How to effectively release on Spotify (and everywhere else)

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You have your music mixed and mastered, it sounds amazing and you are ready to release it on Spotify (and all other streaming services).

Submitting your release

The most important thing to keep in mind is to plan things ahead of time. It may take up to 7 days for your songs tho show up on all services, and that’s assuming everything goes smoothly. The further out you schedule the release date, the better and I will go into the details shortly. For now, this is how you can get started:

Open up an account on DistroKid. Here’s a discount link.
I suggesting signing up for ‘Musician Plus’ plan. It will let you release an unlimited number of tracks for a flat rate and schedule releases.
If you schedule a release in the future, DistroKid will give you a ‘Pre-Save’ link. Save it and we’ll talk about that in a bit!
Register on artists.spotify.com

A word about the artwork

It’s worth mentioning that your artwork can delay your release if it does not meet the technical specifications. It’s nothing crazy and will just ensure that your releases will look great. Here are the official artwork guidelines.

In addition, when releasing singles, you will need different artwork for each release, so don’t risk uploading the final album artwork for a single, or you will find you won’t be able to use it for the actual album. For instance, an easy way to alter the artwork for a single is changing the color scheme, or even just adding the song title in a different color for each single on top of the art.

Album artwork: single vs album — Vivifyd’s single ‘Walk Away‘ artwork on the left vs ‘Beliefs & Insanity‘ album release on the right

How to get on official Spotify playlists?

You can let Spotify editors know that you would like your song to be featured on a ‘New Music’ playlist. If that happens, you get thousands of new listeners out of the gate. It’s free but there are a few caveats:

You can only suggest one release at a time.
You can only suggest one song per release.
The more time between submission and release, the better (minimum 7 days).

Therefore, to maximize your chances your best bet is to release singles every two weeks or so and suggest every song. In the end, you can bundle everything into an album and release again (ideally with a bonus track to make it special). Here’s an example timeline:

Schedule song 1 for release at least 7 days in advance.
Submit the song to editors via artists.spotify.com.
Schedule song 2 for release at least 7 days after song 1.
Once song 1 is released, immediately suggest song 2 to Spotify editors.
Repeat for all songs.

What’s a ‘Pre-save’?

It’s a web page from DistroKid that will let your fans get notified when your song releases. The more pre-saves you have, the higher your chances of getting noticed. A nice added bonus is that any fan that pre-saves, will also get notified of all your future releases as well.

Once your release reaches the release date, the ‘pre-save’ link is still useful and transforms into a page that has links to all major streaming services.

Spotify pre-save before and after release — Before release ‘pre-save’ on the left and after release on the right.

After releasing singles, how can I make sure that the album version will retain the play count?

DistroKid should usually do that for you, as long as you upload the exact same file. However, if you want to be absolutely sure, note down the ISRC number for each single that you released. This is a unique identifier for your song. When uploading the same song as part of the album, make sure to manually specify ISRC in DistroKid and paste the matching ISRC from the single version.

I’m done. Now what?

It’s time to promote! Here’s a simple guide to promoting your music online.

Instagram for bands

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Using Instagram to promote your band can be a very effective way to help people discover your music. While using Facebook to promote your band is the number way to take care of your band’s online presence, Instagram has a secret weapon that will help you to reach a lot of new people – hashtags.

Instagram focuses on posting images and short videos and requires a bit of a different strategy than Facebook.

What to post

The basic ideas of what kind of content to post still apply, so if you need a refresher, check here. One difference with Instagram is that it focuses more on spontaneous content. Experiment what works best but it’s worth trying posting more of the bands’ day-to-day activities and even some non-music related content that might be interesting to your audience.

Keep in mind that Instagram does not let you post clickable links, simply because they don’t want you to leave Instagram.

It’s also worth mentioning that Instagram stories are great for sharing more spontaneous content since it gets erased after 24h unless you save it. One great idea is sharing your songs directly from Spotify into an Instagram story. Just remember to put some animated arrows in the upper-left corner to make sure people see that there’s a link to Spotify they can click.

Tagging

Just like on Facebook, it helps to tag the right people. If you are posting about a venue, music gear you are using, another band who was awesome to play with, tag them by typing the ‘@’ character, then the account name.

How to get more followers

Follow!

