When should an indie artist release music: Break Through
When Should an indie artist release music?
For many indie music artists, the best opportunities are present after December. Releasing your music in early January or February allows for a few different benefits:
Lower levels of competition: As many artists build their release schedule around the later summer months (June/July/August) there is less competition for a January/February release.
Cohesive Yearly Branding Opportunities: More than just symbolic, you can dictate your content strategy for the year starting with dropping your new music in the front half of the year. Remember, when you’re releasing new music, you have the opportunity to use the release as a branding and marketing strategy.
There are certainly benefits to a summer release as well - depending on where you’re at in your release strategy and the overall theme of the music that you’re releasing, there are benefits to releasing music some time during June/July
During the summer months, there is a massive appetite for new music. There are a wealth of great opportunities for music disocovery
According to Vertonic, 78% of survey respondents noted that they are likely to listen to new music when they are outside during the Summer.
How strong is streaming in 2024?
Plainly enough, there is not a bad time to release music. As it stands, the odds are in your favor:
Spotify alone surpassed 574 million monthly active users in 2023 (Vaizle)
On demand audio has increased by over 23% (WeRaveYou)
Approximately 43 million tracks were uploaded to Spotify in 2023, approximately 112K tracks per day (Billboard)
Over 44% of Spotify users access the app every single day (Vaizle)
Spotify Monthly Active Users (By Quarter)
As Spotify is the largest streaming audio platform (by a pretty wide margin - more than 100M monthly active users more than their next competitor), we can pretty easily use them as an analog (no pun intended) for the rest of the streaming audio universe. You can assume two things from the data:
There is plenty of opportunity to be discovered
The streaming audio marketplace is extraordinarily competitive
How do I get new listeners for my music?
First thing’s first, you’re going to want to focus on making your music as high-quality as possible. If there’s one mistake that we always see people make, it’s focusing on all of the wrong things at first. You could have the greatest marketing campaign, choose the perfect release date, call all of your friends and tell your mom to tell your grandma to tell all of her friends, but if you don’t have a song that’s great and well made, then it may just be a song that your grandma’s friend posts on her Facebook page and that’s it… and we don’t want to just be stuck on your grandma’s friends Facebook page forever. But once we’ve got a great song (if you need some help getting there, let’s chat!!), there are certainly some ways to get people to take notice - we’ve got some of the best strategies in our last article for the best ways to market your music as an independent artist.
