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You want to deliver music as a prerelease or Waterfall release

Prerelease and "Instant Grat"

Spotify doesn't currently support prerelease or "Instant Grat" releases. An "Instant Grat" is a multi track release where tracks go live at different date/times throughout the campaign.

Releases delivered in this way will appear on the Artist page with only X amount of tracks live. There'll be no indication that it's a pre-order / pre-stream. This type of release style causes confusion for users and has led to many complaints that the release is broken. Followers receive a notification to tell them the release is live, when in fact it it's incomplete.

On release date the full release goes live with the remaining tracks and no further notifications are sent to followers. Not only is this a bad experience for users, it's a bad marketing experience for the label and artist.

For this reason, we may take down releases in this format. For single tracks to be available ahead of the full album release, you'll need to deliver them as separate single releases instead.

Waterfall

Spotify does support Waterfall releases. This type of delivery will allow the "latest release" on the Artist page to be replaced by multiple single bundles over time as more get released. In a waterfall release, each release will be its own product, having separate URIs. Rather than one album having tracks released at different dates, we prefer a series of single bundles being released during the campaign.

The best way to do this is:

  1. Deliver release A (e.g. Single 1) - release A goes live.

  2. Delivery of release B (Single 2 + Single 1) under a new UPC—release B goes live. Please make sure track metadata + ISRC for "Single 1" is an exact match to previously delivered releases.

  3. When track linking happens on release A (Single 1) and release B ( which contains Single 1) the you can issue a take down for release A.

  4. Etc

In the example above, you should synchronize the end date/time of release A with the start date/time of release B. As track linking process could take at least 72 hours, you must deliver B far in advance of its start date/time.

For any further information on this subject, please reach out to the Content Operations team.