Excitement of a musician with a “finished” album is hardly comparable to anything else. Though each style comes with a different preparation background, we all end up in pretty much the same place after a mind-blowing or head-aching composition period, hours of rehearsals or explorations of sounds on our DAWs (or sometimes both), session after session for arranging and recording, bouncing back and forward gazillion versions of mixes for each song, and finally the mastering.
In groups and ensembles with workload share, not all fronteers are shouldered by the same person, but even that comes with the responsibility to keep a productive interpersonal communication, which at times, can be harder than composing that single in the first place. Hence, when a musician reaches that final version of the track or the album, there comes a rush to release and get the feeling of “reward” right away.
But not so easy! All that hard work, if not presented well in media, can disappear as fast as it appears, which is why timelining a promotion strategy is a crucial part of being a successful musician. If not, hours and hours put to perfect the material can not be heard by the audience which deserves to discover it in the first place. Today’s world is full of new content, as long as you are not living in a hypothetical town in which there is a hypothetical local record store with its regular customers hypothetically refusing to use the internet, constantly waiting for something new, your chances to get discovered out of the blue is very little. Even to have the possibility to be selected on a playlist of Spotify, you have to wait a decent amount of time which doesn’t come with a guarantee that it will be done so. So crawling your way into the eyes of your target audience over a large period is almost as crucial as the quality of your music album’s content.
First of all, choosing the season to release your new album can calm your nerves about the waiting period, because the easiest thing to accept is the fact that a summer album should not be released over winter. This is one of the clearest things that every musician knows deep down inside, that the songs of the new album are asking to be heard on a rainy day in autumn walking down the street, or on a hopeful day of spring with sun shining on blossoms, or on a super chill day of summer, or closed-up with a mug of hot cocoa on a winter night. If Sting released “If on a Winter’s Night…” in the middle of August, it wouldn’t match now, would it? With the same logic Coldplay would not even consider the Christmas season for their album “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends” (it was released mid-June, now that you think about it makes sense right?). So, first homework: check the discographies and release dates of musicians and bands that you can relate your music to, and follow in their footsteps. Choosing the season that they have a tendency to go for will help you reach a similar target group. Assume that you finished your album in mid-October and you know that it’s meant to be a summer album. Well… Now you have a very valid reason to wait and in the meantime, start preparing the promotional material for your album.
As readers of this blog know, we can not put more emphasis on the phrase “consistency is the key”. Whatever season or month you choose to release your product, you have to start carving that date into your audience’s mind through various inception maneuvers. First off, prepare a press pack with your regular artist tone to share on all the platforms you are active on (assuming you already have done your homework on that, if not, we recommend you to read this article on how to create and maintain a successful social media profile for your project.
Once the text news is out, having a video in which you make eye contact with your target audience is one of the best ways to go these days, since most platforms are already with or going to have face recognition and are prioritizing the content that has the most “human” in it on their newsfeed sections.
After that comes the visual and audio release timeline. Choosing up to four tracks to be released as singles before the actual album comes out is a maneuver most of the top-notch bands are following, so no shame in sharing almost half the content of the album itself as promotion material! This comes with the opportunity to triple or quadruple the promotional material as well. This means, a text-formatted press release to share the news, a vlog post to boil the calderon a bit more, releasing the cover art to add a bit more suspension, changing the cover image, profile image, and all possible visual content on your social media profiles to fit the cover of the single that you are going to release, and finally dropping the single to all the platforms that you are available at. At this point, aiming to gather all audience to one streaming platform is not entirely necessary, since your goal at this point is to reach as much audience as possible.
This simple strategy by itself done four times (with each single) in a span of 3 to 4 months is going to cook enough attention from your audience to actually boom the album release in the way it deserves. This is why here in Album Cover Zone we have more than 2.000 options of affordable and unique album cover art waiting for you to choose from, with their press pack promotional materials such as social media banners suitable for all social media platforms, ready to boost your upcoming album’s target audience count!
