Mediocre bros run the scene because they’re the ones shameless enough to ring up everyone and tell them they run it.
Better artists who are great at making music often aren’t so slick at promoting it, or themselves. And technology, heralded as the great leveler, has made it worse, giving people with advantages like wealth or family connections a leg up before they commit a single note to tape.
Onesheet.club won’t balance the scales on that, but it’s a product that I think every aspiring artist dipping their toe into the press pool should take for a test drive.
Spoilers: it doesn’t actually make a onesheet, at least not according to the common industry use of that term as a single, slim document intended to promote a single record or album. Instead, Onesheet.club creates what is effectively a dynamic EPK — a press kit focusing on an artist which updates many things automatically, and actually almost creates itself with the slightest oversight.
For those tempted to pay skeezy designers to create an EPK of dubious value, you might find Onesheet.club is a pretty great and snappy alternative.
People pay a lot of money to have these made, and I’ve never understood why. Most EPKs have a surplus of hype and a dearth of actually usable information. Onesheet.club was created by Chartmetric, an analytics company in the music industry, and as such pulls a lot of information that’s both helpful for communicating what you’re all about and fully customizable so the artist can get rid of irrelevant or negative information.
Here’s how it works. Onesheet.club pulls much of its data from Spotify, which you might feel a bit odd about especially at the start of your career, but it’s not a bad basis for most artists. It also seems to tap into YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok among other source of information, as well as an ordinary web crawl.
After registering, you plug in your Spotify artist’s name (you don’t have to prove control over it). Within about 10 seconds, the first draft of the EPK is created: onesheet.club pulls images, follower/listener counts, bio, press, playlists, upcoming shows and other data, including recent or popular news reports. (Onesheet’s documentation repeatedly refers to creating “onesheets,” which is very on-brand but we’re going to call them EPKs the rest of the way.)
Every bit of that can be changed, hidden and/or updated. You can push something like YouTube videos clearly off the page if you don’t want them there, as well as the analytics info which for a new artist will, understandably, lack much data. Right out of the box, the EPK looks pretty good. It takes considerably longer to tweak it how you want but you’re not locked in and can change it later and the entire point is that you probably will. It’s not a PDF but honestly considering the dynamic nature of it, this is probably better.
Again, this isn’t a onesheet generator, despite the name: I found it pretty hard to manipulate the page to really emphasize a new release (especially if you’re doing press the right way, and are promoting a record that isn’t on Spotify or anywhere else yet). But for those tempted to pay skeezy designers for an EPK of dubious value, this is a pretty great and snappy alternative. Chartmetric just rolled onesheet.club out of beta, so there might be some bugs, but I didn’t notice any.
It’s also free. When we first published this just after their launch, Onesheet.club allowed new users to make up to three EPKs for free. That was pretty quickly lowered down to just one. This is the major downside: a swift change in product strategy and you’ll find that you’ve sent all of your traffic to a site you’re no longer on unless you pay. And if you pay, you pay forever. A remotely hosted Onesheet — say, on your own site — is probably a better long-term solution, but if you’re just looking to create something where you had nothing before, this is a good place to start.
