Market a band's release

This guide takes a release, a single, an EP or an album, from the plan to the weeks after. It uses The Paper Tigers as the example. Each step links to the page that goes into it.

You need the band as a project in Ensemblis, in the same org as the brand. Linking asks you to be an owner of both.

  1. Open the brand's Settings.
  2. Under What this brand markets, choose the band in Choose a project and press Link.

The brand now has the Release and Tour plan templates, links to the streaming services, a Release page, the band's shows on its calendar, and ideas drawn from its songs and shows. Brands and kits lists them all.

2. Start from the Release plan

  1. Open Plans and find New plan.
  2. Keep From a template and choose Release.
  3. Set Day zero to release day.
  4. Press Make the plan.

The plan has four phases, Prepare, Announce, Release and After the release, each with milestones and tasks dated from release day. The form shows how far before and after day zero it reaches. Change anything once it is made. Plans goes into it.

The streaming services give an artist no numbers Marketing can read automatically, so the plan's goal counts clicks on your tracked links instead. That is why the next step matters.

On Links, every link the brand shares goes through a short link of its own, and its clicks are counted.

  • Make a link for anything you hand out, such as a pre-save link, with New link: say Where it goes, choose the Source and Medium, and press Make the link. The sources and mediums are the words in the brand's Settings.
  • For the release itself, use the Release page panel. It makes one short address that lists the release on each streaming service, with a tracked link to each.

To make a release page:

  1. If the brand markets more than one band, choose the Band.
  2. Write the Release title.
  3. Paste the release's address on each streaming service, one a line. The page takes Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Bandcamp, Deezer and TIDAL. An address from anywhere else is refused.
  4. Choose a Source and a Medium.
  5. Press Save the release page. The short address appears, ready to copy.

Saving the same title again updates its page. The panel is shown to editors and above, and only once the brand has at least one source and one medium. Links has the rest.

4. Announce and tease

Write posts in Posts as in Plan a week of posts, with the release page's address in the text. A teaser clip a week out, and a post on release day, are the usual shape.

5. Cut clips of the songs

If you play the release live, Marketing can cut a clip of each song for you.

  1. In Ensemblis, start the stream from the show with Go live. Live opens with a title and description worded from the show, the description listing the setlist. The setlist is the run sheet, and each song starting is marked.
  2. Live needs GreenMind's approval for the brand before it can stream. Ask for it early; everything else works while you wait. See Live.
  3. When the stream ends, the Song clips from a show pipeline makes one clip per song and leaves each in Library as a draft. Every brand with a band linked is given this pipeline, switched on.
  4. Review the drafts in Library, approve the ones you want, and use them in posts.

Covers are different. A song with another artist's name is marked as a cover, a warning shows before it goes out on Twitch, which may mute it or take the recording down, and the pipeline skips its clip. The pipeline's Covers setting, Skip them or Clip them too, is yours to change. See Clips and Pipelines.

6. Release day

  • An admin schedules the release-day posts ahead of time.
  • Go live if you planned to.

7. After the release

  • On Links, read the clicks on every link and the release page. That is the plan's goal.
  • Bring in the services' own figures by file. Open Numbers, then Imports, and use Import a file for Spotify for Artists, Apple Music for Artists or Bandcamp sales. Each says where to export the file from. A weekly task reminds whoever imported the last one. See Numbers imports.
  • Close the plan's last milestone, Release looked back on, and note what worked for the next one.