I’ve gone on the record in another article that I’m not here to talk about myself, and I promise that remains true, but…I seem to keep coming up. Not because these articles are explicitly about me in any meaningful way – they’re not, I promise. That said, I’ve found it particularly easy to feature myself as a protagonist simply because I’ve recently experienced so many of the topics I’m writing about.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s move on to Today’s Big Question: how often should you, a musician working on gaining momentum, building an audience, and otherwise filling your big head full of steam, be releasing music?
I’ll lead off with the big-picture, uber-unexciting reveal first, and yes, it’s the one you’ve probably already guessed: there’s not really a correct answer to this question. To put a more positive spin on that same reveal: there are a lot of correct answers. As long as you’re releasing music on a semi-regular basis and not going dark for extended periods of time (don’t give the people a chance to forget you exist, because they will!), you’ll be in good shape.
My Experience
Here’s where I come in: since the dark and deeply pandemic-ridden days of 2021, I have released two albums under my nom de plume, The Wirelight. The first of those albums, an eight song album fantastically named Megaturquoise, was preceded by three months of single releases (one single per month), and the second, a nine-songer more literarily named The Perils of Small Mining, was preceded by a grueling twelve months of single releases (five singles spread out a bit more) and assorted social-media-oriented promotional content. In other words, I’ve already conducted a version of this experiment for you.
So, which one worked best? Well, you’re not going to believe this, but it’s tough to say definitively. If success is measured by streaming numbers, then they’ve both been moderately successful. If success is measured by audience engagement…same. In neither case were my dreams of superstardom realized, but, with some caveats that I’ll address below, both release plans did a decent job of generating and maintaining listener interest. Here, I’ll walk you through the reasoning behind my approach to those two releases and then provide a few shiny pearls of wisdom for you to take away as party favors.
The Album Model
In a twist that maybe also explains the somewhat traditional approach, the Megaturquoise release was managed by a PR company that I’ll refer to as “Newsic,” which is a word I just invented that smushes “news” and “music” together. As you might imagine, assuming your lofty aspirations resemble mine, I was pumped to have Newsic on board and certain that here, finally, was my seat on the bullet train to fame. The nitty-gritty details could probably constitute their own article, but in short, Newsic’s strategy for releasing new albums from relatively unknown artists was to bombard the internet with a combination of PR (booster posts from music blogs mostly) and digital marketing (Facebook ads, playlist, etc.) run by a third-party partner for an approximately three-month period, at the end of which period the full album dropped.
It worked fine. The marketing was way more effective than the PR (spoiler alert: music PR companies are struggling to find their footing in this brave new world), and the upshot was my three singles doing pretty decent numbers solely attributable to placements on the partner company’s playlists. During the three-month promo period, I was diligent about posting on social media, talking up each song, releasing acoustic bedroom-style performances, and blogging; once the album dropped, I plugged it more broadly for a little while longer, pushed my fancy new vinyl, and then basically ran out of things to talk about and went dark. To be honest, that darkness brought with it relief; the promotional aspect of the music business doesn’t come easy to me and often feels a bit icky, and if given the choice I’d much rather hole up in my home studio and work on new material.
The Singles Model
When it came time to kick off promo for The Perils of Small Mining, I looked back on what had and hadn’t worked for Megaturquoise, and one of my most important revelations was that, for at least as long as I’d had new songs scheduled for upcoming release, I’d had something to talk about on social media. Put differently: having material inspired more material. For that second album promo cycle, then, I resolved to stretch the damn thing out as long as I could – make it really painful this time – and see if maybe a longer runway might allow for a more successful launch. I picked five songs to release as singles – six, really, if you count the one I’m currently pushing alongside the full album drop – made some artwork for each, took a deep breath, and hit ignition.
I’m nearing that same brick wall of exhaustion I slammed into the first time around, but as I take stock of the last twelve months, I’m inclined to call this extended-promo-cycle, the “slow drip” option, the superior one. I’m not any closer to quitting my day job, of course, but the streaming numbers were good, and I felt more consistently engaged with my musical output on a day-to-day basis. Feeling more engaged generally led to more posting and more live shows – more peripheral, song-adjacent content, in other words – and that rising tide helped to raise all of my musical boats.
The Rationale
Before I got going with this year’s promo extravaganza, I sat down in my squashiest easy chair and gave serious thought to the way albums have historically been released and how they’re released today, and my conclusion, which no one has yet convinced me is wrong, was that out-of-nowhere, sneak-attack album drops only work for the Taylor Swifts and Beyonces among us. It’s only those artists with name recognition that are still capable of releasing an LP of previously unknown songs that a sizable audience will turn out for and listen to cover-to-cover. The rest of us – even those bands you might think of as household names but that exist below the tippy-top of the musical food pyramid – have to fight for our audiences’ attention, and once we have it, we have to fight to keep it.
Releasing music regularly is one way to keep that delicious, delicious attention. And while it’s true that, in my case, the five singles I released were in service of an eventual album drop, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t release a series of songs wholly untethered from an album and never compile them into any sort of more cohesive product. Albums are nice and all, and it feels good to hold the finished record in your hands and say “I accomplished this thing,” but the fact of the matter is ten-song albums aren’t critical – or even relevant, really – to the industry today.
Until you hit the big time – until you’re The National and capable of dropping two massive full-lengths in one calendar year – you’re probably better off releasing songs every few months and providing each of those songs with a concentrated laser beam of attention and marketing push (read: money).
Lavishing each of your songs with the attention they deserve also provides an easy way to stay top of mind with your audience. If you’re always releasing songs, you’re never going dark; if you’re never going dark, your audience won’t have the opportunity to lose track of you. Sure, they may tune out from time to time, and to be honest, oversaturating the internet with material was a matter of deepest concern to me over the course of this last year – like I said, I’m no natural promoter – but I recently came across a quote by Jeff Weiner, the former CEO of LinkedIn, that I found useful in reframing those feelings:
“When you’re tired of saying it, they’re only just starting to hear it.”
It may feel obnoxious to pursue constant self-promotion and make endless demands of your audience’s attention, but chances are you’re barely a blip on the radar.
The more you talk about and market new songs, the bigger your audience will get; to contextualize that sort of growth for Spotify, the more people that listen to and save your songs, the more people will have your future releases show up on their Release Radar playlists (not to mention that continued growth and attention can trigger the almighty algorithm). That’s not to say you can’t also build an audience through an album drop, but you’re giving yourself a lot more chances for incremental, compounding growth if you go one song at a time.
(PSA: before you release anything at all on Spotify, remember to get all of your ducks in a row.)
Do Your Other Homework, Too
As you’re working to release songs at a regular, ongoing cadence, don’t forget your other duties. Play shows, and at those shows, mention your previous and your upcoming song releases. Casually bring up your Instagram handle. Tell ‘em you’re on Spotify. Sell hats! Sell shirts! The more you have going on, the more the various threads of your musical output can work to support each other.
I started this article with the big reveal that its premise, a question, has no right answer. And while that may be true in a sort of cosmic sense, it’s worth pointing out that parts of the answer are more and less true depending on where you land on the “Famous Musician” scale.
If, like me, you’re closer to “Not A Famous Musician,” I’m betting you’ll find more benefit in releasing lots of songs on a regular basis than in hoarding songs until it’s time for that once-in-a-decade triple-album drop. Ari Hest saw the writing on the wall earlier than most; in 2008, as part of a project called 52, he wrote and released a new single every week over the course of a year. Today, he’s a Grammy winner with some nice TV and movie credits to his name.
Now, I’m not saying that Hest’s success is a direct result of his shockingly prolific output, but you know what? I’m not saying it isn’t.
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