How to write your musician bio: short, long and for the press

Nearly everything people ask for once you are booked starts with a bio. A festival programme wants two lines. Your site wants a paragraph. A journalist wants something longer, with facts they can check and quote. Each of these readers needs the same story at a different length. Write all three versions before someone asks for one in a hurry.

Three versions, three readers

The short one, one or two lines. This one goes on a poster, in a concert series programme, in an event listing or under your name in search results. The reader does not know you yet. They only need to place you: who you are, what you play, where you are from.

The medium one, a paragraph. It goes on your site and in a concert press release, and a venue copies it into its listings. It takes the short one and adds what sets you apart and what you are working on now.

The long one, for the press. Several paragraphs, for the press kit and for anyone preparing an interview or a review. Your track record goes here, with your albums, your collaborations and a press quote or two with their source. If you do not have a press kit yet, start with how to make a press kit people read.

Write all three in the third person. The reason is practical: people paste them straight into a programme, a press release or an article. A bio in the first person has to be rewritten before it can go anywhere.

What your card already says

Before you write, separate the facts from the story. Your name, your photo, your instruments, your roles (performer, composer, arranger) and your town are facts. They appear once, somewhere visible, and the bio does not need to list them again one by one.

№ 190 501

Thelonious Monk

On stage

Pianist, composer

Plays

Piano

From

New York

With the facts already on the card, the bio has room for what a card cannot say: what your music sounds like, what brought you here and what you are doing now.

A method in six steps

Writing the short one first seems logical, but it usually comes out generic. Going the other way works better: gather everything, write the long one, then cut it down.

When you finish, date them. A bio goes stale. When a new album comes out or the line-up changes, update all three together.

What they look like inside

Use the templates to get started. They do not have to fit you exactly. If your story starts somewhere unusual, that can go near the top of the long one. Keep the priorities in order: put first what the reader needs to know first.

What to leave out

Some sentences turn up in almost every bio and tell the reader nothing about anyone. Some facts make sense in the long version and only take up room in the short one.

Two more mistakes are common and easy to avoid. The first is mixing persons: one sentence in the third person, the next in the first. The second is letting different versions circulate. The site says one thing, the press kit another and a festival programme a third. If all three versions come from the same long one, that does not happen.

The short one, in search results too

Your short bio also turns up somewhere you might not think of: search results. Under the name of your site, a search engine shows one or two lines of description. If you do not give it one, it picks its own, often a random bit of the page. A good search description reads almost like your short bio: what you play, where and for whom. Keep it to about 160 characters, because search engines cut anything longer.

The bio in Pages

In Pages the facts live on the identity card: name, photo, roles, instruments and town. You can hide any you would rather not show. The bio has its own block. The intro comes first because it is what people read first, and the full bio follows below it. The editor also holds the search description, with a preview of how it looks in a search. Health tells you if the description is missing, too short or long enough to get cut. To see how it all fits on the site, read what a musician’s website needs.