Planning a release

When to deliver, when to pitch, and what actually affects how a release is picked up — separating what the stores have published from what everyone repeats.

14 min read · checked August 2026

The timeline, and where the deadlines come from
Pitching, store by store
Why Friday
Pre-saves and pre-orders
What actually affects pickup
What is not available in India
The weeks after
Things everyone says that nothing supports

The timeline, and where the deadlines come from

Four weeks is the working answer. It is not a round number someone invented — it falls out of the stores' own published deadlines.

When	What happens	Why then
4 weeks before	Deliver to us. Audio final, artwork final, credits and splits settled.	Everything below is measured backwards from release day, and nothing below can start until the release has reached the stores and appeared in their artist tools.
~2 weeks before	The release appears in the stores' artist dashboards.	Roughly two days after delivery on Spotify. Until it appears, there is no pitch form to fill in.
10 days before	Apple's pitch deadline for full editorial consideration.	Apple's own figure. Seven days is the late-add cutoff. Below that, nothing.
7 days before	Spotify's pitch deadline — and the deadline for Release Radar.	Spotify's own minimum. Pitch by then and your chosen song goes to your followers' Release Radar. Miss it and Spotify picks the track for you.
Release day, 00:01 local	Live.
Up to 14 days after	Amazon still accepts a pitch. Deezer does too, with reduced effect.	The only second chances anyone offers. Spotify's door is shut permanently once the song is out.

The absolute floor is about two weeks — Apple's ten days plus the two days it takes for a release to become visible. Everything past that is not ceremony; it is the room to fix an artwork rejection, a featured-artist role set to the wrong value, or a missing code, without any of those costing you the pitch.

Spotify says it needs five business days to get new music live. Deliver inside that and your release date is not a date any more — the music simply appears a few days late, and the pre-release work you did lands on nothing.

The four-week figure is our arithmetic on the stores' published deadlines, not a number any store publishes. We would rather tell you where it comes from than present it as a rule handed down.

Pitching, store by store

Different rules, different windows, and two of them you cannot reach directly at all.

Store	Window	Who can do it
Spotify	7 days before release, minimum. One unreleased song at a time. Cannot pitch a song that is already out.	You, from your own artist account.
Apple Music	10 days before for full consideration; 7 days for late adds.	Not you. The pitch tool sits in the portal distributors and labels use. We submit it.
Amazon Music	Up to 14 days after release. One track per release.	You, from the Amazon artist app.
Deezer	7 days before, or up to 14 days after with less effect. No edits inside 24 hours of release.	Not you. Provider accounts only.
YouTube Music	No pitch mechanism exists.	— Categorise uploads as Music, which is what their systems read.
JioSaavn	A contact form to the editorial team. No published deadline, eligibility or response commitment.	You, but it is a form, not a pitch tool.

A few details worth knowing before you write a pitch. Spotify's editors have said publicly that followers and monthly listeners do not factor into their decisions, that placement cannot be bought, and that knowing an editor makes no difference. Compilations and tracks where you are only a featured artist cannot be pitched at all. Videos are a separate pitch with looser rules — several at once, and up to seven days after release.

Gaana and Wynk are effectively gone. Wynk is being wound down and its artist portal is offline; Gaana went subscription-only and was absorbed into another group. Guides that list four Indian services to pitch are describing a market that no longer exists. In practice the Indian editorial route is JioSaavn's form, and the international services.

Why Friday

Global Release Day moved to Friday on 10 July 2015, after an industry consultation found listeners across eight markets preferred new music at the start of the weekend. Music goes live at 00:01 local time.

It is a convention, not a rule — nothing stops you releasing on a Tuesday, and no store documents any penalty for it. But there is a structural cost worth understanding: Release Radar refreshes every Friday. A Tuesday release sits three days before it can reach your followers there. That is our reasoning from Spotify's published refresh day, not something Spotify says.

India's own chart week runs Friday to Thursday and publishes on Monday, compiled from Amazon Music, Apple Music and Spotify. So the domestic chart infrastructure is built on the same convention.

Pre-saves and pre-orders

Two different things that guides routinely merge, and one delivery rule that can get a release taken down.

Spotify does not support pre-release or staggered delivery at all — the model where an album is listed and one or two tracks play now. Spotify says a release delivered that way looks broken on your artist page, sends misleading notifications to followers, and may be taken down. If you want a track out early, it has to go out as its own single.

Store	What exists	What it does on release day
Spotify — Countdown Page	Albums and EPs only. Singles, re-releases, deluxe and anniversary editions, reissues and compilations are all ineligible. Requires 3,000 monthly listeners.	Push notification to everyone who pre-saved, and the release is added to their library.
Apple Music — pre-add	Requires at least one instant-gratification track or video. The sales date only needs to be one day ahead.	The full release is added to the pre-adder's library automatically, and they are notified the moment it is available.
Amazon Music	No native tool — runs through third-party link services.	Pre-savers become followers, are notified, and the album saves to their library. Followers then hear about every later release.
Deezer, JioSaavn	Nothing documented.	—
YouTube	A Premiere, with a reminder.	Notification about 30 minutes before, and live chat during.

Pre-saves feed the algorithm and boost Release Radar.

No platform documents this anywhere. Spotify describes Release Radar as driven by followers — yours, plus listeners it predicts will like you — and never mentions pre-saves. This is the single most confidently repeated claim in release marketing with the weakest basis. A pre-save is worth having because it puts your record in someone's library on day one. That is a real thing. It is not a signal you are sending to a machine.

