Why a 21-35 Day Release Gap Often Beats More Frequent Drops

Releasing every week often makes your Spotify monthly listeners look worse, not better.

The key to the whole issue isn’t why your artist isn’t getting more streams (is it just hard work and dedication enough?), but rather to look at the numbers. Spotify reports monthly listeners on a rolling 28-day window. Artists have often found out the hard way that a spike in listeners early on will have a disappointing dropoff in the weeks that follow. To avoid looking like an unstable flop, many are trying buy Spotify monthly listeners or multiple drops in the same period, but if the core timing is all wrong, a drop in the numbers is inevitable.

Take a look at the timeline in Spotify for Artists. You’ll notice that a lot of releases follow a similar shape: An initial spike on release week, followed by a rapid decay, then a flat tail. What happens between release week and the end of the month is crucial in maximizing potential replay. If you let your monthly decay drop first, it can negatively impact your next decline.

The decay curve you can actually see

I’ve read somewhere that the monthly listeners are not an accurate measurement of a band’s or artist’s popularity. According to that article, monthly listeners are actually counted with a 28-day window and are people who listened to your song in the past but will be knocked off your monthly listener count in 28 days unless they come back to listen to your song within that window again. So your increase in monthly listeners looks kinda of like a slope of two lines together – people who have never listened to your song before (one line) and people who are repeat offenders, coming back to listen to the same song over and over again (the other line).

New listeners tend to show up in bursts from playlists, release radar / discover weekly in particular. Very often, first-timers don’t return for a second listen. Conversely, returners are the saves, follows, repeat sessions of your music and the people who explore the rest of your catalog after falling down the rabbit hole of one particular song. These listeners will help bring down the curve instead of amplifying it in week 3 and 4.

I also get a good read on things from the fall in the post-day 7 drop in monthly listeners. Is that a sharp fall in both monthly listeners and streams per listener, indicating you brought in some samers in the run up to release? Or a fall in monthly listeners but a more stable streams per listener, indicating you are retaining a smaller but loyal fanbase that are replaying tracks? These are generally more valuable than release frequency advice like release frequency breakdown that looks at all listens as equal.

Why frequent drops cannibalize carryover

This is because singles are released on a regular basis i.e. weekly or biweekly which means your attention is divided and directs your audience in a different part of your album/mixtape. This in turn means the latest track gets the most return but those few playing sessions will be spread so thin that the last track will lack a returning fanbase to really develop.

We at Spotify also need time to read the signals. Therefore we can repeat a test of a track that worked well in week 1 as long as the engagement is still trackable (saves, completion, low skip rates, repeat playback from real users etc). Unfortunately this means that dropping another single too soon will shift the listening context which may skew the platform’s exploration to the new single, rather than allowing it to reach a wider and more exploratory audience.

I have watched small teams lose it on day 10 and release the second single because the first single has slowed down. This leads to two fairly decent peaks but then no tail, and a profile that looks like a heart monitor. You haven’t built any momentum, you’ve just interrupted the test.

A simple 21-35 day planning model

You don’t need to have a whole spreadsheet set up in order to determine how often to play a given song. You just need to have a rough estimate for how long a song decays, and an empty gap in your rotation in order to keep audience memory high whilst giving the song time to reemerge.

• Day 0-3: release spike from your own channels and early algorithmic placement.
• Day 4-10: the first drop as casual listeners move on; this is where saves and follows matter.
• Playlist adds, creator content and looking into the catalog do either continue to stabilise things or they don’t, let’s see if it keeps going for the next 10 days or so.
• These are the days 22-35 of the test window. Even though it’s been a couple of weeks, I’d expect to get served up the track to older listeners who were into it originally and possibly some new people to come across the song as well. Healthy levels of engagement going on.

So far we have mapped out the trajectory of the presence’s life, characterizing the peaks and valleys of day 1-42. Now we’ll look at how the last two releases fit into that larger picture. In this case, the day 11-21 valley isn’t a downward slope – it’s a cliff. Rather than rushing the presence to fill that gap, we could improve the presence at 11-21 days by focusing on features that drive returners. The save-focused call to action above the fold on the artist profile, a freshened-up artist profile, a pinned Canvas that hooks at the top of the presence, and a second wave of outreach to both curators and micro-playlists all have the potential to make a big difference here. The presence freshness explainer (T2: monthly listener drop analysis) makes a similar point, albeit from the opposite direction: just because you’ve been gone a month doesn’t mean your “fresh” has to be a new single every Friday.

Patching the valley without faking it

All campaigns tend to die of old age in a valley around 10-14 days in, where content eases to a crawl and the last remaining emails are playlists people saved ages ago. You can’t stop that entirely, but you can make it less painful.

If your organic reach sees a great release-week peak but then drops in a pretty dramatic mid-cycle “valley”, investing in a month or two of buying Spotify monthly listeners can be used to keep the bottom from falling out while you are pushing your next track and sending out playlists to submit to. This is a service that many artists buy from (Promosoundgroup for one) but like any trick, it only works well if your song already has good conversion of listeners into actual followers or repeats, and is meant to be a tiny part of the long game, not some silver bullet that can turn a bad campaign into a good one.

T1: Focus on retention signals – drive saves, follow, points to another track – and let the floor take care of itself. Your monthly listener building overview listener growth tactics will eventually realize that repeat listeners are worth more in the long run than a single day with a huge open spike.

What is the best gap between single releases? The answer to that is likely genre-specific and audience-specific. But the curve of decline doesn’t care about your publishing schedule. Look at your own release cycle: does it always drop off so sharply in week 3? Are you giving the best single, your biggest hook, a full 28 days in the limelight? Then ask yourself, do you really need more good songs, or do you just need the second half of your album to be better?