A 6-week release plan for your next single

Most singles under-perform for a boring reason: everything happens in the last four days. The song goes to the distributor late, the pitch to Spotify’s editors never happens, the visuals get made the night before, and the ads start on release day with a cold audience. Here is the timeline we run for artists on our development program. Six weeks is enough. Eight is comfortable.

Week 6: lock the master and the artwork

Final mix and master done, artwork final, ISRC assigned. Upload to your distributor now so the release date is at least four weeks out. That gap is what unlocks the Spotify for Artists pitch form, which only accepts unreleased songs with a scheduled date.

• Choose one lead visual. Everything else in the campaign should look like it came from the same shoot.
• Write a two-sentence description of the song: who it is for and what it sits next to. You will reuse it in the pitch, the ads and your bio.

Week 5: pitch the editors, plan the creative

Submit the Spotify for Artists pitch as soon as the release appears in your dashboard. Be specific about genre, mood, instruments and the artists you sit next to. Editorial placement is a bonus, not a strategy, but the pitch also feeds Release Radar, which is guaranteed reach for your followers.

This is also when we plan ad creatives. We need four to eight short vertical clips, fifteen to thirty seconds, with the hook of the song in the first two seconds. Studio footage, a lyric moment, a performance clip and one “this is the song for” concept usually cover it.

Week 4: pre-save and warm-up

Set up a pre-save or smart link. Point every post and bio link at it. Start a small video-view warm-up campaign on Instagram, ten to twenty dollars a day, using the best clip. The goal is not clicks. It is an audience of people who watched the clip, which we retarget later.

Week 3 and 2: content and retargeting

Post two to four pieces of content a week, all from the same shoot. Keep the warm-up running. If the warm-up audience is past a few thousand viewers, add a small pre-save conversion campaign aimed only at them.

Week 1: everything ready, nothing live

Ad campaign built and paused. Landing page tested on a phone. Release-day post written. Email to your list scheduled. Sleep.

Release day and the two weeks after

Turn the conversion campaign on at midnight. Run the testing phase for seven to ten days, cut what does not convert, scale what does. Watch saves and playlist adds in Spotify for Artists, not just streams. Most of the streams from a good campaign arrive after the budget is spent, because the saves keep feeding the algorithm.

The release is not the finish line. It is the point where you finally have data.

If you want us to run this timeline with you, that is what artist development is. If you just want the campaign, pick a Meta package and send the song.