The Music Business Buddy
A podcast that aims to educate and inspire music creators in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. A new episode is released each Wednesday and aims to offer clarity and insight into a range of subjects across the music industry, all through the lens of a music creator for the benefit of other music creators. The series includes soundbites and interviews with guests from all over the world together with commentary and clarity on a range of topics. The podcast is hosted by award winning music industry professional Jonny Amos.
Jonny Amos is a music producer with credits on a range of major and independent labels, a songwriter with chart success in Europe and Asia, a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business at BIMM University UK, director of The SongLab Ltd and the author of The Music Business for Music Creators.
www.jonnyamos.com
The Music Business Buddy
Episode 10: Pre-Release Tactics When Preparing Singles
Ready to make your next single a hit? This episode promises to equip you with all the essential strategies for a successful music release. We break down the critical steps, from picking the right distributor to crafting a killer electronic press kit and creative asset bank. You’ll learn how to upload your music and metadata correctly and why these details are crucial for your song's success. We also delve into the art of connecting with tastemakers and leveraging social media to extend your music's reach, offering practical advice for targeting influencers through platforms like SubmitHub, Musosoup, and Groover.
But we don't stop there—discover innovative tactics to maximize your music release's impact in today's digital age. From pitching your songs to Spotify editorial playlists to strategically planning special content for release day, we cover it all. Hear why sharing personal insights can resonate more deeply with your audience than traditional marketing techniques. Finally, get insights into how to use your existing music catalog to boost visibility for new releases and utilize Spotify's Discovery Mode to enhance discovery rates. This episode is a treasure trove of actionable tips and strategies designed to help you navigate the complexities of the music industry and ensure your next release is a smashing success.
The Music Business Buddy. The Music Business Buddy Hello, big, warm welcome to everybody. You're listening to the Music Business Buddy, with me, johnny Amos, podcasting out of Birmingham in England. I'm the author of the book the Music Business for Music Creators. I'm also a songwriter and a producer and a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business. Wherever you are, whatever you do, consider yourself welcome to this podcast and to a part of this community. I'm here to try and educate and inspire music creators from all over the world in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music.
Speaker 1:Ok, so today we're talking about preparing to release music, so I'm not going to touch on kind of post-release pitching and what can be done once music is out there. It's more to do with the steps before beginning to release that next single. There's a lot of different things that I could talk about, but I'm going to try and condense this into 10 different steps. Okay, you ready, here we go. Step one choose your distributor. It's good to build an expectation. What do you expect from a distributor, you know. So do you want to pick one that's going to work with you for the entirety of a strategic campaign. Maybe it's like a kind of 18 month campaign, or maybe you just want to work with different ones and put a single out on different ones. Maybe you're happy to relinquish, you know, kind of 10, 15 percent of your master rights in exchange for working with a distributor that can look to monitor your growth and offer kind of strategic support and editorial play listing and that kind of thing. Or, you know, maybe you don't want that, maybe you would rather just pay a fixed fee and not have to worry about any kind of commissionable model. Also, maybe you're really into kind of good analytics. Maybe you want a distributor to help you with creating visualizers, squares, banners, things like that. Whatever it is that you're looking for. Choose your distributor. That's step one.
Speaker 1:Step two upload the release to that distributor and send the right metadata. Now this seems like quite a simple step, but actually there's quite a few things that can be done kind of wrong here. So the goal is to upload a high resolution wav file of the song together with the artwork and choose a release date. But the release date will ideally be kind of six weeks away from the moment that you actually upload. Now your distributor is going to ask you some questions about your song. Don't rush it. It's a crucial step. They're extracting metadata about your song not about you so much as an artist, but mainly about the song and where it fits so that they can paint an accurate picture of how the music will actually be recognized by the digital service platforms. So, ultimately, the information that you put in at that stage will fall in line with what the music actually represents in terms of kind of genre and mood and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Step three electronic press kit and creative asset bank. This is really important, right? So you have to prepare content, don't you? We all know this, and we have to get really creative in this day and age to kind of think about, you know, what are we going to say on social media or how we're going to come across. There's a lot of pressure on artists to have to come up with that sort of stuff these days, but you know it is what it is, it's the times we're in. So let's just, you know, kind of put the focus on this for a minute.
