29: What Materials are most helpful for Publicity?
with Beth Stewart
What materials are most helpful for publicity?
I think the top material would be your website. So a website is kind of the storefront of your small business, and whether you know it or not, you are all small business owners – that as a real thing. There are so many incredible platforms that will give you gorgeous websites with really very little time investment on your part. I always recommend Squarespace. It's what I use for all of my client sites at some rather large corporations – I think HBO and target also use the Squarespace platform. It's been around a long time, longer than WordPress, actually, I think… super stable, and they've got really gorgeous kind of shiny designs that you can put together in about a weekend. They're also very customizable if you feel like teaching yourself some code.
So I think that that website is key and what's going to make a website really pop are exciting photographs, and catchy, captivating, interesting copy. So that copy is going to be kind of what we talked about with your bio, making sure that it talks about what sets you apart, that it communicates in a way that feels authentic to you.
Your photos need to go with those words. So for example, if your… if your whole thing is bringing classical music to the average Joe and your tone is very casual, your photo should not then be you in a three piece suit, like looking very serious. Conversely, if you have a very top-tier concert career, you might not want… actually, no, I'm gonna go ahead and say for literally any career. At this point, we don't want photos that look like they were taken on your iPhone. I think that there was there was a point a few years ago when smartphone cameras got so much better so quickly that there was the sense that like literally let's just pop outside and take some photos and here we go. That time has passed [laughs]
I think that investing in quality images of yourself is one of the absolute best things you can do for your career. Those images and your website will represent you to people who may never meet you before they book you or before they hear your album or before they buy a ticket to your concert. So it's crucial that be able to people be able to get a sense of you. You as a person you as an artist, visually.