a website for bands: the epk, dates, and listening without autoplay

business · 2026-10-29 · 3 min

bookers, festivals and journalists do not read a band site, they scan it for four things: who you are, what you sound like, where you play next, how to book you. if one of them needs a scroll and a guess, the mail goes to the next band on the list.

the epk is one page

a horizontal photo at full width, credited. one paragraph of bio: city, lineup, what you sound like in plain words, what you released. three tracks, not the discography. one video. two press quotes with the name of the outlet, or none. technical rider and stage plot as PDF links at the bottom. it gets read in ninety seconds by someone with forty other bands to check.

dates in one place only

one page, next date first, each line with venue, city, date, time, ticket link, sold out when it is. home and footer show the next two, not the tour. if you will not update it, embed a service that does. the mistake i see most is the same concert on five pages, four of them wrong: a cancelled date that stays online sends people to a closed venue, and they remember the band.

listening without autoplay

never autoplay. people open a band site at work, on a train, next to a sleeping child. one play button big enough for a thumb, one track, a link to the album. use a platform embed instead of hosting wav files: forty megabytes sound no better on a phone and make the page slow. an embed also loads third-party cookies before anyone clicks, so it belongs behind a consent or a click-to-load — how to add a video.

booking and the boring part

the form asks date, city, venue, type of event, fee range, a link to your music, nothing else. the rider stays a link: the promoter needs the channel list, not a manifesto. keep a press folder with three photos at print size and a short bio in text, because the journalist will ask for exactly that and will not resize anything. write the four lines of the epk once and reuse them in every mail.

faq

do we need a site if we are on spotify and instagram?

you need one place you control, and it is the only one where a booker finds rider, stage plot and a mail address on the same screen. spotify does not say how to book you and instagram hides the link behind a bio. keep the profiles, use the site as the address you give promoters.

how many songs should we put on the site?

three, chosen: the one that opens the live set, the one people sing, the one you are promoting. a player with twelve tracks asks for a decision the listener does not want to make.

should we publish the fee?

a range saves everyone a phone call. what you should not do is leave the booking form without a budget field: the promoter will assume you are expensive, or free, and both are wrong.