Speaker 1:Now. You're going to need a range of kind of assets for both social media and for tastemakers. Uh, for, you know, when it comes to promoting your music tastemakers. I'm going to come back to in a few minutes on a different step, but now you're making something available in the form of an electronic press kit on a downloadable link to tastemakers, right? So? Bloggers, to youtubers, whoever you want to send music to, now it could be a google drive, a dropbox, one drive, something similar. It's more about assets than it is about presentation over some kind of beautiful website. That's not as important, I would say.
Speaker 1:Now you're going to try and make it easy, okay, for tastemakers to be able to access a range of assets that can actually promote your release, together with some kind of assets that you can use yourself to actually promote your release. So the kind of things we're talking about here are high resolution images. It could be video content, music videos or lyric videos. It can even be things like behind the scenes or a documentary or some kind of storytelling content that aids your release. Maybe it's even a visual that kind of fits well with your song. You know, when you think about promoting an artist, it's a double-handed promotion, isn't it? You're promoting the artist and you're promoting the song. But one of the best ways to promote an artist is by promoting a song. So, for example, if you were to have some kind of visual element it could be about anything nothing to do with your music, but that you could sync your music too. That could be really useful content for Reels or for TikTok, for example, a biography that's written in third person I'm going to come back to that in a second A PDF copy of the press release which I'll come back to as well, artist logos, and that could be ideally in different sort of shapes, right, so you know that you can use for different social media channels, which, again, I'll come back to contact details.
Speaker 1:So many people leave this out, right, the contact details, you know phone number, telephone number, that kind of thing. Uh, the actual music files, don't overlook that, you know. So just upload some. You know, the mp3s, the wav files or whatever of your song. It might be that you're pitching, for example, to I don't know a podcaster and you want them to play your song on their podcast. Well, they're going to need the file downloaded and instead of tastemakers like podcasters or youtubers or bloggers, instead of them having to come back and forth and hey, can you send me this, can you send me that? They expect a link these days that they can just go and click and find those things themselves.
Speaker 1:Now it's good to be creative when writing your biog. Right, it doesn't have to be kind of, you know, long-winded, but it's certainly a good idea to kind of steer away from unnecessary detail about how much music means to you, or you know what you did in music when you first started. What matters now is who you are, right, who you are. This is the perfect way to write a biog who you are, who you are. This is the perfect way to write a biog who you are, what genre of music you make, where you're from, what have you done recently with music? You know it could be past releases or live performances and what you plan to achieve moving forward. It doesn't need to be anything outside of that. That's a great way to uh, you know, write a biog. It can always be adapted, it can always be revisited anyway.
Speaker 1:So that's step three and that's creating a creative asset bank and epk. Step four prepare your channels. Tastemakers are going to need to be able to hear your song, but it's not released yet. So you've got to make it easier for them by allowing access to your unreleased music in two ways. Firstly, by putting your song and an instrument of your song in your EPK so it can be downloaded by the user that you're trying to engage with. And secondly, to upload a private link of the song on a platform where it can be streamed. So SoundCloud is quite a good fit for this because it's a trusted source by many radio stations and bloggers and stuff. But also you can just make the track public once it's actually been released. Now it's good to prepare your social media channels for a release Now.
