How to release an album, part 7: Audience assembly through promos
When releasing an album, building awareness that singles and a whole album are coming is a key to success.
WordPlay T. Jay has a method for audience building that can help attract people to your music in the pre-release months.
For starters, you’ll need to pick two or three songs that will be released as singles. By this point in the process, it’s important to already have an idea of what those songs will be.
Those releases should correlate with the two to three months prior to the album release. Schedule with your distributor for each song to be released four weeks ahead of time. That gives you time to promote those songs before they hit the shelves.
Once you have them scheduled, go to your artist account on Spotify and submit them for playlists. It is recommended to do this four weeks in advance, and depending on how well it does on release, it gets the opportunity to be feature din playlists.
Next, you should have a music video for each song. If you can’t do a music video, at least do an audio-only video for promotional purposes.
Post the video to all your social media, like Facebook, Instagram, IGTV, TikTok, YouTube and any others you have.
You can then create ad campaigns. Video views campaigns on Facebook will get your video needed exposure, and traffic campaigns are useful for getting streams, followers or subs. T. Jay runs both types of campaigns simultaneously.
You can also use the audience tool to create custom audiences based on how long people view your videos. In that set, pick videos that correlate with your upcoming album, then you can create an audience and use it for ad sets once the album is released.
By doing this, you will be able to direct your ads toward people you already know have an interest in your music, versus trying to create a whole new audience upon release.
For more about promotion, check out the video below, or watch other videos in the “How to release an album” series on T. Jay’s music marketing page on YouTube.