The easiest way to get more relevant followers might be easier than you think but does require some research. First, identify artists that play music similar to you, then find their Instagram account, look at the list of their followers and start following these people from your band account.

Some of them will be curious and will check your Instagram account, and if they like what they see (or even better – hear!), there is a good chance they will follow you back. If they are not interested, they will simple ignore it and move on with their lives.

It goes without saying, you should have some good content on your account before doing that, so people have a reason to follow you. Short video clips with your music are a great way to make a good first impression.

Hashtags

What are they?

A ‘Hashtag’ is the text that starts with a ‘#’ and you can often see that in social media posts. They are a way of tagging your content to appear under the appropriate topic. Once you click on a hashtag, you will see the content from all other Instagram users that used the same hashtag.

Example hashtags from Gürschach

The power of hashtags

With Facebook, there are two basic ways people will see your posts:

Somebody who ‘Likes’ your page will see it in their feed
A person who ‘Likes’, comments or shares your post, will make it visible to their friends

That’s great but you can really see how your reach is limited. With Instagram, you can add special text to your post that will help your content to be discovered organically. This comes at absolutely no cost and if done right, will get you a lot of new followers.

Originally you had to search or click on a hashtag to see related posts, however, later on Instagram allowed its users to follow hashtags, giving people who use them even more exposure.

How to choose your hashtags

It’s important to choose relevant keywords, as spamming will actually hurt your post.

Start with your own hashtag. Is your band called ‘Happy Hippie Rage’? Get #HappyHippieRage hashtag going, so other people can post their photos with that tag and your fans can see it.
What is relevant to your post?
To help you choose a good hashtag, you can use sites like Websta or simply type keywords into Instagram’s search bar by starting with # and you will see matching hashtags and their popularity.
Use local tags associated with your local scene: #BayAreaMetal #BayAreaMusic
Jump on some high-traffic hashtags: #MusicMonday #MusicMondayVideos #TBT (or #ThrowbackThursday) #HumpDay #MetalMusic #FridayNight #SaturdayNight #SS (or #SelfieSunday)
A lot of people view the popular hashtags but as a result, they also get so much content that your post will move down quite quickly. Because of that, it is recommended you use a mix of 3 to 5 super popular hashtags and 6 to 3 of less popular one.
Is your post about an upcoming show? Tag other bands you play with that night and use their hashtags for some great cross-promotion.
If you have a decent number of followers, tag gear manufacturers whose products you like and use. This might be a good starting point to discuss an endorsement.
Don’t spam with irrelevant tags. You don’t want to annoy people with your band

Putting it all together

This is a great post from Hellheart where a lot of things come together:

Funny image
Anybody can relate to it, and join in with comments
Hashtags
Tagged the drummer, so people can follow him as well

Action plan for you

Find relevant fans, and follow them.
Use good hashtags in your next post.
Tag people or brands when you mention them.

Finally, one more tip. It might be tempting to post to use Instagram to post to Facebook as well, but it’s not a good strategy. If you tagged anyone, it will not work and the using Instagram hashtags in Facebook posts can actually hurt your exposure.

What other strategies have you found useful when promoting your band on Instagram?

Facebook for bands

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How do you use Facebook for bands? Let’s start with something you might not have expected…

You are NOT building a promo page to sell stuff

Instead, you are building a community of like-minded people. You want to attract people who listen to your style of music and enjoy the culture around it. Don’t try to appeal to everyone and instead cater specifically to your ideal audience and the fans that respond to that will be your most valued asset.

And please, don’t do the ‘Check out my band’ driveby posts. Nobody will be impressed. Here’s an example:

Why would I be interested in clicking on this?

This post would be much more interesting if it included some information about the music that would intrigue the viewer, for example ‘Love psychedelic hot-dog inspired folk tunes? Listen to our new song from our upcoming album’. Even better, add a Spotify link to your post so that I don’t even have to leave FB to listen, just press play right in the post.

Posting guidelines

Post consistently. You can schedule your posts in advance directly from Facebook, or across different social media platforms with a free web app www.hootsuite.com
Think of what theme does your music present. Play Celtic metal? Post LOTR, castles, weapons, etc.
Pretend like you are talking to one person when building your sentences.
Don’t ask people explicitly to share and like. It will work against you.
Track which posts get the most shares and comments, repost them again in the future for new people that liked your page since.
There is a huge metal audience in Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. Learn how to post in multiple languages here.
Videos will get you best reaction. Images are ok and text-only posts are something you should try to avoid.

