Stop living song to song
Batch creating music and content builds a release buffer that enables consistent scheduling and focused marketing. This approach helps artists plan creatively and avoid disruptions caused by life events or last-minute rushes.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
I haven’t sent out one of these in almost a month - crazy I know! I took a much needed vacation and couldn’t get newsletters pre-scheduled ahead of time.
I bring this up because a lot of people actually never realize when i’m on vacation, or when on travel for business. Even over the past few weeks I still had YouTube videos going live, social media content going live etc. This is because I batch create content, and that’s the topic of this newsletter.
If you’re like most people, you’re living song to song. Meaning, every time you release a song you don’t have the next song ready to go.
The difference
Living song to song: You release a song, nothing is ready afterwards. It’s hard to plan out your year because it depends on how each month goes. If something happens in life, you’re missing your next release date.
Batching music: You have at least a couple songs in the bag before you start your release schedule. This acts as a buffer, so you can actually stick to your schedule. You can plan release dates with more creativity, and you can focus more attention to marketing.
There are many release schedules you could pick, but often myself and others say release every 4-8 weeks. It’s hard to keep up with this schedule for many, but batching is the key that allows many artists to pull it off.
But this is only one layer of it. You can also batch create your social media content as well. It’s typically much easier to create 20 pieces of short form content in 1 day than make 1 per day.
Here’s what many pros do
I’ve worked with over 3,000 artists 1-on-1 (consulting link here), so i’ve seen every level of preparedness you can think of. In many cases the pro artists look like this:
Music is finished nearly a year in advance. This might be an entire album is done, and ready to be scheduled throughout the year as singles and a final album release.
Content is done for at least the next song, but often for many songs. Meaning not only are the music videos shot, but the individual social media videos are also all created and edited. One artist I know (that’s an indie artist) every song has 30+ short form videos ready weeks before the song comes out.
While they’re releasing the music they’re working on the next batch of music. But also, they can focus on marketing.
Since things are ready ahead of time, we can really capitalize on any date specific things. For example, putting releases aside certain holidays. Or making concepts that stress across multiple songs.
You ever see one of your favorite artists roll out their album, and notice how consistent the branding, messaging, graphic design etc is? This is only possible when things are batched ahead of time.
Playing devil’s advocate
There is an advantage to creating as yfou go though. You can respond to things as they come and adapt along the way.
If you’re a newer artist and your skills are improving rapidly release by release, the feedback you get from each song may actually help a lot. This is sometimes called ‘building in public’ because you’re showing the world your growth / origin story.
My podcast My 0.4 Cents doesn’t batch create content. But in our case it’s because we want what we’re talking about to be very current. We cover evergreen tactics, but every week we also cover current music industry news. However we also have an editing team that edits the podcast and distributes it for us within 24 hours of us filming.
Even with these things in mind, in cases like this a hybrid approach is often best. We do actually have some video clips pre-recorded of evergreen topics that we can use in the case of an emergency. And if you’re an artist wanting to respond to the feedback of each song, you would still benefit from having a few tracks ‘in the bag’.
Honestly this is something i’ve always struggled with for my own music. However i’m trying to be better. There is also a fine line between holding back too much, and jumping on things too early. I’ve met many artists that sit on music for far too long and delay getting started as a result.
On the note about not sitting on music, I recently interviewed Goshfather. Not only did he release a song a week for a year, he’s a big advocate of artists just getting their stuff out there. It was a super fun chat, check it out here!
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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