You made it. You got your feelings into a record. You’ve uploaded it to your distribution platform of choice and it’s set for release.
Now what? There are many angles to take when promoting new music, but here are some simple organic marketing building blocks for any new release.
5 things to do anytime you release music:
Get your promo assets together
Create banners for your socials - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and any other active socials (that allow for banners).
Create Canvas for Spotify, and some sort of visual to pair with the release on YouTube (since YouTube accounts for nearly half of all music streams). This visual could be your album cover animated using an app like Pixaloop or as simple as a content piece you capture on your phone and pair with the audio. The ways to do this are endless, and many options are free .
Throw a landing page or promotional banner up on your website promoting the new single.
Set up artist dashboard at DSPs & submit for playlisting
Once your song has been distributed, submit it for playlists on Spotify at least 2 weeks out, via Spotify For Artists
While you’re at it, make sure you have your Apple Music For Artists dashboard setup too!
Plan your social schedule
There’s a lot or a little you can do here, depending on your strategy. But a good baseline schedule might look like:
About a week out, begin to tease the release. Post 1-3 teasers leading up to release day, a post or two on release day plus retweets / reposts of any nice posts from your fans. And then 1-3 posts in the following 7 days to remind people you just released new music.
Also, make sure that you update your social bios & "link in bio” tool of choice (ie: Linktree) with the song link when it goes live.
Pin the new song to Spotify / YouTube
Your new releases automatically go to the top of your Spotify profile (on the left), but you can select anything as your “artist pick” via Spotify for Artists. A great way to boost your new music as well as previous releases is to create a playlist of your catalog highlights with the new tracks always added to the top. If you don’t have a deep catalog, get creative - build a playlist of artists that inspired your new track and pin that.
Also - setup your channel preview / trailer on YouTube to be the video you created in step one for the new song.
Tell your team!
Finally: the biggest tool in your arsenal is your team. If you’ve got an agent or a publisher or even a lawyer who champions you — send everyone a note on release day letting them know about your new album and asking them to share it. Even if your “team” is your family and friends. The people in your life who care about your art want to support you, but don’t make the mistake of thinking they’ll remember to do it without a nudge.
And that’s it. Those are the bases to cover. Anything from here is icing on the cake.
This blog was written by me and originally published on Venture Music’s blog