What to post

Post viral videos that you like (could be a wine repurposed barrel table). Check Buzfeed or metal memes. If you can download the video and post, that’s great. If no, sharing is ok too.
A story about a show, or rehearsal.
Images that go with your theme (‘choose your weapon’, ‘I would like to retire here’, etc.).
Use open-ended questions (not a ‘yes/no’) to get a conversation going. It could be feedback on merch, asking for help to choose a design, etc.
Take a photo of your fans during a gig and tag them.

Here’s an example of a post that works. It uses images that is funny, specific to the genre, and it knows its audience well.

Tagging

This is an important aspect of Facebook that many people do not utilize well. It will help to promote you and your fellow bands.

Whether it’s a personal, or band post, always tag well. Instead of writing ‘We had a great night with my band, Apicura’, type ‘@’ first, then start typing the band name. This will create a link, so it’s easy for people to see your band page.
Tag other bands you played with, venues, specific people you want to mention.
Do not overdo it, as it can be overwhelming for some people to keep getting notifications.
If you are posting about a specific piece of gear, tag the company. They might just share your post and give you free exposure. Just make sure only their product is visible in the photo/post.

Interacting

Comments and shares are your most valuable Facebook currency

Get on the same page with your band members and have everyone share posts from your band page without being sarcastic about it. If you are not fully committed to your music, why are you doing it in the first place?
‘Like’ and comment back on people’s comments. It will make them feel special.
Delete negative comments. You don’t need assholes hanging around your awesome community.
When you have a popular post, check the likes on it and invite these people to like your page.

Page setup

Set your FB page template to ‘shopping’ and add your albums as for sale items. This will show a ‘shop’ tab on the left that can link to Bandcamp and will also let you add little ‘buy’ icons underneath posts.
Set topics to similar musical genres. These are ‘tags’ that will help people discover your page based on the style. Use autocomplete to set things like ‘Melodic Death Metal’, ‘Orcs and Trolls’, etc.
If you have Bandcamp or website, put the link in ‘About’/’CONTACT INFO’ section of your page, so people can easily listen to your song.

Facebook and hashtags

Hashtags on Facebook are very different than onInstagram. Here, they are not widely used and while they can help you get your content to new people, they can also hurt you. As shown in this article, using more than one hashtag on Facebook actually hurts your reach. Facebook does that to prevent spamming and people seeing irrelevant topic under hashtags.

A word about ads

What do you when you already have great content but somehow still don’t reach as many people as you would like?

‘Ads’ might seem like a dirty word and often this business stuff is the last thing a creative person wants to deal with.

However, ads are a super important part of getting noticed. After all, how can people know how cool your music is if they never had a chance to hear about you?

Ads can greatly speed up your growth but you have to be very careful about how you set them up. This deserves a separate article but the bottom line is that you want to be very specific about who will see the ad. If you just advertise to everyone on Facebook, it might be detrimental to your reach.

The good thing is that it’s not as difficult as it might seem in the beginning and after having run a few successful FB campaigns, I can tell you it’s not very expensive either. If you don’t know where to get started, ask your friends, check YouTube for tutorials but whatever you do, don’t just ‘boost’ a post and walk away without setting up any campaign details.

Action Items for you

Think what kind of community you can build around your band. What is a theme that will bring a lot of people together?
Prepare a library of funny/viral videos and photos that match your theme and schedule the posts in advance
Practice tagging

I hope these tips helped you get some inspiration for your band page. What strategies have you found working well for you?

Facebook posts in multiple languages

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English may be one of the most popular languages in the world but not everyone understands it or feels comfortable with it. While your metal fans in Sweden and Norway will not have a problem understanding your posts, there’s a huge metal audience in Mexico, Chile, and Brazil.

If you want a better engagement from these countries, try writing your posts in their native languages.

Luckily, Facebook allows you to post one message in multiple languages. The correct version will show up based on the user’s language settings. This way you can write a single post that will be both readable in English and Spanish. Here’s how to enable that:

In top-right corner of your page, click ‘Settings’ -> ‘General’
Find ‘Post in multiple languages’ and enable it
From now on, when you post, there is an additional option called ‘Write post in another language’

And that’s it!

