In this article, you’ll learn some insider information on how to succeed on Spotify from both personal experiences from me as well as from someone actually working at Spotify.
New artists with small followings should release new music every 1 to 2 months with at least 6 – 8 releases per year. It’s best to release music as singles instead of albums, and artists should try not to have more than 12 releases in a year so they have 1 – 2 months to promote each release.
The key is to try to release as much music as you can while also making sure each song is high quality and you are taking the time to promote each release properly.
The more content you have, the more opportunities there are for listeners to discover your music – but only if the songs you are releasing are great and are worth discovering.
It can be a bit tricky to find that balance so let’s dive into some key tips on how to accomplish that in this article. 🙂
1. Aim For 6 – 12 Releases Per Year
When it comes to new projects and artists that don’t have a big following yet, the algorithm favors constant releases.
Although it is best to aim for 1 release per month to maximize the Spotify Release Radar playlist, you may find every month is too much to produce in high quality and promote properly.
If this is the case for you, then aim for 6 – 8 releases per year to start.
2. Release Singles Instead of Albums
Simply put: releasing albums doesn’t make sense nowadays.
The only reason to release an album as an artist is if you want to have a collective of songs that reflect a certain point in your life and share this with your fans.
Instead, consider releasing 4 – 6 of the songs as singles throughout the entire year while trying to sell the full album as a pre-order to superfans along the way.
After your run of singles, you can release the entire album and preserve all the previous streams your singles got by reusing each song’s ISRC code when setting it up for distribution.
3. Balance Quantity With Quality
While it’s true that releasing music constantly can help you gain more listeners, it’s equally important to make sure that the music you release is of high quality.
If you release mediocre songs that listeners aren’t streaming on repeat, adding to their own playlists, and saving to their libraries…
These negative engagement signals could actually hurt your artist profile in the Spotify algorithm resulting in your music being pushed out less by Spotify.
4. Have Enough Time To Promote
When figuring out how often you should release music, it’s important that you bake in enough time to properly promote each release.
To get the most out of any release on Spotify you want to put in some effort to increase the number of streams, saves, and playlist adds that you get from that song in the first 28 days.
The first 28 days are the most important because this is when the Release Radar algorithm can be triggered to get you 10,000s of additional streams for free from Spotify.
In my experience, running Facebook Ads for Spotify streams has been the most effective because it gets the highest amount and quality of listener engagement and doesn’t take up a lot of time so I can focus on getting more music out the door.
5. Collaborations Can Expand Your Reach
A great way to have your music reach more ears is by collaborating with other artists for your releases so that you can potentially finish songs faster, divide up the work, and share each other’s fanbases.
When going with this approach, it’s important to remember that you may be able to finish songs faster but there may be a bit more time in the planning and co-ordinating of the release.
You both may have other releases in your schedules and time-issues to get around which can result in your collaborations being released months later from when you originally completed the song.
