What Goes in an Electronic Press Kit: The Full Checklist

Quick answer: A complete EPK needs six things: your artist biography, professional photos, social media links, your discography, music reviews or press coverage (if you have any), and your logo if you have one. Missing even one of these can quietly cost you a booking or a feature - the person reviewing your EPK isn’t going to go hunt down what you left out.

Putting together an EPK isn’t complicated, but sending an incomplete one is one of the easiest ways to undersell yourself to someone who was already willing to consider you. You don’t need a music manager or an agency to get this right - you need a checklist and the discipline to actually fill in every item on it.

Artist Biography

Your bio is very often the first thing anyone opens an EPK to read, and a weak one colors everything that follows. A few tight paragraphs covering who you are and your past, present, and future - that’s the job. See our full step-by-step guide to writing your artist biography if you’re starting from scratch.

Professional Photographs

Include a small handful of current, professionally shot photos - not your entire camera roll. Publications and promoters need something usable, on short notice, without asking you for a better one. A blurry phone photo from three tours ago is worse than no photo at all.

Social Media Links and Details

Link everywhere you’re actually active - Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever platforms your fans actually use this year, not whatever list was standard a decade ago (Google Plus, for the record, has been gone since 2019 - if an old checklist still tells you to include it, that checklist is the problem). Current follower counts help too; nobody expects you to be huge, but a stale number reads worse than an honest small one.

Your Discography

List every release, link to it on streaming if it’s up there, and include 2-3 actual audio files if you have anything not yet available to stream. This is the section that answers “okay, but what do they actually sound like” - don’t make anyone go searching for the answer.

Music Reviews and Press Clippings

Compile your best reviews and press mentions, whether they ran online or in print. A solid handful of real coverage signals you’ve already been vetted by someone else, which matters more than you’d think to the next person deciding whether to take a chance on you.

Try this prompt: If you have a handful of review quotes and press mentions saved but no clean summary of them, hand the raw text to an AI assistant and ask: “Pull the strongest one-sentence quote from each of these reviews and format them as a short pull-quote list for a press kit, with the publication name attached to each.” Cut anything that reads generic even if it’s technically positive - a vague compliment does less for you than one specific, quotable line.

Logo

If you have one, include it - a recognizable mark makes you easier to remember across a crowded feed of other submissions, and it’s genuinely useful on merch, release art, and anywhere else your name shows up. If you don’t have one yet, it’s not a blocker; it’s just one more thing worth getting eventually.

What This Is Missing (On Purpose)

Some artists also add testimonials or a sponsor list - nice-to-haves, not requirements. Get the six above locked down before you worry about extras.

For where to actually host and send all of this once it’s assembled, see our guide to storing and sharing your EPK.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the essential elements of an electronic press kit? Artist biography, professional photos, social media links, your discography, music reviews or press clippings, and your logo if you have one. Miss one of these and you’re sending an incomplete package to someone with no time to chase down the rest.

How many photos should I include in my EPK? A handful of strong, current, professionally shot photos - not a full gallery. Whoever’s reviewing your EPK needs something usable for a listing or an article, not a scroll through your entire photo library.

What if I don’t have any press reviews yet? Leave the section out rather than padding it with a friend’s blog post or a fake pull-quote - a missing section reads as “not yet,” while a weak one reads as “this is the best I’ve got,” which is a worse impression to leave.

Got your EPK together? Submit Your Music and let’s get it in front of the right people.