Pre-Release Stage: Preparing the world for your music!
It’s exciting that the work you’ve been carefully preparing for months will be out at last! This feeling can be also overwhelming as the work is not all done yet. The hard part is actually making the people listen to it. There are tips and a schedule you can follow – we’ll be working side by side with you to make it easy and smooth for your release. If you have any questions, be sure to drop an email at dam@indiemono.com
Before starting, there are things we’ll need from you. Some of them are optional, so don’t worry – we’ll ask for them if we need them.
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- The audio of the song, the video and any other media you have for the release. It doesn’t have to be of the highest fidelity, but the best quality will make it better for us to work with it. If you have low-fi versions we’ll use them for our site. Link to a soundcloud, wetransfer, dropbox, Drive or similar.
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- Bio, info about you as an artist; your roots, past projects, plans for the future e.g. are you preparing an album or ep? are you part of other bands? what made your sound like it is?
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- Audio and video teaser of the song to create promo. Mainly to use for instagram and facebook. The best practice here would be closing credits of the videos with dates and your collaborator’s icons.
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- Link to the Spotify release playlist! What is this? This is basically a playlist you’ll display in your own profile or Artist Pick. The important stuff here is you use the song you’re about to release as an hypothesis so it’s coherent. Use the title of the song as Title to start warming up the search results in Spotify. Display the release date in the Description. It’s important to have it in the Artist Pick during the week before release date.
- Images for promo. These will serve as material for communications in our socials, possible posts or web content. Best quality possible. Evade images that you don’t own or we won’t be responsible to them if the owner claims them.
- Material to build your profile in Indiemono (a future feature for our new site) What we’ll need? Country of origin, your main genres, links to all your social networks, your email. A bio and an image from you and a small description in what’s your philosophy when creating music.
Let’s get to work then, what is going to happen before release and what is needed from you?
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- We’ll pitch to every official partner (Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, Deezer, etc).
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- Driving activity to Spotify is really important as it increases the chances to be included in algorithm playlists. Create the Artist Pick playlist, share in social networks whatever you can from your profile heats up the algorithms. IMPORTANT: Every share has to be from the Spotify app or desktop app, not copy/pasting links.
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- During at least a week before release it’s so important that you get profile followers in Spotify. The more people follows your profile, the more chances there are to be included in release official playlists. Invite your friends and family to follow!
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- New Music Friday is purely editorial, not algorithmic so we’ll present the new release to be included. It’s mildly important but not our main goal – the important ones are the playlists that pull from algorithms. The difference is that the music is held during more time and generates constant activity – NMF is only 7 days and unspecific to genres and audience.
- We aim to Discovery Weekly, Release Radar or others like Fresh Finds. We’ve got extra power there as in playlists like Fresh Finds the set up from the algorithms are based on independent playlists like ours, so they pull our newest additions to feed their playlists.
- Be sure to make your own submission of the song from the Spotify For Artists Dashboard to appear in Release Radar.
Let’s wrap it up and keep it simple; this is the structure of our goals in Spotify.
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- New Music Friday: Not our primary goal. We’ll try to meet them presenting the tracks through official submissions to the partner.
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- Virals: It may show that the activity outside the platform (but through the platform) are resulting. Also not our primary goal as it doesn’t mean streams but it’s a great indicator that the work is being done successfully to ease up the inclusion into the next phases,
- Algorithmic playlists: Really important to follow the tips to generate activity in the platform, our editorial push in Indiemono and playlister network.
- Release Radar: Build a great base of fans (followers) and monthly listeners in Spotify. It will be more noticeable in consequent releases during 3-6 months.
- Discovery Weekly: It’s our work to feed this algorithm and partly the audience response. We’ll drive independent playlists’ impact to the song by connecting the audiences of bigger songs to make the algorithms treat our audiences similarly.
- Other algorithmic playlists: Push + activity.
- Mixed playlists (Fresh Finds): Mid-term focus thanks to the push of Indiemono’s editorial playlists and our network of independent playlisters. Important focus for long term inclusion in high impact official playlists.
- Full editorial official playlists: Long time goal that we’ll be building with all the above. Meaning that the project is extremely successful and we met the official curator’s taste fully.
Apple Music and other streaming services.
We have a huge take into Spotify as it’s the platform that is better suited with a set of rules and power to official playlists, but that doesn’t mean we’re forgetting the other platforms. We’ve got official pitches and a push into our own impact playlists.
When talking about Apple Music (the second most important service), we’ll be pitching there too. We’ll feed our playlists with the new releases as well. We ask the same from you; keeping your artist profile busy with updates in Connect to be noticed by Apple Music’s core would work best at pre-release stage.
Are you almost on release date? Here’s some tips for the Release Stage.