Well, almost. You might have noticed that Facebook automatically translates your post but keep in mind that not only the translation might not work well, Spanish in Mexico and Chile is different than in Spain, just as Portuguese in Brazil slightly differs from the one in Portugal.

If you don’t have a native speaking friend to review your messages, you can always find somebody on Fiverr.com.

How to promote your music online

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To get noticed in the digital age, it’s not enough to have great music. It’s essential that you know how to promote music online and make sure you stand out with something unique.

YouTube

YouTube is currently the biggest video service on the internet, and one of the best ways to promote music online. Uploading your music with a static photo is a good start it will not be enough to get you any views. You need something more to grab and hold the viewer’s attention.

If you do not have a budget for a fancy video, a lyric video is a great way to show your music on YouTube. You can easily put one together in the most basic video editing software like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.

If you are looking for something more flashy, you can hire a freelancer instead. A quick search for ‘lyric video’ on Fiverr shows over 300 lyric video creators, with many prices well below $60.

Facebook Groups

It goes without saying that your band needs a Facebook page. It’s the best way to show new content, promote events and connect with your fans. I assume you have one, so instead, I will focus on Facebook Groups.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we had internet forums. These days a lot of people have migrated to Facebook Groups for talking about all sorts of topics. It’s worth finding a few groups specific to your music genre. For example, if you are an Italian folk band, find groups that are dedicated to Italian folk music; if you play indie rock, search for groups focusing on indie rock music.

Just to give you an idea about the results, I’ll share a story about my first YouTube video – a tutorial about ‘PRS guitars winged tipped tuners‘. I found multiple Facebook groups focused on PRS guitars and posted the link. The posts reached more 3500 people, out of which about 10% actually clicked on it and saw the video. That’s not too bad for a first time, but I’m sure I would have gotten a higher watch conversion with a little tweaking of the wording I used in my posts.

It’s crucial that you engage your audience and instead of pasting a link and saying ‘check this out’. Try asking for feedback or a critique, because engagement leads to higher view counts. For example, if you post your song in the ‘singer/songwriter’ group, try asking for opinions about the chord progression. The more active the discussion in your post, the more people will see your work, so remember to post engaging content!

Collaboration

Once again, YouTube is worth mentioning. This time as a collaboration platform. You probably have seen videos of your favorite content creators featuring a guest in one of their videos. In most cases, this is well planned and makes perfect sense from a business perspective.

While every YouTube channel is unique, there are always common elements that overlap. Think of all the guitar related channels, where you see Fluff with Jared Dines battling Rabea Massad in ‘Riff Wars’, or Rob Scallon featuring Leo from Frog Leap Studios.

These channels above cater to people who are interested in guitar and share a potential common audience. By collaborating on a video, both creators can be exposed to a new audience which is already interested in videos about guitar. Just make sure it’s not cheesy or forced.

High profile YouTubers are usually inside of partner networks (often with a membership fee), so unless you have something unique to offer, it won’t be easy to break into that group. Instead, find somebody who not only has common content but also a similar number of subscribers.

A very different approach is reaching out to an unrelated channel – one about makeup, news, a vlog, or any other topic. These often are in need of royalty free, original music.

Streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.)

Want to hear your music on Spotify? It’s never been easier to release your own music.

Services like Distrokid make it very straightforward to upload your music to multiple streaming services at once. They charge a low flat fee and you get to keep 100% the profits. They even take care of cover song licensing for you.

Majority of people listen to music through streaming services, so putting your music on Spotify or Apple Music is great for exposure. Additionally, it helps you secure another revenue stream by getting paid for every play or when somebody uses your song in a Youtube video.

That being said, set your expectations right. Streaming does not pay a lot of money until you reach a certain level. However, it’s fantastic for exposure and pretty darn cool to see your music there.

Link your content

So you have a great website for your band (if you don’t, check out band templates from Wix), now what? Your website is not worth much unless people know about it.

Make sure to cover the basics of search engine optimization (read more here). Also keep in mind that the more outside links point to your website, the higher your visibility score.

