Music Release: Planning, Platforms and Promotion

"It sounds amazing!" or "this one's gonna be huge!" or "ah, I love it!!"

Yes, your music is ready for release. Your peers loved it. You love it. And now you want the world to listen to it. With an overwhelming amounts of options available today, music release can be stressful. A well planned music release can be the difference between a "hit" and "it did well" song. There are so many different parameters that one needs to take account of. I've divided them into 3 stages, the 3 Ps: Planning, Platforms and Promotion. Let's look into each of these one by one.

Planning

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” – Yogi Berra

We see that a lot of new products enter the market every single day. Only a few of them sustain the competition. Your music is your product that is going to compete against an ever growing market of music producers with the technology being much cheaper than before. A lot of campaigns fail only because they have not planned on key pointers like target audience, costs and potential revenue.

Target Audience

Understanding and knowing your audience is really important. Is the consumer tech savvy? The language, the channel and the content that you use to communicate with the consumers in one demography would not necessarily work in another demography. Having your goals set and planning on how to reach your target audience is vital to stay on path and move in a particular direction.

Platforms

The two main considerations when it comes to platforms are "which distribution service is the most reliable and what is the cost involved?" and, second, "what is the potential revenue that I can expect to make out of these different streaming services?". It can be really stressful going through the various options. Let's take a look at these in the following section.

Costs

There are different costs that you need to consider when considering music release. Publishing your music on all the major platforms would require you to use a distribution service. These distribution services often charge a fee for their service. You can find a great deal of information on different distribution services here.

Potential Revenue

Different streaming services offer different rates per stream. Following graph shows a breakdown of the per stream rates awarded by different streaming services:

Source: Soundcharts Blog

Promotion

Earning a living through music hasn't become easier even with so many options being available to release your track these days. The challenge these days is to overcome competition and rise above the crowd. Marketing and promoting yourself and your music is utterly important to get streams and in turn generate revenue. It is important to build a fan base and reach out to maximum.

Some of the tasks that can help you with your promotion are listed below (source: Ditto):

1. Build a website and mailing list

2. Develop an engaging social presence

3. Get yourself a place on the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc.

4. Get Press and Blog coverage

5. Work on engaging Music Videos

6. Surround yourself with a strong team.

If you want to read about these in-depth, click here.

There are so many things that you can consider to make your release a well planned one. This article covered a few these things in brief. I hope this article points you in the right direction. Continue your research and gather as much information as you can before jumping into the market.

Have a wonderful career ahead!