INTRODUCTION

What should an independent emerging artist think about when releasing music? 

A release plan can be broken down into 3 parts, these are the buildup, the release, and the post release. In the buildup you should think about how you are creating hype around your release so that on release day you have all your fans ready to listen to your music and after the release day you should think about how you will continue to maintain that hype. As everything happens on social media these days, you will need content, as in a huge amount of content. The more content you have the longer each part of this release plan can be. I suggest that you literally create a content plan, not a general plan but an actual daily schedule where you list out each day and you add in deliverables for that day, be specific.

CONTENT IDEAS

As content is so important, you should consider what types of content you will be using to show your release off to your followers.

VIDEO

Video should be one of the most important content items in your release strategy as all platforms have moved towards prioritizing video. This means that you should have a visualizer video, a lyric video, an official video, and a live video to use in your strategy.

These would all be long form content and available in landscape orientation, in other words a video like on YouTube. Then, what you do is cut out 30 to 45 second clips of each of these videos to use on your social media profiles. These short promo videos should be in portrait orientation, like a TikTok video.

Then you should also consider shooting video of you announcing the release of your new music, in this video, make sure that you record in a quiet space on a high-quality camera (If possible). Make sure you speak up and be excited about the release so that other people get excited too. Try keep your video under 30 seconds and include wording like “My new Hip-Hop song titled Crowbar is out on all stores. Follow this link and listen to it on your favorite service and let me know what you think”. You could do an Out Now video and a Coming Soon video. Just make sure it is engaging, you have 1 second to catch the attention of the viewer, and always link back to the longer form video where required.

STILL IMAGES

Then, there are still aspects of your plan where you should consider still images. I’d suggest 2 square images for coming soon and out now, these could even form part of the reveal for your release sleeve if it is something that is eye catching or shocking.

The big one would be to create new skins for all your social media and For Artist profiles. This means you can pick a day in your release plan where you update all your social media banners and profile pictures to reflect the new release. Having all your profiles looking the same shows that something is coming, and you will look professional. 

TEXT

Lastly, remember that some people need to read. When you are posting your content items, include text. I did a more detailed post about this which you can check out here but you want to include this so that people understand what you are promoting. Include things like the genre, release date, featured artists and even consider the record label and distributor that you are using, if that is relevant. Your text should entice people reading it to go listen to your music, which is the goal in the end. 

Part of the text element doesn’t only live on social media, you should have a press release written, with your bio and some great images of yourself. This can be used to send to the media, bloggers etc.

MARKETING AVENUES

This is all about how you are going to reach your current audience and how you will reach a wider audience, let’s call these marketing avenues.

Marketing avenues you should work into your plan are, social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and all the others that make sense for your market, like LinkedIn or Reddit which generally don’t make the cut but might be viable or you. You should also look at using E-mail marketing, WhatsApp broadcasting and even Telegram if you think that is a good avenue for your marketing. Don’t underestimate the power of direct emails, people are still very active on email. In fact, I’d suggest that you sent up 2 email lists, you will want one for people who you think are fans or followers. You can use this to send special content to but then also setup a 2^nd one for the media, bloggers, and other influential people. Here you can send out your press release and request a feature or playlisting. The more you get your music in front of eyes and ears the better.

TIKTOK

As we all know, these days TikTok has a big influence, and therefore I want to give them their own mention. Consider pre-releasing your sound to TikTok. When your pre-release goes to TikTok you can use the official sound in the platform to do videos that highlight the song without getting blocked, you could even go viral. Get your friends, family, influencers, and other artists to create their own videos using that sound. Remember, TikTok do not flag a sound or video as popular by the number of views it gets, instead a sound is deemed popular by the number of videos that have been created using that sound, so try get everyone you know to make one and share!

LEAK

Leak your songs to YouTube channels like Mr-Luu de Stylist, they already have a great audience, and your music will get heard by many people. The wonderful thing about YouTube is that if someone other than yourself uploads your song to their channel, your distributor can track that video and generate revenue for you on that video when ads are played. The wonderful thing about this is that it makes copyright issues on YouTube a thing of the past. Yes, people can still rip it off YouTube and share it however this is a risk you might want to take to gain more of an audience.

RELEASE DAY

On release day, get your visualizer video live on YouTube and push the shorter teaser video you cut to all your socials, remember to include the link to the release on all your posts and tell your followers that you have a lyric video coming so they should subscribe to your YouTube channel.

After that, you will update all your socials, send out your email marketing and also any WhatsApp or telegram broadcasts. The idea is to spike the algorithms for all platforms at once, this will push the automated systems to service your content to more people as it will see your release as a priority.

To follow up on your visualizer video, drop your lyric video a few days after that and push that to your socials in the same way. As above, tell them that the official video is on its way and let them know when it’s coming out. 

Then, you guessed it! Drop the official video, when sharing the official video, let your following know that you will be releasing a live performance of the song as well… Then do it!

If you have enough of a following you could ask your fans to get your official video to 20k or 50k views and then you will do a live performance of the song/s for them.

Just the above strategy can help generate streams on your music and keep your following engaged for a few weeks. If you also include Apple Motion art and Spotify canvas videos on those platforms, you can upload those and announce that to your following to get them to go check it out and play your music.

PAID PROMOTIONS

Run boosted posts or actual digital campaigns across Meta, Google, YouTube and TikTok to widen your reach, I’d suggest starting these just after release day to widen the reach of your campaign and extend the longevity of your promotion.

These can be run while you are doing your normal posting as they will pull a new audience into your network so make sure that you are posting engaging content through this period.

CONCLUSION

There are many ways to release music these days and so much that I have left out of this which would have just made this a full-on novel. This is also just my opinion from my own experience in the industry. Use this as a guide and do some research on other peoples ideas and then execute a plan that works well for your market and your release.