Instant Grat, Pre-Stream & Pre-orders

Instant Gratification refers to a feature offered by some digital music services which allows selected tracks from an EP or album bundle to be made available prior to the scheduled release date.

When a customer pre-orders the bundle on a download store such as iTunes, they receive (and pay for) the I.G. tracks instantly. Once the bundle is released, the customer is reminded to pay the difference in price to download the remaining tracks.

Instant-grat incentivises customers to pre-order bundles instead of cherry-picking individual tracks – though it’s important to note that the tracks can still be purchased individually. The customer is not obliged to pre-order the entire bundle in order to access the I.G. tracks – but they are more likely to do so than if presented with the tracks as standalone singles.

I.G. can be enabled for any bundle that is available for pre-order. A maximum of 50% of the bundle’s tracks can be selected for I.G. though usually only one or two tracks are offered.

Tracks which are available for instant-grat as part of a bundle may also be enabled for pre-stream. This allows the selected I.G. tracks to be streamed from the album before the release date. This is particularly relevant for Apple Music where this is required to enables their native Pre-Add feature (which allows users to add the album to their library ahead of the release date).

It is important to note that Spotify does not natively support Pre-Stream or Pre-Add. To make tracks from an upcoming bundle available on Spotify requires additional 1-track releases to be created for this purpose – and the Kudos Spotify Pre-Save tool can be used to offers fans a way to add releases to their personal library ahead of the release date.