RELEASE STRATEGY
PROMOTING A SINGLE IN 2025
Once upon a time, all of us in the music business knew how to make a hit.
In Britain, the record company pressed the record and sent it off to the shops. The following Saturday we filled a couple of cars with school kids, gave them a few shillings, and drove them from town to town buying records at each chart return shop. These were the shops that reported sales figures to the organisation that compiled the chart.
If the shops said it was selling well, it would go into the chart and you’d get radio play. Hopefully, it would then become a hit. The formula wasn’t pretty, but it worked — like slipping the maître d’ a little something to jump the queue for a table. There were charts, there were shops, and there were people to whom you slipped your little somethings. Nowadays, that’s all gone and the charts are incomprehensible.
In America, the process was larger and louder. You paid consulting fees to radio programmers and the records they consulted on ended up on heavy rotation. Everyone from DJ Alan Freed to the major labels took turns at getting caught, fined, and pretending to be ashamed. It was crude but quick.
Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, the system is smoother. Almost elegant. No more cars full of schoolkids or briefcases full of cash, just “influencer activations” and “playlist placement strategies.” The bribery is now fully tax-deductible. Labels quietly buy their way into Spotify’s curated lists, sponsor TikTok challenges, and pay an army of micro-influencers to perform the same dance to the same track. Soon the dance becomes addictive. And the song along with it.
Radio is no longer the prime target. It joins in later. In the old days, a promo team would ring around a few stations, send a box of vinyl with a sachet or two of coke, and hope a few DJs were in a good mood. Now, radio is almost ignored. The promotion is aimed at streaming – giving early leaks to fan accounts, coordinating influencer content across several time zones, and scheduling the first 48 hours to maximise “velocity” — the rate at which a song is streamed, shared, and added to streaming playlists.
The old system was about getting the song played in full. The new one only requires just a fragment. The chorus, the hook, the scream — each atom of a track must earn its keep. A song is stripped down for TikTok like a KFC chicken being rebranded as nuggets, tenders, and a family bucket. You don’t sell three minutes anymore; you sell fifteen seconds. And the first two bars must be catchy enough to survive the skip button.
The Billboard Hot 100 no longer relates to what people buy, or even what they listen to, it’s a measurement of how quickly a record moves through the bloodstream of the internet. The process is managed down to the second. On big releases, Spotify now debuts with five different colour thumbnails for the same track, testing which one gets more clicks. And three months before a single is released, marketing teams are already filming “spontaneous” dances for TikTok and dreaming up fake feuds for social media, ready to drip-feed “organic” virality into the system.
The big artists – Cardi B, Teddy Swims, Nicky Minaj, Youngblud, Billy Eilish, Harry Styles, Post Malone – are all promoted with this same precision. And if you happen to hear a new act for the first time, you’re already late on the scene. To get signed, they first need to generate tens of thousands of fans. To get heard, their single must navigate algorithms, playlist editors, influencers and content strategists. Then have the label spend upwards of fifty thousand dollars to help it arrive “organically” on TikTok.
Streams, social mentions, video plays, radio spins — all of them are stirred together in a statistical gumbo that somehow declares a winner – and into the chart they go. The illusion of spontaneity has never been so carefully choreographed. The industry calls it “organic discovery,” which is a lovely phrase for something so entirely synthetic. There are other lovely phrases too. Bribes are now “marketing spend.” Payola is “curation.” Scams are “engagement strategies.”
As for radio, it tags along behind – waits to see what’s trending before it decides what’s worth broadcasting – a reversal so complete, it’s poetic. DJs used to make hits; now they take dictation from Spotify.
Yet amidst all this, one good thing still exists. And it’s something that existed before. Sometimes – with no campaign, no budget, no plan and no record company – one of the 100,000 songs a day uploaded to Spotify somehow comes out of nowhere and rises to the top. Right across the industry you can feel the thrill of a genuine hit - a record that didn’t climb the chart through organised planning. A song that caught the public’s attention unprompted.
Even so, there’s something hypnotic about the slickness of modern record promotion – this giant, gleaming machine that can turn a whisper into a phenomenon. So different from how it all worked in the past. Somewhere, a TikTok teenager is doing a dance to a clip of a song written in LA, produced in Stokholm, launched by a label in New York, while an algorithm in Singapore decides whether it’s worth showing to you again. It’s global, instant, and utterly ridiculous.
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As usual eloquently on the money! Billboard has become the “People “ magazine of and for the music fan/listener business- not the business of music buyers. The industry currently fails to differentiate between music buyers (of which created the foundation of “fan sales”) and music consumers ( of which there has always been many). The difference was and is that between what we used to call a “turn-table hit” - that received many spins and much play and earned very few “sales”, and a record/ song that had kegs and sold product! But the geniuses of the industry threw the baby out with the bath water in favor of kneeling at the alter of technology and streaming/ therefore forgoing all chances of independence and freedom to be at the behest of the world corporate order!
The problem is- that there is another record/ music business that isn’t reported or quantified- by any trade publication…that industry is inhabited by the fiercely independent pirates that were the foundation and life’s- blood of the industry that they made great.
I believe it is rising again. Slowly growing and at some point come into focus. The industry has always had 3 divisions- Radio ( which includes social media and streaming) / Records & performance. The first and later are well represented- the 2nd has been greatly ignored- but being that human nature has not changed since the beginnings of time- i expect we will continue to see this area continue to grow. And just like it was once said that “books would become obsolete “ and yet book sales have never been better… just watch the “music/record” section of the major chain book stores grow…and don’t be surprised when a record & tape store opens in a neighborhood near you!
Keep it up Simon… they haven’t caught us yet!
Thank you so much for this Simon. I've been waiting for a summary of how the modern world works and you've done it as beautifully as ever!