2-months Pre-Release
Two Months Before Music Release
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Finalize your Single / Album / EP Artwork
Your artwork should be ready, on brand and amazing! Ask your designer to animate it or break it up into tiles for Instagram, and resize it for all your social posts.
CLICK HERE to get access to our skilled and affordable graphic and digital designers and content creators.
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Get Great Photos
Make sure you have at least 3-4 great images. Variety is important. Most music blogs feature square or horizontal photos. When getting photos taken, think through your brand and think about variety to keep your images fresh as time goes by.
CLICK HERE to get access to our great photographers!
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Research Which Spotify Pre-Save / Marketing Platform is Right for You
You will need to run a campaign to get that Spotify track pre-saved! There are a bunch of great sites to choose from. Feature.FM has Action Pages to help build your audience – CLICK HERE (future affiliate) to create one. From The Site: Action Pages are highly engaging pages that reward fans for taking the actions you want in the platforms you want and provide you with deep insight into your audience.
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TONEDEN is a great tool to help facilitate social media follows/likes and/or email addresses for free downloads. You can also optimize Facebook ads via Toneden, and customize those ads more than you can under the Facebook Ads Manager. SHOW.CO owned by CD Baby, is integrated so you can use it as well.
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Focus on Increasing Your Audience
If you have been recording new music, you may have taken your eye off of the constant grind it takes to keep your socials and your newsletter growing. This takes a lot of heavy lifting and your whole band or team should be helping.
If you have not kept up consistently, find your friends and people you admire (bloggers, other artists, venues, local spots you like to hang out in, etc.) on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and start following!
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This will increase your audience, because many of the people you follow will follow you back – especially if you already know them. Also, start reaching out to people in your inbox and outbox and get them on your list (remember it’s illegal to just sign people up, so do this with integrity and ask each person). Your newsletter is the place where you will be able to monetize so, don’t skip this step.
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Prep Your Social Media Content Calendar
Your content calendar is outlined with all of the assets that you need for your release with dates for each asset/action needed. Countdowns, art reveals, listening party or live release party announcements, ticket links and calls to action (like Spotify Pre-saves) are all fodder to add to your content calendar.
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Use our SMM ORGANIZER to organize all of your posts and any of your ongoing communication. This will help you keep track of all the content that you will post. You can see there is a tab for each platform. If there are several of you in a team or in a band, assign one platform per person. You will also see a VIP tab here – this is where you will add industry people you need to connect with in real life.
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Six Weeks Before Music Release
Submit Your Music to Your Distributor
If you are leading this music release with a single (or two), make sure to let them know you are releasing a single(s) FIRST before the EP (if this is the case). You must have your single artwork ready at this time! Tunecore, CD Baby, and other distributors need upwards of 6 weeks to send your music to iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Amazon Music, and other digital service providers (DSPs).
CLICK HERE for access to our graphic designers and illustrators for your artwork TODAY!
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Submit Your Single to The Spotify Curators
Login to your Spotify For Artists account and submit your track for playlist consideration. FOLLOW THIS GUIDE so you don’t miss an opportunity.
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Launch a Facebook Like Campaign to Get More Followers to Your Page
Or if you have not done so in a long time, go through your personal Facebook Page and ask all of your friends to Like your Page.
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We know this may seem crazy to do during a time when Facebook is catching a lot of heat but promoters, venues, and music bloggers still look at social numbers so make sure yours are consistently growing (and don’t buy fake fans ever!)