Release Visibility

We believe that letting digital services, physical retailers and fans know about your upcoming releases as soon as possible is the best approach to marketing your music.  For this reason our systems widely display your release information as soon as it is added to the portal – in some cases even before all the metadata has been completed and submitted for review by your label manager. It is therefore important to bear in mind that anything data you enter may be publicly visible so should always be accurate and appropriate.

We understand that in some circumstances you may wish to keep a release secret prior to release – or until a particular announcement has been made.  If this is the case you should discuss with your label manager how best to approach this before you add the release on the portal.

Where appropriate, your label manager is able to “hide” a release from our schedules and websites at your request.  However, note that in such cases your release will remain hidden until you instruct us to unhide it.  For as long as the release stays hidden, we are not able to market it to our accounts.  It will not be in included on our release schedule and mailouts or displayed on our business or customer-facing websites.  Although we can not completely guarantee that no release information will be visible on any part of our system, this will help to ensure that no pre-orders, previews or announcements of the release will be made available to the public through any stores or services which receive our release schedule data.  However, unless you instruct us to un-hide the release, physical releases may be made public only in the week preceding release (when it becomes available to order) and this may severely impact your sales.

While a release is marked as hidden it will only be delivered to digital services which will not display the release ahead of the release date.  However, a hidden release may also be delivered with a pre-order date (by default we set this to 4 weeks ahead of release).  In this case your release will be made available as a pre-order on iTunes, Amazon and other supported services but without audio previews enabled before the general release date.  You can ask your label manager to set a custom pre-order date (or disable the pre-order) if you would prefer.

A hidden release will be withheld from any digital services which routinely display pre-release products until such time as the pre-order date has passed.  Bear in mind that this means your release may not appear on some services until a few days after the general unless it is un-hidden at least 7 days ahead of the release date.