Speaker 1:It could be achieved using, you know, squares or banners or whatever is suitable for different platforms. But just to create, you know, awareness of the release. So not that's not necessarily kind of artist artwork, but artwork, uh, of the actual release. So it, you know it's got to be sized appropriately, you know, for the different platforms that you're using. So you know the size of a youtube banner is unique, uh, to that platform. The size of the facebook banner is unique to facebook. Be sure to create a visualizer as well for spotify canvas. This needs to be a kind of three to seven second video that works well when placed on a loop. Don't make that common mistake where you know you've kind of tried to lip sync with something it's not tiktok, right? So for spotify, be sure to make a little video loop that has to work in 9-16 ratio and it also needs to be between 720 pixels and 1080 tall. So once your release has been delivered to Spotify, you'll be able to upload this asset To find out if your release has actually been delivered to Spotify. You can check on your Spotify for Artists app. If you're signed up to Spotify for Artists, spotify will also very often send you an email with notification of that delivery, so you can add that asset and pitch their editorial team the second that that is delivered to them.
Speaker 1:Step five creating a press release. Now, a lot of artists I know really struggle with this. Oh, I don't like talking about myself. I don't know how to put this together. Well, I'm going to try and simplify it for you. So by this point, ok, you've got a release date, you've got a range of assets, and this means that the PR campaign on you as an artist and your release can start to begin. Now you're going to need to send a press release to tastemakers such as bloggers, journalists, curators, youtubers, influencers, media outlets, radio stations or anyone else that you can think of or you can research that could be useful in actually helping you to market your release.
Speaker 1:Now, to achieve this step, it all starts with a press release. It's an expectation that many, many people have, and your press release is, you know, think of it as a statement, right? So an official statement that you are issuing to the media to inform them of your release. Now, a press release will contain information on the artist, of course, and the release details and some kind of perhaps even some kind of narrative that supports either the artist or the release. Now, remember, you know you're talking to journalists here, so you've got to try and think like a journalist and put something across in a way that would resonate with them. So, you know, new band releases, new single. It's just not exciting enough. So it could be that you choose some kind of narrative. It could be something topical, it could be something to do with a lyric in the song, by the way, shh, it doesn't even have to be true, right? You can't let the truth get in the way of a good story. There's nothing new about that in the show business. So, you know, be sure to get creative with how you get a narrative across, because it will help people to be able to write a story about you with, then the subtext being hey, this artist has got a song out and go and check it out. If the idea of creating a press release is a little bit scary, I'm going to try and make it even easier for you. So if you go to my website that's johnnyamoscom, j-o-n-n-y-a-m-o-s, johnnyamoscom, click on music industry resources and one of the many free downloads on there is a press release template and you'll be able to see in the way that it's a word doc, right. So when you download it, you'll be able to see in the way that it's a word doc, right. So when you download it, you'll be able to see the kind of format and the kind of way that you can present your press release, which will then mean that you can write up your own and then it's done and it's there, and the more you do it, the better you get right, just like writing songs.
Speaker 1:Step six engage with tastemakers. Now, arguably the most important this step in this list is actually researching and targeting key tastemakers in your genre, your niche, your style. Now, tastemakers are either, you know, individuals or entities that have a significant influence on the direction and the popularity of your intended style. So often they are kind of key sort of gatekeepers to a much wider audience than you could actually create yourself, as they have a ready-made audience. So you know, think about, you know, taking your social media content or the fact that you're just trying to promote a new song and you're hitting it out on social media to anyone that will listen, as everyone does nothing wrong with that. That's how it works. However, there's a limit, perhaps, unless you spend, spend, spend, there's a limit.
Speaker 1:So one of the ways in order to tap into a wider audience is to understand who your tastemakers are. So if you were making prog metal and you were sending your music off to the wrong tastemakers, maybe they were more on the kind of alt-rock or rock or indie rock side. They're not going to write about you, are they, because that's not their style. However, by finding out who those niche key tastemakers are and that is research then you're going to be able to send them what they want to hear. You're helping them to feed their audience, keep their listener base and viewership happy, and the appealing by-product of it for you and your band is that you reach a new audience. I make it sound simple because it is so, you know, tastemakers could be journalists or radio hosts or presenters or radio producers, or, you know, social media influencers, maybe even like promoters. Certainly, youtubers, bloggers, streamers, playlist cur many of these entities have the power to introduce music to their audiences and a positive recommendation can really really help to break an artist to a much wider audience.
