MY SONG IS READY, WHAT SHOULD I DO BEFORE I RELEASE IT?

After so many days, weeks, months (maybe years?) the record is ready. Everything you creatively envisioned is ready to be heard by someone besides you, the producer, and the engineers. Excited is an understatement. So let’s just drop the file on my distributor page so it finally sees the light of day, right? No. Not even close. Having the music ready is hardly half the battle.

You must have a plan for your release. And just to be clear, 1 Instagram post and a few stories isn’t a release plan. If you’re interested in having new people listening to your music, take a look at these recommendations.

What’s your goal with the release?

You can’t have a plan if you don’t know what your goal is. Set a goal and break it down with 2-4 objectives. Each objective should have a list of tasks to complete. This way, you can accurately measure if you reached your goal or not. What do you hope to accomplish with your release? Make sure to set a realistic goal.

By having a goal with objectives and tasks you have enough to make up your plan. Make sure that everything you ask your fans to do is clear and understandable. Don’t spend money and time on vague videos and images that aren’t really asking your fans to do anything. If you want them to follow your page, ask them. If you want them to stream and share, ask them. Be clear about what you want your fans to do! 

5 ways of getting the word out & the artist volume.

Ads, publicity (blogs, radio, tv), (online) promotion, personal sharing (face-to-face), and word of mouth. You should have a strategy for at least 4 out of these 5 elements. I know it sounds like a lot, but you will get further than you think by doing one thing for each category. 

When it comes to paid ads, this subject can be very lengthy. So in order to keep things short, all I have to say is to truly understand who your audience is. Nurturing relationships and being a trusted part of a community matter now more than ever. It’s not enough to know the demographics of your audience, you have to really understand what they’re about (personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles) as well. This will help you create targeted ads that are effective. 

For promotion, you have a lot of tools to help you boost the reach of your release. A common mistake I see from artists is that they only share the stream link from the platform they personally use. You should have a short link that centralizes all the links for all stores. You should also share your release with Spotify playlisters (you can read my tips about Spotify playlists here) and with your mail list. Why a mail list you say? There are only 2 types of artists that don’t use mailing lists, the ones that don’t need them to make money and the ones that don’t know how beneficial they are. Which one are you?

Now, what is the artist volume? this is the total number of “touchpoints” you have to reach out to your fans. Think about all ways you can reach out and contact them: IG, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Soundcloud, mail list, website visitors. If your goal is to grow your fanbase by a certain %, you will have to pay special attention to this number.

I recommend you plan and prepare everything 12-8 weeks prior to the release date. Make sure to get (a lot of) the visual content, set an advertising budget, and have press material ready (bio/record concept) so you can start talking about the release 4-3 weeks before dropping. Additionally, there’s no such thing as “too much” visual content in 2020. People get bored easily. So prepare accordingly.

Are you looking to make money from this release?

For this, it’s really important to know your current relationship with your fans. Do you know how many fans you have? How’s been your interaction with them recently? are they engaging with your content? Are you only reaching out to them when you want something out of them?

Once you know the answer to these questions, you also have to factor in another element: how many super fans do you have? those that are completely willing to buy, share, and react to anything you put out. These are the only people we can count on when we’re looking to sell merch. If these numbers aren’t looking as good as you want them to look, it’s best that you just focus on spending money to cultivate your fan base and worry about making money later down the line.

Write it down

Write down everything you want to do/make/get done. It’s easy to forget about what you’re supposed to do. Write down your plan, as well as a detailed timeline describing what you’re going to do each week before the release (and a couple of weeks after the release). What will you do to make people aware of the release? Once they’re aware, what will you do for them to take action and engage with what you’re putting out? 

Analytics

Without analytics, there’s no way you can tell if what you’re doing is working or not. Putting aside Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists, there are so many tools available for you to study the traffic you’re driving into your content. If you have a website, check Google Analytics. If you’re running FB/IG Ads, you have the Ads Manager. Chartmetric also gives you a lot of free tools to study your overall online presence. 

There are so many tools to help you with analytics that I’m not even covering the tip of the iceberg with these. Just make sure to be on top of this information so you can really tell if what you’re doing is on the right track.

I hope that with this information you have a better idea of what you should do before releasing your song. This is a lot of information so feel free to come back and give it another read later down the line. 

If you have more specific questions or comments about this content feel free to drop a comment below! Talk soon.