Preadd, presave and preorder

It has been about a month since my last blog on Registrations and Distribution in this series on releasing Entangled and I promised to talk about pre-saving. So here goes. But first, as ever…

And now onto presaving and what it is. Presaving is a way to get your listeners to save your music to their library before it is released so that it is available from the day of release. It’s the equivalent of preording a CD in the days of physical releases (speaking of which you can pre-order a physical copy of Entangled from my Bandcamp). Not only is it a useful way to make sure your music gets to the ears of your fans but it provides a metric bump on the first day of release. Whether someone preadded the track 3 months or 3 days before release, it only gets counted from the day of release. If you are someone like Taylor Swift (what?! It is good to keep abreast of all areas of the music industry not just your own!), that could help you to get a headline like ‘most presaved album on Apple Music‘ and so getting more of a bump in presaves and a better chance at charting but even if you don’t have a massive marketing machine behind you it will show interest in your music and increase your chances for editorial and algorithmic playlists. It will also increase your save rates.

Apple Music has started to offer a native service where if you add an instant gratification track to your release and have it available for pre-order from iTunes then you get an ‘Add’ button in Apple Music. Unfortunately because of the duration of the tracks on Entangled I wasn’t able to do this (though and chasing up on it now) and neither Spotify nor Deezer offer a native way to pre-add. (I’m using pre-add and pre-save interchangeably because they do the same thing but different services use a different term).

Whether you go for free or paid, both versions convert on release to a landing page directing people where to stream or buy. So you don’t have to worry about updating links you’ve already sent out once things are released.

All you need to do to setup the presave is add your UPC, artwork add a little bit of text, add a source for preview audio (iTunes, soundcloud etc) the you are sorted! Feature.fm then scans all the services on the release day and adds the music to your listeners’ library. It is really easy and straightforward. Once you’ve got your URL you can start shouting about it to get people to preadd your release.

Preorder – Bandcamp

News

All of my music is now available on Idagio. They are a new(ish) classical music streaming service. Check out my artist page here.