Speaker 1:So one of the key things to perhaps bear in mind here is that, you know, tastemakers, they get bombarded, don't they? They get bombarded by all sorts of people sending music and, you know, sometimes the temptation is perhaps there to kind of just send out your press release, you know, kind of to as many people as you possibly can, but it's not always an effective approach. I think one of the most effective approaches that I witness and have experienced and have observed in others is when people actually go hang on, let me hone into my niche, let me look at who's kind of influential in that space and let's contact them and let's see what they say and what's the worst that can happen? They just don't reply or they say no, that's the worst that can happen, isn't it? So it's worth a go now if you're thinking, well, all right, johnny, that sounds okay, but who do I go to you know if you don't have connections to tastemakers, um, you know who you're gonna go to? Well, you know there's loads of centralized platforms out there these days that really kind of streamline that process and actually enable independent music creators to build their own network of influences. Platforms likes like SubmitHub and Musosoup and Groover and all these kind of places are becoming really really popular centralised platforms to connect all sorts of different music creators with influencers and tastemakers. I think the search functions and the algorithms and filters and stuff for those platforms is continually improving. So an example of that would be whereby you can actually enter right this is my style input it and it will start to give you kind of recommendations as to who the suitable tastemakers are on that platform. So that's a great way of getting started. And if you then at that point start to go right okay, we're four weeks away from release and we've got three blogs lined up and we've got four playlists ready to list this once it gets released, then you're in a good spot already.
Speaker 1:Step seven social media release ramp. So researching, planning, scheduling social media content you know it's an important part of the process, isn't it? For release preparation and it starts by just kind of understanding the platforms that you think will best serve your promotional assets and then optimising those assets for those platforms. Now, once you've kind of identified that kind of thing, it's then time to start thinking about what kind of content works for you as an artist. Now, we can be cliche and just do the normal things right, and there's kind of nothing particularly wrong with that.
Speaker 1:However, you know, since the turn of the 2020s, we've seen a lot of changes in terms of what works well on social media, especially in terms of how artists market themselves, right. So, you know, it could be argued that actually there's a fine, fine, fine difference in terms of how artists communicate themselves when it comes to either PR or marketing. So, if we think about marketing as kind of, you know, sell, sell, sell and PR is more about like opening the book and kind of going this is who I am as an artist. You know, it could actually be argued that that kind of direct, in-your-face marketing post about pending releases and subsequent countdowns to releases and that kind of thing are not as effective as they once were due to the sheer saturation of that technique. So instead, the artists that are gaining more success are the ones, on social media at least, are the ones that are offering better public relations, better PR, by offering insights into their daily lives and their activities and what they're up to outside of music. So it isn't just music, music, music it's like shared interests or values or messages. These are the things, let me tell you, that labels are major labels especially are very, very interested in right now. So any artist that want to get ahead of the curve think about that.
Speaker 1:Think about not just selling the music, but how do I indirectly sell the music? By just opening myself up. Now, an example of a hybrid could be an artist talking on camera about what their song is about, you know. That's a perfect hybrid piece of content whereby you know it's kind of opening up, talking you know to the screen or to the audience about you know where the song came from, what it means, what it might mean to other people and actually then people kind of gaining an interest in the song. So that's kind of marketing and PR in terms of how that links and projects itself on social media.
Speaker 1:One thing's for certain and that is that the more prepared you are, the better, because I think the daily pressures of kind of going right, you know, what do I have to say today? Or what, what can I'm, how can I make myself look interesting today? You know, these are the common kind of thoughts and concerns, aren't they? But those kind of concerns can be reduced a little bit by kind of thinking ahead and planning and preparing content in advance. I know lots and lots and lots of people that do that these days, and it certainly takes the burden away from having to think about, right, you know, what am I going to say today? What am I going to say tomorrow? You know there's a strategy to it, isn't there? So that is the release ramp activity.
