How To Reverse Engineer Your Music Release Strategy

Song overload. I was talking with a friend and we were trying to decide what to do next in the studio. My friend played song after unreleased song of his to the point where I’m sure we both felt a little overloaded.

Most artists are sitting on a back catalog of songs that they would like to record. However, lack of time, money, energy, and other resources get in the away. I myself have about 100 voice memos of song ideas that I would like to pursue.

My friend and I decided to determine what the goals and outcomes we wanted to reach are for the coming year. Then once we knew where we wanted to get to it was a lot easier to determine the steps we needed take take now to get there.

We decided our goal is to release four four song EP’s this year. One has already dropped, leaving us a dozen songs to work on. One of the EP’s is going to be released before Spring, another in the Summer, and another in the Fall.

We decided to chip away at the songs with the soonest release dates and we used an Eisenhower decision matrix to determine what are the most urgent and the important tasks to do now.

This process sounds so simple when you type it out and as I read it back to myself. Reality is that sometimes we get stuck and we don’t know what to do next. We have the freedom to choose so many different paths and as artists we want to share and express all of the art that is important to us. We can get fatigued with too many possibilities and all the uncertainty surrounding our work. Sometimes you just need to take some time with a friend to talk about the future and where it is you want to go and then go FULL NERD with an Eisenhower decision matrix.

If you need a friend to pull out a huge whiteboard with you and go through this process, I got you.