About albums and singles

Release order of albums and accompanying singles

During the era of physical music distribution, often one or more singles were released and promoted first, the album release following at a later date. This release order can also be useful in the present day and age, where digital distribution, and especially streaming, plays the leading role.
When practically the only digital distribution model consisted of download platforms, such as iTunes, the trend to only release an album slowly gained more traction. Now that the streaming platforms have gained the upper hand and the income largely consists of streaming royalties, we note an even more frequent decision to only release an album. After all, it contains all the tracks, so why release multiple instances of the same material?

However, nowadays it can still be useful to release a number of singles first:

The listener hardly searches by album (only 10% of the streams come from a search for an album). Most of the streams, and thus income, come from playlists (“playlists”). However, often only one track of an album is placed on a playlist.
You can only pitch one track from an album, bring it to the attention of curators, while by first releasing a number of singles, you can bring several tracks to the attention of the curators.
It is useful to release a single first so that you can edit your artist profile and prepare it for the album release.
It is also no problem to release multiple singles followed by an album in the sense of duplicate tracks. The streaming service links statistics of the single releases to the same tracks on the final album.

If you follow this method, it is not necessary to take a single offline after an album release, but if you want to, for whatever reason, wait at least until 7 days after the album’s release before taking down the single, so that the track’s playlist placements and statistics are preserved (these will be linked to the same track on the album within those 7 days).

NOTE: If you release an album containing tracks by four or more different artists (“various artists”), it is not possible for us to pitch tracks from this album for playlist placement. This can only take place by/from the profile of the artist involved.

Some additional tips:

It is important to know that we can only pitch one track per artist at a time. Only after the release date of the single containing this track, is it possible to pitch the next track of the next release.
To be eligible for playlist placement, a pitch must be made at least a week before the release date.
For the same reason, a release will only be visible in the Release Radar for our followers if it has been delivered with a release date of at least one week in the future. Otherwise, it will not be visible in the Release Radar until a week after the release date.
The best day for a release is Friday. In practice, it is therefore wise to keep at least two weeks between releases so that optimal use can be made of all promotional opportunities!