Should you promote your music before it comes out?
Promoting your music before release often wastes budget and effort, as pre-save ads cost 3x more and organic hype rarely converts without an existing fanbase. Focus most marketing efforts on release day and after for better results.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about if you should promote your music before it comes out or not.
The short answer is no. In most cases the best option is to have all, or almost all, of your marketing efforts start on release day.
As you might imagine there is plenty of nuance to this, and understanding the reasons why I don’t recommend pre-release marketing for most artists will help you know when it might make sense to switch strategies.
Pre-save ads
I’ve had a lot of people ask me if they should run ads promoting their pre-save link. That’s why this section is first.
One big reason I don’t recommend running ads for pre-saves is the cost. It will often cost $1-$3 per pre-save. Whereas after the song is out it’ll only cost $0.30-$1 per save. Basically: saves are 3 times more expensive prior to your song’s release.
Artists think that getting pre-saves will help with the song’s algorithm. And while that can happen, it often doesn’t. Nowadays most platforms even offer something called a ‘future pre-save’ or a ‘forever save’, which fans that opt-in will pre-save ever future song you release to their library.
Even with that, the largest benefit of running a pre-save campaign is actually the email addresses you get in addition to it. Not the pre-save itself.
Now if the emails are valuable to you, and you have a budget of at least $3k, running up to 10% of your budget prior to release day is fine. Sometimes I do this not to get pre-saves, but to test my ads and audiences early so my campaign can go through learning a couple of days earlier and I can have a higher spend on release day.
Organic pre-release marketing
Alright now lets talk about organic marketing, namely social media content promotion.
You’ve probably heard stories of artists that posted like 200 times about their song before it even came out, and then it went super viral on release day. Does that happen? Yes! Will it happen to you? Probably not.
I don’t mean to be a negative Nancy here, but for every person I see that pulls off this feat I see 100 that fail.
The big probablem is it’s so hard to get people’s attention. Once you have it, you want somewhere to send it. And often the people that try and post 50 times before release day end up not even posting 20 times after release day.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with someone posting about their song 50 times before it drops. I just think that if they do that, they should post 150+ times after it drops too. Most of your content should come after release day.
It’s important to push new songs, and the first month of a release is important. But remember that your song is out forever. Don’t give up on it the moment it’s out.
The big exception
There is one situation where it does make sense to actually tease a song, and that’s if you have a fanbase already.
Imagine you have 100,000 followers on social media and 5k on an email / SMS list. Now imagine you can get them foaming at the mouth waiting for your new song to come out. This leads to a spike of traffic on release day, fan content being created, etc.
If you don’t have an audience and try to do this, you’re basically trying to build an audience off the back of a song that isn’t out to get them excited about a song that isn’t out. It’s just harder to do.
Conclusion
So for most of you reading… start pushing your songs on release day. Maybe do a couple posts ahead of time but save 90%+ for after release day. If you have a big budget maybe consider launching your ads a few days early to test content and go through the learning phase, but skip that pre-save campaign.
You’ll get the most traction once people actually have a place to listen.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency Southworth Media specializes in running Meta conversion ads to promote your music on streaming platforms, email list growth, tour promotion and more.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels and FanFunnels are the best all-in-one platforms for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels, build a mailing list and more!
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or my team here.
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