Getting Serious: Brand Image, EPKs and Tech Specs
So, you’re looking to play some more live shows, and maybe some slightly bigger opportunities. You follow a bunch of fellow artists on social media, some with more followers, maybe some with less too. You wonder how they get booked for all those really cool gigs, festivals, tour support slots, etc.
Well, chances are, they’ve figured out these three pretty important things that make them look professional, and I guarantee it doesn’t take as much time or effort as you think to make them! These are three very practical concepts concerning how promoters, festival organisers and band managers view you, which you probably have the bare bones of anyway! We’re talking about brand image, an EPK (Electronic Press Kit) and A Technical Specification (also known as a Technical Rider or Tech Spec).
“But Jacob, I just want to enjoy making music without all of this fancy professional stuff – do I really NEED all of this?” Well, in a word, no. Chances are these will not be the be-all-end-all concepts that if you don’t have them, nobody will take you seriously. Brand image is the only one of the three which is designed to engage your fans, so the other two are mostly to make sure you are on the same page as whoever is organising your gig. I’ll show you some examples and talk you through the process of making them a bit later, but what are these three things, anyway?
1. Brand Image
I dislike the word “brand”, as it can be a little unhelpful when discussing individual image. I don’t mean you should design a corporate logo and drop thousands into a marketing agency and graphic designer. When we talk about brand image, what we really mean is aesthetic. How do you want to visually come across to anyone who will listen to your music, view your social media platforms, or even meet you in person? Do your visual aesthetic and your sound match up well? For example, if you’re a bouncy, positive indie-pop artist, would you be more likely to kit yourself and your band out in pastille colours for photo shoots and gigs, or in tweed suits? Both choices send a message which will be received differently, and because of this there really isn’t a ‘wrong’ answer. The main point is, consider it! The last thing you want to do (unless it’s your chosen brand image) is have a four-piece band all turn up in something completely different and clashing! The long and short of it is, give your audience something to expect. If they can associate you with a particular look, or even a colour, then you’re off to a great start!
A couple of ideas to help you get started with this.
Firstly, there is no set way of doing this, and nothing specific that will definitively lead to success, other than picking something and sticking to it consistently. Who doesn’t love a Pinterest board? When I’m helping an artist get some ideas together, I sit with them for 5-10 minutes and type some rough ideas of colours and styles they like into the Pinterest search bar. After 10 minutes, you usually have a pretty strong place to start. Here is an example of one I made recently with an artist client.
Secondly, look at the artists and bands you like the most, or sound most like. I’m not saying you should copy them, but simply look at the image they convey, and think of three keywords that come to mind when you look at them. Then listen to some of your favourite music by them and see if you feel like they are cohesive. This will hopefully show you either how it’s done or give you some of your own ideas about how you can be purposeful in crafting your look and sound to match each other a little bit. The whole thing with three words is an interesting experiment because you can be really concise with how you want your project to come across. But how can you just pull 3 words out of the air and apply them to yourself? Well, a great lecturer and even better friend once used a helpful exercise with me, which goes something like this:
1. Write an elevator pitch summary of what you want to achieve with your project – about 100 words or so.
2. Now take that and condense it into 10 words.
3. Now 5.
4. Now 3.
5. You now have a clear, focused picture of what you are doing, and now you can use that to help craft your aesthetic!
This can be challenging, but it is so helpful for focusing on how you want to craft your artist aesthetic! Try it out, and you might be surprised by how helpful it can be.
This seems like a lot of thinking and logic for such a seemingly small thing, but if you are purposeful in getting this right for yourself, you can have a stronger foundation to build all your other visual stuff from! In the EPK and Tech Spec examples, you will hopefully see how this approach translates and creates a cohesive image.
2. The EPK (Electronic Press Kit)
The EPK is a document that I speak about all the time with artists and grassroots venues, and I am always surprised by how few have heard of it! So, if this is the first you’ve heard of it, do not worry! You’re not the only one! It pretty much does what it says on the tin, acting as an all-inclusive pack of information that you can send to promoters, venues, other bands, prospective managers, and, of course, press (radio/TV, playlisters, blogs etc.). Here is an example of one I made for a band that I manage, called Croissant. This EPK is actually a very basic website that Canva hosts for free as part of their Pro subscription level (which is well worth it for the £100 per year cost, as it’s such a helpful tool for designing all sorts of things!), so it’s nice and easy to just send the link to anyone, instead of having to send a PDF version (which you can also do).
I’ll talk you through each page as we go, explaining the functions and purposes of each element.
