Two things move a release: money spent reaching people who already listen to music like yours, and the record landing in front of the people who programme playlists. We run both.
Campaigns built around the release and run on Instagram and Facebook, YouTube and Google. Audiences are built from listeners of comparable artists, your own engaged followers, and the territories your catalogue already performs in — then narrowed as the data comes in rather than set once and left running.
You see what was spent, what it reached, and what it did to your streams. Ad spend is your budget and is reported separately from any fee, so you always know which is which.
Your release pitched through the official store pitching tools to DSP editorial teams, and to independent curators who accept submissions and programme in your genre.
Pitching is submission, not placement. No distributor can guarantee an editorial playlist, and any company telling you otherwise is either buying placement or lying about it. What we control is that the pitch is early, complete and argued properly — which is most of why pitches fail.
This is not only principle. Spotify, Apple and YouTube detect artificial streams, strip the revenue, and can remove the track or the whole artist profile — and the penalty lands on your catalogue, not on the agency that sold you the package. A promotion that puts your masters at risk is not promotion.
Promotion is quoted per release rather than sold off a shelf, because a debut single and a fifth album with a back catalogue need completely different money. Tell us the release, the date and roughly what you can spend, and you will get a straight answer on what that budget can realistically do — including when the honest answer is to save it for the next one.
