How do you organise and store/maintain all the media and information that you need to communicate the essence of your project?
Website
A website can be a platform to communicate the essence and content of your artistic presence to the world. Especially venues, programmers and potential bookers will be looking for your website to make up their mind about you as an artist. Yet it requires an investment in time (and sometimes money) to create and maintain a website. Expertise and skills to build a website can be hired, but the maintenance of the website in most cases will require the attention of the owner on a regular basis.
Think about who your website’s target audience is though. It can be the audience, but in many cases the website’s more important target audience is a concert presenter or concert promoter.
A website’s bounce rate is often between 40% and 60%, so bear in mind that you need to put across the most important information as soon as possible.
Make sure the website is always up to date and that it’s easy to navigate, things should be found quickly. A person will often only be on a particular page for a couple of seconds, so make sure you grab the visitor’s attention and interest immediately.
If you provide links on your website, make sure that they open in another window or tab and that these links don’t lead the visitor away.
The portfolio is the collection of all media that you have containing the essential information to communicate the essence of your project. This can consist of physical material (prints of photos, CD’s, vinyl albums, flyers, posters) and digital material (audio, video, visuals, text).
Make sure you keep your portfolio up to date. Be aware that different channels and media have different maintenance frequencies:
To keep people engaged your Instagram, for example, needs more frequent maintenance than your SoundCloud.
You can keep older videos/recordings on your YouTube channel (as long as they still reflect your message at this moment in time), but you might not want to have photos in which you look 6 years younger on your website. Venues and journalists tend to just use any photo they find on your website for their own web page or article. That way, it could happen that you see an announcement of your concert accompanied by an old photo that doesn’t fit that particular concert or article.
Press kit
It can be very beneficial to add a press kit to your website: a downloadable folder that contains material you would like to be used in publications about you or your product. This way you can influence what information about you is published and how others promote you.
A press kit could, for example, contain:
- one or multiple photos
- a short text about a specific project
- a biography
- audio or video files
- a list of upcoming events/performance