A press kit for bands
A band press kit has more readers than a solo one, and they want different things. A venue wants the stage plot. A journalist wants a photo at print resolution and a bio they can quote. A festival wants to know how many of you there are. One document has to serve all three without becoming a brochure.
Three readers, one document
The mistake is writing for the most flattering reader — the journalist — and leaving the other two to email you. In practice the venue writes first and the journalist may never write at all, so the operational material has to be as easy to find as the story.
- The venue wants the stage plot, the input list and how much space you need. This is the part that decides whether the booking is easy.
- The journalist wants a quotable bio, one good photo and a link that plays. Anything that needs downloading will not get used.
- The festival wants the count: how many people travel, how long the set is, what you played recently.
The photo nobody can use
Most band press kits contain one square photo of five people, cropped for Instagram. A flyer needs a horizontal one. A festival grid needs the faces readable at 300 pixels wide. If there is only one photo, make it horizontal, and if there are two, make the second a close crop.
A bio that survives being cut
Whoever uses your bio is going to cut it to two sentences. Write those two sentences first, then the paragraph, then the long version. That way the cut version is one you wrote, rather than whatever the first two sentences happened to be.
It is also the part that ages worst. A bio mentioning a record as "upcoming" two years after release tells a promoter more about how organised you are than the record does.
Why a link and not an attachment
A band press kit is heavy: photos, a stage plot, audio. As an email attachment it bounces; on Drive it becomes a permissions conversation. As a link it opens on a phone, in a meeting, without an account — and when you add a date, everyone holding it sees the new one. The same case, with a DJ angle.
Do we need a stage plot?
If you are more than two people, yes — it prevents the conversation where you arrive and there are three inputs. StageLink builds the rider from a catalogue of real equipment, so the venue reads model names rather than a description of them.
Can we have one press kit for a band with side projects?
Each artist profile has its own page and its own press kit, so a band and a solo project are two, under separate usernames. They are separate acts to whoever is booking them, and a combined kit tends to confuse the person deciding.
What resolution should the photos be?
Upload the largest you have. The page serves them resized for the screen, and the print view keeps the original, so the same upload works for a phone and for a magazine.
Is it free?
The press kit is included from the free plan, print view included. Paid plans add templates and more blocks, not the kit itself.
Free, no card.