What belongs in a press kit (and what quietly ruins one)

December 5, 2025 · sauvachi

A press kit is not a marketing document. It is a convenience for busy people who have already decided to take you seriously enough to look you up, and whose next decision depends on how long it takes to find what they need.

Assume ten seconds of patience. Design accordingly.

The six things everyone needs

• A one-line description. Who you are and what you sound like, in a sentence someone could paste into a listing without editing.
• A bio in three lengths — roughly 50, 150 and 400 words. Different outlets need different sizes and none of them want to cut yours down.
• Photos that can actually be printed. High resolution, at least one horizontal and one vertical, with the photographer's credit attached.
• Music, playable immediately. A link that plays without an account. If a curator has to sign up for something to hear you, you have lost.
• Contact. A working email address, on the page. Not a form, not a DM request.
• The factual block — release dates, label or self-released, territory, and the exact spelling of every name involved.

What quietly ruins it

• A download that is 400 MB of raw photos. Nobody is downloading that on a deadline.
• A bio written in the third person about your “journey”. Describe the music. Three specifics beat a paragraph of adjectives.
• Comparisons to enormous artists. They read as a claim rather than a description, and everyone discounts them automatically.
• Unlabelled photos. If a publication cannot tell who took the picture, they cannot legally run it.
• Numbers with no context. A stream count is only persuasive if it is genuinely persuasive.
• A press kit that is out of date. A kit whose newest release is two years old says more than the kit intends to.

The format question

A PDF is still the most portable option — it opens everywhere, prints, and can be attached to an email. A web page is easier to keep current and easier to link. The pragmatic answer is both: a page that is always right, and a PDF generated from it for people who want a file.

Whichever you pick, the important part is that it is one link you can send without preamble, and that it lives on a domain you control. This site keeps its press kit reachable from every page's header for exactly that reason, alongside the argument for owning the address in the first place.

The test

Send it to a friend who does not work in music and ask them to find your email address, your newest release, and a printable photo. Time them. If it takes longer than a minute, the problem is not that they were slow.