1. Title Page
This is an important page, as it introduces you, a whistle-stop description of your project, who to contact for bookings and enquiries and links to all of your social media and videos. In a nutshell, if you send this whole document to a busy promoter or festival organiser who can’t be bothered to read all of it, they have everything they absolutely need on the first page within 30 seconds. Every single element of this page has been designed to be concise and give a lot of information, which is reinforced with a focused, clear, and clean aesthetic. This should carry on throughout the rest of the pages too. The icons in the bottom right-hand corner are a benefit of using a website for the EPK, as with a single click, you are taken anywhere you want to go!
2. Longer Bio and Press Photos
This is where your press/promoter/festival organiser people get what they need. This longer bio is designed to help get a fuller picture of the artist, their story, and their inspirations, as well as any notable accolades or releases. The photos on the left are photos that you would like to be used in things like gig posters, blog introductory photos, etc. Ideally, you should have a separate folder that you can send to people along with the EPK. As the pages go on, you can see more of the colour choices and general aesthetic forming, so you are gradually gaining a more rounded impression of the artist as you go.
3. Music, Videos and Existing Press Coverage
This one’s a bit more of a portfolio page so that anyone viewing can see that you can walk the walk, so to speak. It can be difficult when starting out to get anyone to review a gig or music release, so I would recommend doing a bit of digging for reviewers in your local area. If you are in the West Midlands, UK, then Andy Holdcroft over at Hot Music Live is a very friendly and knowledgeable guy who will listen to your music and give you a review that contemplates your lyrics and presentation to a deeper level than even you probably have! A published review can give you a lot of credibility as an artist and finding people to do it is not as difficult as you think! You don’t have to get a glowing review from Rolling Stone or Billboard for it to be credible and valuable!
Yet ANOTHER benefit of using a basic website for this is that you can embed Spotify and YouTube links directly in. This means the viewer only has to click a single time to get an idea of your sound! If you don’t have anything released just yet, or you’re only releasing on SoundCloud, you can still embed that into it as well, but your visual experience may vary.
4. Visual Spacer Page with Link to Tech Spec
This is a good opportunity for you to put in your favourite photo for the viewer to appreciate (I particularly like this one – that was a fun day!) whilst also giving them a direct link to your technical specification for live shows at the same time! You’ll send them the tech spec as a different document anyway, but this way anyone who has the EPK website link can also access the tech spec easily.
5. Gig Dates and Details
This page shows that you are actively gigging and helps you to stay organised and keep the EPK up to date. As you can see, this version of the EPK is not up to date, but it gives you an idea of what this page should do. It’s always nice to write a short and hyped description of the gig to give context and show that you are excited about it. ANOTHER benefit of making a website-based EPK (are you bored of hearing this yet?) is that you can link directly to the ticket pages, festival line-up websites, charity, or whatever else you want to. This shows professionalism and that you care about every gig you play. Obviously, the more often you gig, the harder it is to keep on top of this sort of stuff, so I would suggest only including the gigs you are most excited about.
As you can hopefully see, an EPK does a few things for you. It essentially acts as your musical CV/resume, telling everyone you send it to everything they need to know about you and your project. It also helps you stay up to date with what you have going on, and if done correctly, can passively convey your brand image and aesthetic to whoever views it.
3. Technical Specification
Ok, so this one isn’t quite as fun as the others, but it is still very important! You know the grumpy person dressed in black at the back of the venue who’s twisting knobs and swinging cables around? Well, that’s the person who makes you sound good (hopefully) and makes sure the audience can see and hear you. They’re probably grumpy because they had a hard week and dealt with the stress of plenty of artists not really knowing what they are doing, or giving them the information they need, and then acting like it’s the sound person’s fault. We don’t want the sound person to be grumpy, because they’re (usually) a nice person and they do this because they love it, so we want to make sure we do everything we can to ensure that they can enjoy it too.
That’s where the Technical Specification comes in! This is an all-singing, all-dancing, all-telling document that tells the techies everything they need to know about your live show. It tells them the channels you need, the positions of instruments and vocalists on stage, the list of equipment and cables you will bring and what you need them to provide, and it also gives them some rough mixing and lighting directions to suit your aesthetic and other preferences. A lot of times, this can just look like a couple of pages of plain A4 Word document in your favourite boring font (mine’s Calibri, call me basic) in PDF format. But where’s the fun in that? We want to make our tech spec exciting and engaging to look at!
1. Title Page
This one’s really simple. It’s purely aesthetic and helps you make a strong first impression. You can see how the colour and photo are the same between the EPK and the tech spec, which adds to that consistency and cohesion we’ve been talking about.
2. Channel List
This is possibly the most important thing to add to this document. If you have a slightly more complicated/high channel-count live setup, then the engineer needs to know what you are planning to bring. For smaller shows and festival line-ups where you may be short of either channels or setup and soundcheck time, this channel list acts more as a guideline than a definitive list of demands. For example, the drums may only require the kick and snare to have microphones, as the room may be small, and the cymbals and toms may carry well enough un-amplified.