What does that mean in practical terms? Link all your social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). Make sure they have a link to your website in the ‘about’ section, use links to your website in your Facebook posts, add them in the description of each YouTube video, add ‘YouTube cards’ on your videos that let your viewers click a link and directly go to your site.

Don’t forget to be considerate and help to promote other bands and services as well! When you post photos from your show or mention another band you played a show with, use proper Facebook tags that link back to their Facebook page. For example, instead of writing ‘We will be playing with Wet Oreos tonight!’, write ‘We will be playing with @wetoreos tonight!’. Facebook will automatically convert that into a link. It’s good for you and it’s good for them!

Cover songs

When you are at the start of your musical career, chances are people will not be searching specifically for your songs. There are a number of well-established artists that have started their careers with a great cover song to, later on, promote their own music.

How will this help promote your music online?

First of all, people have a natural bias towards familiar things, so they will be more likely to click on a cover song they know instead of a completely unfamiliar one.

Secondly, if somebody is looking for example for a Beyonce song and you happen to have a great cover song, you have a chance of it showing up as one of the video recommendations. As a result, people are much more likely to click on it. If they like what they hear, you have much higher chance of them checking out other songs you have posted.

Final words

These are just a few simple ideas to get you started. Don’t end there, be creative! There are a ton of different ways to get exposure without spamming or annoying people. If you have some cool strategies that worked for you, share them in the comments below!

Batch normalizing a large number of files (OSX)

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Depending on your workflow, you might want your tracks to come in at a predictable level. For example, when you work with a mix template, normalizing your tracks will help you get a rough mix faster because you can predict the input level of your kick and snare is and have your plugins pre-dialed correctly.

While it’s not perfect and you will still need to do some balancing, normalizing can help you in your mixing workflow.

There are a few paid tools that can help you with this task (for example Sound Grinder) but with a little effort, you can create your own, efficient workflow for this.

[Note: This guide covers only OSX]

Step 1: Get the command line tool that does the normalizing

I used SOX, an open source project that works on Windows and Mac.

Download the file named ‘sox-14.4.2-macosx.zip‘ here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/files/sox/14.4.2/

Step 2: Double click on the archive to extract it

Step 3: Rename the folder

Right click on the ‘sox-14.4.2’ folder, select ‘Rename’ and call it ‘sox’. As a result, it will be easier to update Sox in the future without changing other things

Step 4: Drag the ‘sox’ folder into ‘Applications’ on the left side of your finder

Now you can either download the Automator Script that I prepared here, double click to import and be done with it, or do it manually yourself by following the steps below.

Step 5: Open ‘Automator’

It’s an Apple program located in your ‘Applications’ folder.

Step 5: Select ‘File->New’ and choose ‘Service’

Step 6: Select inputs as ‘audio files’ from Finder

Step 7: Drag in ‘Run Shell Script’ action from Utilities and set ‘Pass input as arguments’

Step 7: Replace the ‘cat’ command with the actual code

#!/bin/bash
normalizationValue="-12"

for f in "$@"
do
 normalizedFolder="$(dirname "$f")/Normalized ${normalizationValue}"
 fileName=$(basename "$f")
 if [ ! -d "${normalizedFolder}" ]; then
 mkdir "${normalizedFolder}"
 fi
 /Applications/sox/sox --norm=${normalizationValue} "$f" "${normalizedFolder}/${fileName}"
done

Note that you can change the normalization from “-12” to whatever you like here.

Your windows should now look like this:

Step 8: Finally, hit save, name the service ‘Normalize’ and enjoy!

PRS winged locking tuners – how to use this darn thing?

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Right side – how the pros do it

The PRS winged locking tuners have an unusual look and have developed a little bit of infamousness, as many guitar players were confused about how to use them properly. They date back to 1985 and have been installed in Paul Reed Smith guitars up to around 2002 so as a result, they ended up in a lot of guitars.

Do not get intimidated by these weird looking things. Learn how to use and enjoy them!

Personally, I have struggled a little with them in the beginning and have found limited resources on how to properly string a guitar with them, so I have decided to create this video. Once you get a hold of it, changing string is actually a breeze and they stay in tune extremely well.

So how do you feel about the PRS winged tuners in your guitar? I hope this video helped shed some light on the topic and make you appreciate them more.