By Alin Crihan
In this fast paced, instant gratification world, it’s become more and more important to communicate your new album or EP to your beloved fans and followers, making (as much as possible) sure they’ll be back for more, as focused and efficiently as possible.
Teasers aren’t a new development of gen Y Z and beyond, they’ve been around since time immemorial but the one thing that’s making it much more convenient for fans to engage and look forward to their favourite artists’ new body of work is the rise of the instant gratification, pre-add and the almighty pre-save.
Most of you will know the technique by a name or another, and in essence, all of them mean the same thing. Kind of. The “kind of” is kind of important since it could make or break how you want to go about this business and what you want to achieve, since there are some crucial choices that need to be considered.
First thing’s first, the naming of the techniques and who they apply to. An essential first step, this will give us a very decided clue about what exactly you need and how we can facilitate. For our purposes, we’ll keep it with two of the biggest names around, Apple and Spotify. Here’s what you need to know about:
Apple (iTunes / Apple Music):
- Instant Gratification tracks or IGTs, are the first form to embody the technique. Coined by Apple on their digital music download platform, iTunes, IGTs are a tool used by artists to allow their fans to immediately download a song off of a new EP or album on it’s pre-order date, if they order the full album; or, be able to buy just that one song, commitment free.
- Unlike iTunes, Apple Music is Apple’s music streaming service. That’s right, no downloads or pre-orders because there’s nothing to buy (except the Apple Music subscription.) So then what do you do? That’s right: you pre-add. Pre-adds are basically the same as buying the download, except you won’t digitally have the file on your drive, but it will be added automatically to your fans’ music library in the Music app across all devices your fans have hooked up to the same iCloud account. Neat trick, right? Same goes for songs you want to let your fans in on, they can listen to those in full before the release, and are usually timed with the IGTs.
Spotify:
- Switching gears a bit, we move on to Spotify and their dish of choice, pre-saves. Pre-saves apply to all sorts of release types, not just EPs and Albums, but Singles and Compilations as well. When considering a pre-save strategy, these should ideally be done ahead of release and promoted heavily on socials, so your fans can PRE SAVE (get it?) the release in their library to be made available and ready to listen to at the stroke of midnight on release day. Of course, this can work very nicely with upfront single extracts, as well as full projects. The cool thing here is, your plays won’t get lost when the single is eventually replaced with the full release, as Spotify’s AI recognises your song across as many releases it may be featured on, and it makes the link so that wherever a stream happens, it gets centralised to a single source.
Now that we have the technical jargon out of the way, let’s get real and see what and when should you do either/or? Well, that’s the tricky part and requires a fair amount of seeing into the future, so to speak. We can facilitate a great variety of strategies as long as they are consistent and serve the material in the best possible way. If you’re into either of the above techniques, you have to be committed all the way in supporting and blasting socials as much as possible, otherwise it doesn’t really make any sense to put effort in it if you’re not in the game 115%, does it? We’re always ready to help you out with the best course of action and strategy for your wonderful releases, all you gotta do is reach out and talk to us about it.
