable, because the job is stable. Someone has to decide about you quickly with a partial picture.

• A short bio and a long one — 75 words and 150, both saying the genre and the city in the first sentence
• Two or three hi-res photos, downloadable, with the photographer credit already written next to them
• A player with one current song that represents the current lineup
• Recent shows with venues and cities, and any notable support slots
• Stage plot and input list if you have them, as an image and as text
• Press quotes with dates and outlets, because an undated quote reads as an old one
• A booking email in plain text, and the name of the human who answers it

The part bands get wrong

Your EPK should live at a URL you can say out loud. yourband.com/press. Not a Google Drive folder, not a Notion page you will forget to un-share, not a link that dies when someone leaves the band and takes the account with them. If you cannot read it to someone at a merch table, it is the wrong URL.

And it should be one page. The instinct is to build a whole section with subpages for photos and audio and bio. Do not. The person reading it is scanning, on a phone, with your email still open in another tab. One page, everything on it, scroll to the bottom and you have everything you need.

What to send in the email

Three lines and a link. Who you are and where you are from, what you are asking for, the date range you are asking about, and the URL. No attachments. No paragraph about how much you admire their venue. The page does the selling; the email just has to survive the ten seconds before someone decides whether to click.

The photos are where this falls apart

Nine times out of ten, the thing that makes a press page useless is not the writing. It is that the photos cannot be used. A writer on deadline needs a file big enough to print, a credit line they can publish, and permission that is obvious. What they usually get is a screenshot from Instagram at 1080 pixels wide with no idea who took it.

• <strong>Post the full-size file,</strong> not the web version. At least 2000 pixels on the long edge, downloadable in one click.
• <strong>Write the credit next to the photo,</strong> in text, exactly as the photographer wants it printed. Photo by so-and-so, spelled correctly.
• <strong>Offer both crops.</strong> A horizontal and a vertical of the same shoot covers almost every layout anyone needs.
• <strong>Say it is cleared for press use.</strong> One sentence removes an email that would otherwise have to happen.

Keep it current or it works against you

A press page with a lineup that changed a year ago is worse than no press page, because now the wrong thing is the official thing. Whoever writes about you will use what you published, and then you get to spend the next two years correcting it in other people archives.

Put a reminder somewhere for twice a year. Update the bio if the lineup or the sound moved, swap the photo if there was a shoot, add any press worth adding, delete the quotes that have aged out. Twenty minutes, twice a year, and the page stays true. That is the entire maintenance cost of killing the PDF forever.