Above: Illustration by annanefer661/DepositPhotos

BitDepth#1503 for March 24, 2025

An Electronic Press Kit (EPK) is considered a baseline requirement for a practicing professional musician.

Originally, I’d planned to excoriate local artistes who don’t have one – and that’s a staggering majority – but in considering the potential of this simple project, it seems sensible to cast a wider net.

The EPK concept predates that first “E.” A press kit was a key component of a musician or performing artistes’ introduction to their services.

It included a biography, professional photographs and a sample of the music or service on offer, a CD, or videotape to preview their art.

Clearly this was a lot of work, favored artistes who already had a performance history and cost quite a bit to do at scale.

In this Year of our Lord 2025, post-covid, there’s a range of tools and services available to create an effective EPK, but collectively, the local creative community keeps getting seduced by the ease of social media platforms.

Clearly social media has its role, notably in offering scattered and unreliable amplification of signal, but they are created for clicks, not career advancement.

Some services like LinkedIn, are task specific. LinkedIn is specifically tooled for job searches with some spill-over into siloed business-related discussion, but even there, the platform is ruthlessly regimented.

Users must shoehorn their content into the templates provided and everybody, from company presidents to interns, looks exactly the same.

With one eye on the needs of musicians and artistes, let’s redefine EPK for this column to mean Electronic Presence Kit.

If you are an individual providing services or goods requiring a physical presence, making it clear to potential clients exactly who you are, what you have done and why you should be trusted will become increasingly critical.

One good reason is the increasingly sophisticated capacity of AI tools to mimic or impersonate humans through faked text, audio and video reproduction.

Bots are useful, but for the foreseeable future, there will be jobs that call for an actual person capable of giving nuanced, collaborative feedback.

That’s a no-brainer for live performances, but many creative projects benefit from the value judgements of talented creatives.

An EPK, in this case, is an opportunity to create an electronic presence, something as simple as a one-page scrolling website which reflects your capabilities, style, values, history and vision.

Everything you need to say and offer should be available directly on the page.

You can host audio files on a site like Soundcloud, video files on Vimeo and YouTube and offer downloads of porfolio booklets, sound files and other documents for folks who may need to share them with decision-makers.

Musicians can take advantage of purpose-built websites for EPKs along with other features to showcase their material, but there’s no reason not to explore self-hosted solutions.

At this point, I usually go on about owning your own online real estate and doing self-hosted WordPress, but really, the important thing is to make a start.

You shouldn’t have to take a course in web design to be able to post some photos, link some downloads, embed some videos and have a usable link that you can share as a digital calling card/resume.

For this purpose, services like Wix and Squarespace will do just fine for delivering a user-friendly architecture that allows some level of individual design and organisation of your material.

Some hosting sites offer AI driven tools for creating presence pages. About.Me is still around.

Who should consider making this effort? Anyone who produces work, creates a product or delivers a service that’s distinguished by creative nuance should have an EPK that summarises their personal value proposition.

In addition to having a link that answers early questions about your business, you can create a QR code that points directly to the link, which beats handing over an analog rectangle of cardboard in an age of immediacy.

A presence kit can be useful in other ways.

Social media platforms offer spotty or poor search engine visibility, but an EPK posted to the open internet gets indexed by search engines.

If someone needs a photo or bio information, that 24/7 presence offers a curated and accessible resource of information that’s pre-approved by you.

This pays dividends when someone needs a photo that references you or recent biographical information, and you can’t be reached immediately.

At the very least, it short circuits the possibility of incorrect information being associated with you or a desperate designer grabbing most embarrassing photo of you on social media as representative of your professional image.