Drive industry to your EPK

I was first turned onto the concept of an electronic press kit (EPK) years ago, using SonicBids to try to find shows for a band I was managing at the time by the name of Slowcoaster. The EPK was a collection of press materials that you put together online as the showpiece for each and every application that you put into a festival or venue promoter. It was definitely less of a pain in the ass than printing a bio and stuffing it into an envelope with a photo and a CD, but I found that I was only using the EPK for SonicBids applications. I was not using it as a tool for anything else.

When we started brainstorming the idea of our own Marcato EPK, we wanted to create something that would serve the purpose of promoting the artist to the industry, but we also wanted to take it a bit further and make it the place that press would go to grab high res photos and bios, and where the venue can grab the hospitality rider and the input list and stage plot. The cultural shift here is that the agent no longer emails me for the most recent version of the stage plot and the publicist doesn't email me for a copy of the most current press photo. I have cultured the agent to always grab what he needs from the EPK, or even better, direct the venue right to the EPK. The same goes for the publicist. She can direct press to the EPK where they can choose the image they want for their article or blog post.

There are a few ways to access your Marcato EPK. Most of you have probably bookmarked a link like this to get to your Marcato EPK: marcatoapp.com/artists/173/epk

Not exactly the sort of memorable URL you want to give to a key press outlet. To make your EPK address easier to memorize and share, you can actually customize the URL to include the name of your band in place of 'artists/173/epk' by entering something into the 'Public URL' field in our EPK editor. For Carmen Townsend's EPK, I've entered 'carmentownsend', which creates this much nicer address that simply redirects to the ugly one: marcatoepk.com/carmentownsend

To take it one step further, we've setup simple redirects on all of our artists' websites, so you can even access Carmen's EPK by visiting: carmentownsend.ca/epk/

This last step might require a little help from your webmaster, but it's definitely worth the effort.

If you have any thoughts on how we could improve our EPK's even more, please send along your ideas to info@marcatodigital.com. Thanks for reading!