If you aren’t too technically minded, and you’ve never really thought about all of this sort of stuff, then get in contact with a local venue. They may be able to refer you to their in-house sound engineer to help you build this list to the specifications that are needed. You can use the example presented here as a template, or you can email me at management@felt.live and I can send you the Excel spreadsheet that I have made and use for different acts.
3. Stage Plan
This is another one that may be subject to change depending on the context of the gig, but it is helpful for the engineer to visualise what will be on stage. A key aspect that often gets missed is each band member’s power requirements. For example, the drummer here has requested three power outlets, as he has a backing track rig, a MacBook to play those tracks and potentially a sampling pad that all need power.
Canva is a powerful tool for creating these stage layouts. Whilst you could easily draw circles and squares on a plain white background and label them, it leaves a lot to the imagination, and ultimately requires more effort to decipher, whilst also looking quite basic and unprofessional. With the ability Canva gives you to import images and remove backgrounds, you can include the exact gear that you will be bringing. As you can see here, rather than a generic picture of a keyboard, there is an image of the Novation Mininova that the frontman will use.
4. Band Equipment
This page is closely linked to the stage plan and gives more details to the engineer about what they will need in preparation for your slot. Be as specific as you can here, and feel free to add a note like the one found here. It can be a good indicator of whether your engineer has read the document. Simple but clear design elements such as highlighting key information in a contrasting colour are also helpful.
The aim of all of this detail is essentially to ensure that the engineer has to do as little thinking and decision-making as possible. Bands that are organised and able to advance as much information as possible are the bands that make the engineer’s life that much easier and can help the gig run smoothly.
5. Mix and Lighting Requests
This is a nice extra touch that can be the difference between your show looking and sounding generally good, or like your look and sound. Remember what we said earlier about your brand and aesthetic? Well, this is your ticket to ensuring the engineer gets it right too. The best live engineers will listen to a couple of your released tracks before the show to get a rough idea of your sound anyway, but this is quite rare to see. For this reason, it’s always good to think about how your music will come across the best, and in the way that you want it to. As you see here, the mixing requests are quite detailed. These details have been gathered over time and by paying attention to the sound in videos that fans take of gigs, combined with specific audience feedback. If you know what you want in the first place, and you send these requests to the engineer, you’re already two steps ahead.
Lighting is one of those things that heavily depends on the venue’s facilities. If you’re in a “proper venue” then you have some options, but if you’re doing a smaller show in a pub, record store or somewhere a bit funky and grassroots, then you are of course going to be limited here. It’s worth keeping these requests on your spec though, as you never know when you’re going to need them.
This document future-proofs you, so even if you are just starting and have never done a gig before, sending something like this can come across as very impressive and professional. Whenever I have advanced venues with a spec like this, they are always very impressed with the attention to detail and find it helpful to have all the information in one place, laid out clearly and concisely. It’s such a simple touch and will probably only take you a couple of hours to put together, but it really helps you and your band understand your setup better too. As a band, you can go into a venue with the confidence that all of the details have been handled in advance, and you all know exactly what each other has and needs. As a solo artist, you can use it as an equipment checklist, and you can confidently answer any questions you might be asked by the engineer or the promoter. It’s a win-win in any situation!
Time for the ‘Too Long, Didn’t Read’ recap.
1. Brand Image is important. Create a Pinterest board for your desired aesthetic.
2. Make an EPK and use your new brand image to inspire the design, keeping it consistent the whole way through.
3. A Technical Specification will be your best friend for making sure your gigs run smoothly. If done well, you will look very professional, and you will save sound engineers and promoters time.
Thanks for making it this far. There is a lot of information here, and I appreciate that not all of it will apply to everyone. So, if you feel like you could do with some help in making this stuff apply to you, or you just want to generally step up your game as an artist, then FELT. offers free consultation sessions. We can sit down and work out all sorts of things that apply to your musical project, whether it’s musical, practical, performance-based, social media, building a fanbase, or more technical branding/professional practice stuff, nothing is out of the question. If this sounds like something you might want to do, then please head over to the consultancy tab on the website and click the button below “meet and chat”. You can fill in a short Google form with a few basic details about your project, and I’ll contact you to arrange a free 1-hour coaching session. If you find that session helpful and you want to continue with the sessions, then a reasonable hourly rate applies to a more regular 1-to-1 coaching arrangement.
We also have a podcast, where we talk about all sorts of topics related to the music business and independent musical artistry! There currently aren’t many episodes, but there will be more on the way very soon! As always, if you have any questions, or would like to enquire about a management deal, please email me at management@felt.live. See you again soon!
*DISCLAIMER* This blog is not sponsored by any company or third parties. I use and enjoy both Pinterest and Canva, and I find them to be great resources.
