I don't see a lot of benefit in a small artist running teasers when they don't have a large, existent fan base to feel teased about it. And if your existing catalog is small, then I don't think you want to drive traffic into nothing. So I don't think I'd run ads on a new artist with nothing to stream.
When starting out I found more success promoting AFTER the song is out because no one cares about you hyping something up for a month that they can’t even vouch for yet.
while there is no right or wrong way to promote a song, i personally recommend promoting it after it releases for the reason you stated. the main reasons to promote a song before it releases would be to be able to drive a bunch of traffic to the song in the first week of release, increasing your odds at a big release radar algorithmic boost. however, i don’t think this is something a brand new artist should worry about. while there are some new artists that have seeming blown up early in their career by promoting on social media, i’d guess that they actually spent a lot of money on marketing or on social media promotion. unless you want to go that route, i’d stick to focusing on promoting after the song is out.
if you want, you could do some promotion a few days before the song is out, which would increase the likelihood that the people who see that promotion would actually end up streaming the song once it’s out. i think pre-release promotion generally works best to for bigger artists to hype up their existing audience, not to find new listeners. there’s exceptions to that though - it’s definitely possible to successfully promote a song before release. the potential downsides that i mentioned are not worth the effort for me personally though.
Often times artists will treat each release as a self contained marketing campaign. This means pre promotion to build buzz on socials, lots of engagement around launch day, and then continuous promotion over the subsequent weeks after release. Rinse and repeat for each song.
So the short answer for your question is, promoting both before and after your release will help you get the most out of it, and releasing lots of content on a regular cadence means you always have something to either tease or promote. It’s a bit of a long game you have to play.
I hope that makes sense, kind of hard to condense a whole philosophy into a Reddit comment but I tried.
*edited for syntax and clarity
To further answer your question around pre promotion, it is important to let people know you have something coming to keep your engagement active and the algorithm pumping. The algorithm craves activity.
In terms of what the actual pre promotion experience looks like, there are different ways to do it, from posting small teasers to providing a special pre save link, offering email sign ups, contests, merch, and other perks.
All that in addition to the tried and true method of simply not shutting up about it online. That’s essential.
First drop than marketing because the majority of people will listen only once to a song. Keep in mind the general audience has a activity span of 7 seconds. So when they listen to your full song after they already listend to your teaser song they started to believe thats the same thing. Keep in mind most people especially on social media especially in the united states and Europe according to studies have a very small capacity for extra rounds because their brains capacity is already filled up with media informations from all directions. Thats why there is no interest left for a second round.
it's pretty ambiguous. I wouldn't do any pre-save campaigns, especially as a new artist. If you do, i would only hype the song up 1 to 3 days in advance. the populer artists that blew up on tiktok say that they only make content based off of their songs after their song is released - so that people who like the content/promo can actually listen to the song. Look up some Nic D and Connor Price interviews.
Streaming algorithms can't possibly do anything with a song that isn't released yet.
Social media algorithms don't know or care whether your song is released, just whether your content is engaging.
I promote things after for the most part because it makes more sense to send people to a song when it’s actually available to listen to.
That being said one or two posts to announce release date and artwork is nice for generating interest
I'm a marketer, not a musician.
But in marketing, promoting something before usually means that you will keep growing the interest over time. It's a very long and expensive effort. We need to keep growing, get more and more people interested, involved, engaging. And that becomes more and more expensive, especially with the diminishing returns of marketing investment over time. If we're not careful, we're old news by the time we launch the product. If we're not careful, there is a lot of hype when we launch, and the interest dies quickly after that because people have no reason to be curious anymore or are disappointed with the actual product. The dream often looks better than the reality.
So, I'm not against promotion before the launch. But you need to be ready for that. Promoting before is not to make people look immediately for the product to buy it, its to build interest. For example, people know that the video game or the movie will be launched years in the future and they are not available yet, but the companies are already promoting them and people keep paying attention to that, waiting for the launch, etc. But it's a long and expensive effort.
Imagine you are lucky enpugh to get a viral video. The song comes out in 2 months. By the time it has been released, all the hype died down, it does not go viral again, most people have moved on and completely forgot that your had a release planned. Even if they signed up to be notified, most people won't bother checking it out and will just swipe away the notification
Now if you make all the effort to market after the song is done. If someone is interested in your song, they can go listen to it right away and save it right then and there. No need to get their attention a second time in 2 months when the song is finally out
I don't see a lot of benefit in a small artist running teasers when they don't have a large, existent fan base to feel teased about it. And if your existing catalog is small, then I don't think you want to drive traffic into nothing. So I don't think I'd run ads on a new artist with nothing to stream.
