Free tool
Release timeline builder
Almost everything that goes wrong with a first release is a timing problem rather than a music problem. Pick your drop date and this works backwards from it, with real dates and the two deadlines you genuinely cannot move.
Fridays are the global release day. Pick one and the whole schedule follows.
A project needs longer lead time for artwork and metadata.
The two dates you cannot move
Most of the schedule below is advice, and you can compress it if you have to. Two things are not advice.
The editorial pitch closes seven days before release. Spotify's own documentation is explicit: "Deliver your music at least 7 days before release so our editors have time to listen." Miss it and you cannot pitch at all. The same deadline controls something people care about more, because "if you pitch an unreleased song at least 7 days before release, we'll add it to your followers' Release Radar playlists." Late delivery costs you the pitch and the Release Radar placement together.
You can only pitch one unreleased song at a time. Also Spotify's wording: "Once your pitched song goes live, you can pitch another." If you are dropping a project, you are choosing one track to pitch, so decide which before you upload rather than after.
Seven days is the floor, not the target. It is the hard cut-off in Spotify's documentation. Widely repeated advice suggests pitching four to six weeks out because editorial planning happens well in advance, and that is why this tool schedules delivery at four weeks. Treat the four weeks as convention and the seven days as the rule, because only one of those two is published by Spotify.
Why Friday
Global Release Day is Friday, which is when the charting week starts and when the new-music playlists refresh. Releasing on a Tuesday does not break anything, but it hands away several days of the chart week and lands outside the rhythm the playlists run on.
Sources
- Spotify for Artists: pitching music to playlist editors, official. The 7-day minimum, the Release Radar consequence, and the one-song-at-a-time limit are all quoted directly from this page.
- The four-week delivery target and the rest of the schedule are convention rather than published policy, drawn from the first-release checklist. They are marked as guidance in the timeline above.
Distributors set their own delivery lead times and they vary. Check yours before trusting the four-week mark, and if you find something wrong here, tell @coolturkeyCT and it gets corrected and dated.