Long Live the Music Album
It’s true that we live in a hit driven world - with singles dominating the Hot 100. But if individual track releases aren’t building towards an event in an artist’s career - like an album release or tour announce - the artist’s popularity fizzles out as quickly as the track falls off the charts.
With the amount of noise in the industry today, artists must build excitement around significant events. At Single, we believe that the album cycle and narrative surrounding a release are more important than ever. We’ve built a whole suite of tools that can be used together to maximize the impact of an album release.
Today we’ll highlight one small part of our toolbox: instant grats and cascading releases. These are tracks off of an album that are delivered in the days and weeks leading up to an album release. As with many of Single’s services, delivery of these tracks is completely automated. All you have to do is “set and forget”.
But before you do…
Music is delivered to fans via an emailed download link. As tracks are released leading up to an album street date, fans receive an email for each track - which presents a valuable marketing opportunity. Using our new promotional tool, BoostLinks, you can embed a link to pre-save your album within the delivery email of your grat tracks. Take a look at the example below:
Marketing, Not Overwhelming
There’s no doubt that people already receive more promotional material than they can process. As an artist looking to advance your career, the last thing you want is to sound pushy or not genuine in your marketing efforts. At the end of the day, your success depends on fans connecting with you and your music, so bombarding them with promotional material can run counter to your main goal.
It is unlikely that fans will ignore an email that contains music for them to download. And because they already purchased your music or bundle, they’re clearly interested in supporting you. We’ll break down a successful case study below - but it’s worth mentioning here that not only did fans follow through and pre-save the album, they even shared screenshots of their successful pre-save and urged other fans to follow suit.
Results so far
Through Single’s BoostLink dashboard, you are able to measure how effective your campaigns are in real time. You can see how many people clicked to open the email, along with the clickthrough rate for each of your smart-links.
The example email above is from a pre-save campaign for Hoodie Allen’s new album Whatever USA, which was released last week.
By the end of the campaign, of those who pre-ordered Hoodies new album, 33% clicked through the email and successfully pre-saved the album. Considering the click rate for emails in “entertainment and events” average 2.19%, Hoodie’s engagement was exceptional.
As we talked about extensively in our BoostLink intro blog, pre-saves are important - both for generating streams upon album release AND getting music placed on algorithmically generated playlists. As streaming continues to dominate the landscape, we can only assume that fans interacting with your music through these platforms will continue to rise in importance.
Adding to your Fan Data
One of the main reasons we built a promotional tool is to connect artists' fragmented web presence. Each platform that an artist exists on has separate content and user base. If artists could compare information across platform, they could learn a ton about their audience.
Because even just the data off of pre-sale engagement is valuable. By adding this data point, an artist can see who purchased what bundle and completed a pre-save. Exporting your customer data from Shopify gives you a list of your top fans. But to be able to break that down further with how exactly they engaged with your new album gives you insights for any future releases.
Boost On
We’ll take a deeper dive into how exactly BoostLinks work to connect an artist’s channels in our blog next week. We wanted to start with a straightforward and non-intrusive way to increase the visibility of your pre-save links - through delivery emails that fans are already receiving.
For step-by-step instructions on how to attach a pre-save campaign to pre-orders, check out our dedicated support article.
If you haven’t yet downloaded Single, you can find us in the Shopify App Store. When you’re ready to take the next step, our support team can help build your first BoostLink campaign, put together a music + merch pre-sale and make sure you’re set up to report to the official charts. Reach out any time!