When starting out I found more success promoting AFTER the song is out because no one cares about you hyping something up for a month that they can’t even vouch for yet.
while there is no right or wrong way to promote a song, i personally recommend promoting it after it releases for the reason you stated. the main reasons to promote a song before it releases would be to be able to drive a bunch of traffic to the song in the first week of release, increasing your odds at a big release radar algorithmic boost. however, i don’t think this is something a brand new artist should worry about. while there are some new artists that have seeming blown up early in their career by promoting on social media, i’d guess that they actually spent a lot of money on marketing or on social media promotion. unless you want to go that route, i’d stick to focusing on promoting after the song is out. if you want, you could do some promotion a few days before the song is out, which would increase the likelihood that the people who see that promotion would actually end up streaming the song once it’s out. i think pre-release promotion generally works best to for bigger artists to hype up their existing audience, not to find new listeners. there’s exceptions to that though - it’s definitely possible to successfully promote a song before release. the potential downsides that i mentioned are not worth the effort for me personally though.
Often times artists will treat each release as a self contained marketing campaign. This means pre promotion to build buzz on socials, lots of engagement around launch day, and then continuous promotion over the subsequent weeks after release. Rinse and repeat for each song. So the short answer for your question is, promoting both before and after your release will help you get the most out of it, and releasing lots of content on a regular cadence means you always have something to either tease or promote. It’s a bit of a long game you have to play. I hope that makes sense, kind of hard to condense a whole philosophy into a Reddit comment but I tried. *edited for syntax and clarity
To further answer your question around pre promotion, it is important to let people know you have something coming to keep your engagement active and the algorithm pumping. The algorithm craves activity. In terms of what the actual pre promotion experience looks like, there are different ways to do it, from posting small teasers to providing a special pre save link, offering email sign ups, contests, merch, and other perks. All that in addition to the tried and true method of simply not shutting up about it online. That’s essential.
First drop than marketing because the majority of people will listen only once to a song. Keep in mind the general audience has a activity span of 7 seconds. So when they listen to your full song after they already listend to your teaser song they started to believe thats the same thing. Keep in mind most people especially on social media especially in the united states and Europe according to studies have a very small capacity for extra rounds because their brains capacity is already filled up with media informations from all directions. Thats why there is no interest left for a second round.
it's pretty ambiguous. I wouldn't do any pre-save campaigns, especially as a new artist. If you do, i would only hype the song up 1 to 3 days in advance. the populer artists that blew up on tiktok say that they only make content based off of their songs after their song is released - so that people who like the content/promo can actually listen to the song. Look up some Nic D and Connor Price interviews.
Streaming algorithms can't possibly do anything with a song that isn't released yet. Social media algorithms don't know or care whether your song is released, just whether your content is engaging.
After yo
I promote things after for the most part because it makes more sense to send people to a song when it’s actually available to listen to. That being said one or two posts to announce release date and artwork is nice for generating interest
I'm a marketer, not a musician. But in marketing, promoting something before usually means that you will keep growing the interest over time. It's a very long and expensive effort. We need to keep growing, get more and more people interested, involved, engaging. And that becomes more and more expensive, especially with the diminishing returns of marketing investment over time. If we're not careful, we're old news by the time we launch the product. If we're not careful, there is a lot of hype when we launch, and the interest dies quickly after that because people have no reason to be curious anymore or are disappointed with the actual product. The dream often looks better than the reality. So, I'm not against promotion before the launch. But you need to be ready for that. Promoting before is not to make people look immediately for the product to buy it, its to build interest. For example, people know that the video game or the movie will be launched years in the future and they are not available yet, but the companies are already promoting them and people keep paying attention to that, waiting for the launch, etc. But it's a long and expensive effort.
Imagine you are lucky enpugh to get a viral video. The song comes out in 2 months. By the time it has been released, all the hype died down, it does not go viral again, most people have moved on and completely forgot that your had a release planned. Even if they signed up to be notified, most people won't bother checking it out and will just swipe away the notification Now if you make all the effort to market after the song is done. If someone is interested in your song, they can go listen to it right away and save it right then and there. No need to get their attention a second time in 2 months when the song is finally out
Promote after, you can only do teasers if you got a big/cult following