Pitching for New Release Site Placement

We stay in regular contact with the digital services, pitching your releases for placement and features. Here are some key things you can do to help us get your releases featured:

Our pitches go out three weeks ahead of the release date so update this information as early as possible and keep us in the loop for notable updates.

For example, iTunes, offer digital pre-orders, and they take these pre-orders into consideration when deciding which releases to feature. Driving your audience to this destination prior to release can help you secure coverage on the release date.

Once your release is out, It’s also very important to direct your audience towards those stores which made the effort to feature your release to encourage support on future titles.

Speak to your label manager ahead of submitting the release to arrange an iTunes “Instant Gratification” track which can be downloaded instantly with the pre-order at no extra charge to the customer.

For instance, rather than duplicating your physical release, using the physical label artwork, consider creating digital specific release with, perhaps, an additional track and square artwork. Features on digital stores are typically square or rectangular, so circular artwork doesn’t encourage site programmers to create ‘bricks’.

Make sure your artist pages have been registered through Spotify for Artists. This gives the page a fancy blue tick, provides access to analytics data and allows bio and images to be updated. Tour dates can also be displayed using listings from Songkick. Artists are also able to sign up with iTunes Artist Connect to create and update their artist pages across Apple’s music services.

Having a good PR strategy in place should be standard practise, however it should be known that some services look externally as well as their own internal data for placement consideration so having features in online music magazines & blogs contributes towards placement consideration.

As part of their consideration algorithm curation, Spotify looks at external websites to ‘track metadata, news articles, blogs, and other text around the internet’ and ‘what adjectives and language is frequently used about those songs, and which other artists and songs are also discussed alongside them’.

Some stores use internal data points to measure what they consider an appealling track. Seeing activity such as linking, adding to libraries & dropping in playlists etc. are all part of an engaging and appealing release.