Speaker 1:Okay, step eight, uh, is the pitch to spotify editorials. Now, pitching your song through the spotify for artists app is strongly advised. It's a short process that allows spotify's editorial department the opportunity to curate your new song into one of their editorial playlists that are generally focused on, perhaps even mood or genre. Now, the pitch must be made at least seven days prior to the release of the song. After that time it's too late. So if the song's already released, it's already out, it's too late to pitch. The pitch includes questions about the mood and the genre, together with, you know, some information about the culture and the genre, together with some information about the culture and the instrumentation of the song and also the artist's home city, which also plays a part. So it doesn't take long to do. There used to be a neat little 500-character text box on there where you could pitch your song. They've removed that now. I'm not quite sure why. I don't know if it's going to come back, but that was a great way of feeding the algorithm. But back, but that was a great way of feeding the algorithm, but anyway it's not there anymore, so it takes even less time to pitch for editorial pitches throughout spotify for artists.
Speaker 1:Now step nine work your old songs now. If you've not had any previous releases, then skip this step, but if you've had previous releases, it's worth pitching them to as many curators and I'm talking third party curators as possible in the run-up to a release. Now there's a great deal to be gained from this, as it feeds data to the dsps on who is listening to your old music and what else they listen to once they contrast and compare it through collaborative filtering. So the more data on your old songs, the better it is for your visibility when releasing new music. Now this process basically allows your new music to be deemed as at a lower risk by the platforms and ultimately enhances the chances of your new single being introduced to a wider audience through their algorithmic functionality. So pushing existing catalogue or past catalogue as part of a build-up to a new release is an approach that I can assure you is used by many, many music professionals. This process has perhaps even become a little bit easier since the introduction of spotify's discovery mode. Now, discovery mode is not available in every country. It's not available to every person. There are certain kind of caveats that have to be hit in order for it to be able to be activated. But it's worth checking in your Spotify for Artists if you can activate discovery mode, which allows artists and their teams to use Spotify for Artists app to allow for a higher discovery rate through autoplay and radio functionality by using specific songs to target growth. So this has become a very, very popular kind of tool and technique in campaign preparation by using old catalogue to drive awareness for a new release.
Speaker 1:And step 10 to the steps before releasing music is actually thinking ahead to the release day. I always think of a release day as quite a it's quite a special day, isn't it? You know it's kind of a bit like a birthday. You have that, have that kind of warm, fuzzy, glowing kind of feeling about the day. It's it's special, right, and you've got to do something to celebrate it, even if it's just a small thing. You know it's gonna be different things for different people, but very often release day can be quite a sort of busy day on a kind of administrative level.
Speaker 1:You know, perhaps where sort of track links need to be shared with tastemakers that you've prepared for engagement or whatever. But also it's worth just kind of looking ahead and just preparing some special content which markets that release on release day. You know release day is also about the excitement of something new and people want to hear the song straight away. So you know, allow for that to be the priority. It's also worth looking ahead to the release day several weeks in advance and thinking about, maybe you know, perhaps a live performance and how that might contribute to the launch of the new release and what that event might look like. Or perhaps even some kind of alternate or live or rough or stripped version of the song that you're going to share. You know, that day or perhaps the week after, after you know, we're seeing a lot of people now really kind of stretch out and elongate even just a single release into multiple weeks of, you know, alternate versions, stripped versions, that kind of thing. So you know, those things don't happen by accident. They're all pre-planned, aren't they? So it's good to think ahead of that.
Speaker 1:Okay, now, everything I've said there is all about what you do or you know before you release music, right? Or what you can do before you release music. There's actually a strong argument to suggest that there's a lot more you can actually do in post-release. So I'll cover that in the future, but I didn't want to throw too much at you today. So those are 10 steps about preparing before releasing music, but for now I shall wish you well, have a great day. Thank you for tuning in, and may the force be with you.