Spotify says publishing a Countdown Page at least seven days ahead roughly doubles pre-saves, and that around 60% of people who pre-save an album stream it in the first week. Both are Spotify's own marketing figures with no published method — and Spotify quotes that second one as 60%, over 60%, and nearly 70% on three different pages of its own site. Useful direction, not a number to plan against.

What actually affects pickup

Strictly what the platforms have said. The gap between this and the advice you have read is the point of the section.

Confirmed

Listening, skipping and saving train the recommendation systems. Spotify's engineering team has said this directly. No thresholds are attached to it.
Thirty seconds is a stream. That is the only playback number anyone publishes.
Where a stream came from matters enough that Spotify publishes a taxonomy of it — active sources, where a listener sought you out, and programmed sources, where something chose for them.
A track needs 1,000 streams in the previous twelve months to earn on Spotify at all, plus an unpublished minimum number of unique listeners. It is reassessed monthly, so tracks move in and out.
Metadata decides eligibility. Release Radar excludes re-releases, Various Artists compilations, remixes where you are not a main artist, and some alternate versions. Countdown Pages exclude singles. On a multi-artist release only the first-named main artist can create one — so artist order has a consequence.

Not confirmed by anyone

None of the following appears in any platform's own documentation: a save-rate target, a skip-rate threshold, a completion-rate metric, any claim that the first 24 or 48 hours determine a release's fate, any link from Release Radar performance to Discover Weekly, or any weighting of repeat listens. If you have been given a number for any of these, someone made it up.

Paid streams and playlist placement services violate Spotify's terms. The published consequences include withheld royalties, public stream counts being corrected downward, removal from playlists, removal from the platform, and per-track charges levied on the distributor — which is us, and which we would have to pass on. Nobody who sells you streams mentions that last one.

What is not available in India

Worth knowing before you spend a week looking for a button that is not there.

Three of Spotify's four promotional tools do not operate in India. Marquee and Showcase, the paid campaign formats, list 23 eligible markets and India is not among them — and the payment card has to be issued in an eligible country. Discovery Mode likewise excludes India, though its country list covers most of Asia.

Discovery Mode is worth understanding anyway, because it is often described as a launch tool and is not one. It applies a 30% commission to recording royalties from streams in specific contexts — radio, autoplay, and the various Mixes — and songs must have been out for at least 30 days to qualify. It is a catalogue tool, and it is not free.

What is available to an Indian artist, and free: Countdown Pages if you clear 3,000 monthly listeners, Canvas, Artist Pick, Apple's promotional asset tools, Amazon's follow campaign and its 14-day pitch window, and every store's analytics. The Indian toolkit is thinner than the blogs suggest, and it is concentrated on pitching and metadata rather than promotion.

Spotify Clips has been discontinued — no new uploads since 17 June 2026. What replaced it is better: eligible artists can now upload full-length videos, which are royalty-bearing and may be chart-eligible. Any guide still telling you to make Clips is out of date.

The weeks after

Pitch Amazon if you have not. Fourteen days, and almost nobody uses it.
Add a Canvas — the short looping visual. It is free. Spotify's own itemised figures put it at about +5% streams and +20% playlist adds, which is modest and real.
Set your Artist Pick. Free, stays up for 180 days.
Check your credits on every store. Wrong featured-artist roles and missing writer credits are the most common reason money goes to the wrong place, and they are easiest to fix in the first weeks.
Keep releasing when you have something. There is no evidence-backed cadence — see below.

Spotify's own release guide says that on average about three-quarters of a release's first-year streams happen after the first month. That is worth holding onto, because it contradicts almost everything you will be told about launch week.

Things everyone says that nothing supports

Each of these is repeated constantly. None has a source at any platform.

Pitch three to four weeks before release.

Spotify's documented minimum is 7 days. Apple says 10. Deezer says 7. No platform anywhere says three or four weeks. Deliver early — that part is real. The long pitch deadline is invented.

The first 24 to 48 hours decide everything.

No platform has ever said this. Spotify's own guide says about 75% of a release's first-year streams arrive after the first month.

Release every four to six weeks to feed the algorithm.

There is no primary source for any cadence. The nearest thing is a label manager quoted on Spotify's blog suggesting roughly every six months — an opinion on a blog, not a Spotify position. And very frequent releases carry a real risk: the 1,000-stream annual threshold means thinly-spread tracks can fall below the line and earn nothing at all.

Waterfall releases perform better.

Spotify documents how to deliver one — separate codes per bundle, exact metadata match on repeated tracks, 72 hours' lead. No platform publishes any evidence that it outperforms discrete singles. Two things do work against it: repeated tracks are re-releases, which Release Radar excludes, and the intermediate singles cannot carry a Countdown Page.

You need a certain number of followers to be playlisted.

Spotify's editors say directly that followers and monthly listeners do not factor into editorial decisions. Follower counts do gate the tools — 3,000 for a Countdown Page, 5,000 for Marquee, 25,000 for Discovery Mode — which is probably where the belief came from.

Keep your skip rate under X% and completion above Y%.

Skipping is confirmed as a training signal. No platform publishes a threshold for anything. The only playback number in existence is thirty seconds.

Where this comes from

Checked August 2026. Rules change and pages move — if something here no longer matches what you find, tell us and we will correct it.

General information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Where money or rights are at stake — a cover licence, a dispute, your tax position — get a professional who can look at your actual situation.