Your listeners are split across services. Some use Spotify, some Apple Music, some only watch YouTube, a few will buy from Bandcamp. A social profile gives you one link. A release page is the answer to that: one address that shows the release and lets each person leave through the door they prefer.
The job of the page
A release page has a short job description. Someone taps your link with a little curiosity and not much patience. Within a few seconds the page should tell them what this is, let them hear it, and get them to the place where they listen to music. Anything that does not serve one of those three steps is in the way.
What belongs on it
- The cover, large. It is the thing people will recognise later in their library.
- Title and artist name in text, not only inside the image, so they are readable on any screen.
- A short preview. Thirty seconds is plenty. A person who has heard the hook is far more likely to tap through than one who has only seen a picture.
- One button per platform, in the order your listeners use them. If most of your audience is on one service, put it first.
- The date. Before release day, a countdown turns “not yet” into a reason to come back.
- One optional line. A sentence about the song in your own voice. One, not a biography.
What to leave off
Navigation menus, your full discography, a merch store, a tour list and a newsletter archive all have a place, and it is your website. On a release page each extra choice pulls taps away from the one release you are promoting. The same goes for autoplay: let people press play themselves.
Before release day: collect a way back
The weakness of a pre-release link is that the visitor cannot do what you want yet. The song is not out. Two things fix that. The preview gives them something to hear now, and a “notify me” box gives them a way to be told when the full track is live. An email address is the only audience you fully own; followers on a platform can be reached only when the platform decides to show them your post.
Be straightforward about what the box is for. They are giving you an address to hear about this release. Send them one message on release day with the link, and ask before adding them to anything bigger.
Read the numbers honestly
A release page can tell you three useful things: how many people opened it, which platform buttons they tapped, and how many left an address. That is enough to learn something real. If views are high and clicks are low, the page is not convincing people, so look at the preview choice and the first button. If one platform takes most of the clicks, lead with it next time and mention it by name in your captions.
Keep the limits in mind too. These are counts of taps on your page, not streams, and small numbers swing wildly. Twenty views tell you very little; a few hundred start to show a pattern.
Own a copy
Link services come and go, and a link in an old post is hard to change. It is worth being able to take your page with you. ReleaseKit lets you download an unlocked release page as a single HTML file, with the cover, the preview and the fonts inside it, which you can put on your own site or any web host. The hosted version adds the things that need a server: counting and the sign-up box.
A two-minute test
Open your page on a phone, on mobile data, with the sound on. Can you tell what it is without scrolling? Does the preview start on the first tap? Is your main platform reachable with your thumb? If yes to all three, it is ready to go in your bio. You can see an example release page and the rest of the kit here, or build your own.
