HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR MUSIC AFTER RELEASE: A 6-WEEK PLAN

Almost every artist I talk to plans the eight weeks leading up to a release in forensic detail, then plans absolutely nothing for the eight weeks afterwards. The record comes out, everyone posts the same square graphic, and by Wednesday it’s quiet again.

That silence is the single most expensive mistake in independent music promotion, because the six weeks after a record lands are when most of the discovery, most of the press and nearly all of the physical sales actually happen.

So here’s the plan I’d give any band that asked me: a week-by-week breakdown of what to do once the thing is out, why each job belongs in that particular week, and what to quietly drop because it isn’t working.

Partly exhaustion. By the time a record is out you’ve been working on it for a year, and the idea of talking about it for another six weeks feels like too much. Partly it’s the numbers: the first weekend produces a spike on Spotify, the spike fades, and it reads as failure rather than as completely normal behaviour.

The other reason is that the pre-release job list is well documented and the post-release one isn’t. We wrote up the front half in the release day checklist, and most artists follow something like it. Then the list ends, and so does the promotion.

From what I see come through CD Unity, the artists who do well with a physical run are the ones still talking about the record in November when it came out in September. Not louder, just still there.

Some things have a genuinely short shelf life and week one is the only time they work.

Send the thank-you email the same afternoon it goes live. Not a sales message, just a short note to the people who already care, with the link. Then check the artist profile on every platform and make sure the new music is actually showing where it should be, because distribution glitches are more common than anyone admits and nobody will tell you.

Ask your existing followers to add the track to their own playlists rather than just to stream it. A save is worth more than a play to every algorithm that matters, and it’s a much easier thing to ask for.

THE PRESS CLOCK STARTS NOW

If you’ve got an electronic press kit ready, this is the week it earns its keep. Most blogs treat anything over a month old as history. Send it out while the release is genuinely new, and send it to people who cover your kind of thing rather than everyone with an inbox.

This is where you feed the thing rather than announcing it. The announcement is done. What works now is content that gives people a reason to hear the song again from a different angle.

A behind-the-scenes clip of the session. A live take filmed in a rehearsal room on a phone. A reel of the lyric that people keep quoting back at you. A short piece about what the song is actually about, which is the one thing nobody else can make. Post to TikTok and Instagram from the same shoot rather than treating each as a separate job.

Keep pitching. Editorial pitching closes before release, but independent curators on Spotify playlists take submissions year-round, and a single good placement in week three will outperform anything that happened in week one. The same applies to radio stations: the BBC Introducing uploader accepts tracks after they’re out, and local shows are often more interested once there’s something to point listeners at.

By week four the streaming numbers have settled into whatever they’re going to be and there’s no point staring at them. This is where you shift from chasing new listeners to converting the ones you already reached.

Gigs do more of this than anything else. Get in front of a booking contact now, while the release is recent enough to be a reason for them to say yes. A support slot for a bigger act in your town will do more for you than a fortnight of targeted ads, and it puts you in a room where people can buy something. Set the merch table up properly, because that’s where a fiver becomes twelve: we covered the whole approach in how to set up a merch table that actually pulls people in.

Online, this is when your shop page matters more than your socials. If you haven’t got one running yet, selling music on Bandcamp is the quickest way to have somewhere real to send people. Then send a second email. Not another announcement, a follow-up: here’s how it went, here’s what people said, here’s where you get a physical copy. That single message consistently sells more than anything else in the whole six weeks, which is the argument we made in email marketing for musicians.

Six weeks of this is only survivable if you batch it. Film four pieces of content in one afternoon rather than inventing something new every morning. Write the emails in advance. Draft the pitch template once and change two lines per recipient.

Then give yourself permission to drop things. If a platform has produced nothing across three honest attempts, it isn’t your channel and no amount of consistency will fix that. Two channels done properly beat five done badly, and every independent artist I know who’s lasted has narrowed rather than widened.

One more thing worth doing: collaborate. Not a formal feature, just swapping a playlist add with someone who makes similar music, or splitting a bill. A collaboration costs nothing and puts you in front of an audience that has already proved it likes this sort of thing.

Ignore total plays. It tells you nothing you can act on. Three numbers are worth watching in Spotify for Artists and your distributor dashboard: saves, follower growth, and the ratio of listeners to streams. Saves tell you people meant it. Follower growth tells you the release brought people in rather than just entertaining people who were already there. Listeners against streams tells you whether anyone is coming back.

Alongside that, track two things no platform reports: how many physical copies went out, and how many email addresses you gained. Those two numbers are the ones that still matter in a year, and they’re the ones nobody else can switch off.

Josh McKenzie

Hello, I’m Josh, and I’ve been honing my graphic design skills for almost 15 years now, catering to the needs of bands and businesses alike. What really fascinates me is the business aspect of the music industry. In addition to my design work, I also happen to play the Hammond organ, and I strive to share my knowledge through helpful articles that I write exclusively for you all!