Music marketing strategies: releasing an EP

Let's say, for example, there's five tracks on this EP. We would recommend releasing every single track individually.

Because every time you release something, it's another chance to reach listeners, existing and new. If you know that you can get lots of radio play or vinyl pre - orders, the rules are slightly different, but we’re assuming that that's not the case. Which is increasingly the case for most artists.

What’s good about releasing each track individually, is it gives you multiple chances to get onto Spotify’s Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists. If you decide to release all five tracks all on the same day, only one of those tracks is eligible for Release Radar. You reduce your chances down to 20%. And, the Spotify algorithm is a powerful thing, which can speed up your growth. It’s best to try and maximise that.

It’s better to try and spread the campaign out. You can spread that whole campaign out over 30 weeks, because you can spend six weeks talking about each track. You will be amazed at how long it takes to get the message out, and how repetitive you have to be. So rather than putting everything out in one day, you can maybe spend four to six weeks talking about each track, so 30 weeks for the campaign, in total.

At the labels I worked at, we would be doing album campaigns, and these audiences are usually dedicated fan bases. Yet, still on release day fans would write tweets or comments on posts saying they didn’t know anything was being released. As the marketing team, we felt like we've been talking about a release for months!

The longer you can have your campaign running for, the more likely you are to ensure you get heard and people’s attention. You've also got more time to build up your audience as well. They are more likely to become a listener/follower at the end of that process as you’ve had multiple interactions with them and they have come on the journey with you.

It can be really repetitive and it might sound boring to you. But to your fans, it's not. Plus, consistency really helps. You can build consistency by having a relatively tight idea of what kinds of things you post. So for every track, you could post the lyrics and talk about how you wrote the song, what it’s about. You could film a live performance - you can post photos and studio sessions.

In that 30 week period, I'd probably recommend doing some gigs, even if they're free gigs to have something live to anchor on. Particularly towards the end of the campaign it’s useful and you’re building up the audience the whole time.

Choose whichever one you enjoy the most. That is probably the most important thing. The one you find yourself most actively engaging in where you feel like there's a bit of community. Just pick one as it may be likely you're doing this on your own and you don't have a team around you. It’s better not to get overwhelmed and to be able to keep it active.

Do whatever works best for you. Whatever you are drawn to and use consistently. Whatever it is, it’s important to have some sort of rhythm because all the algorithms like consistency.

So if they see that you are a consistent contributor and the algorithm kind of knows what to expect from you, it helps. If you find it easy to make videos and take photos look at Instagram if you find yourself really good at making videos, YouTube, if you are not so visual, maybe look at Twitter.

The important thing is to actually post - so whatever helps you do that, great!

The best advice I would give is to do what you enjoy as that's what will come through.

Hope that helps!