You just submitted your track to your distributor. Or maybe you’re teasing a song on TikTok. You want to create some hype around your release, and tease the living heck out of it to get a huge streaming push – maybe even score some editorial playlists.

Or so you think that’s how it works.

Enter: the pre-save.

Before we dive in, please note that this is not your typical pre-save article/rant. 

The question at hand is whether or not pre-saves are still an effective way to promote your unreleased music. 

The short answer is no.

The long answer lies in this guide.

And before you come at me saying “everybody is running pre-saves so they must work”, I encourage you to read this with an open mind, and to remember – just because everybody is doing it, doesn’t mean you should too.

What is a pre-save?

We have a more in depth guide on what pre-saves are and how musicians can maximize their pre-save campaigns, but the short and sweet version of what a pre-save does is follow the concept of a pre-order. A fan opts into saving a track and or following an artist’s profile via a landing page before the song is released. Pretty cool right?

The music industry is obsessed with pre-saves right now, which stems from an uptick in musicians on TikTok promoting and teasing their unreleased music.

The purpose behind a pre-save for these artists is to test the waters on consumption. It gives the artists and their teams a sense of whether fans really want to hear the song or not based on the number of pre-saves they get (Ie if we get 1000 pre-saves, and a listener streams 2-3 times, we could anticipate 3000+ streams in a month).

But it’s all a guessing game.

The Lack of Attribution in Music Marketing 

Let’s face it – music analytics suck.

At least, when it comes to attribution from your different marketing efforts.

Sure we have our Spotify for Artists, which showcases metrics such as total streams per release, source of streams in the last 28 days etc.

But we don’t really know where our streams are coming from.

Did they come from TikTok?

Did they come from our Mailchimp email newsletter?

Did they come from a pre-save campaign?

We don’t know.

And who knows if we will ever know.

We talk about the fan journey in music marketing (commonly referred to as the customer journey in other industries), but the journey gets lost without proper attribution.

For example, if I run an e-commerce store, I can see what channels specifically my conversions came from by leveraging a tool such as Google Analytics.

With this I can tell you exactly which channel drove the most revenue for my e-commerce store.

Imagine if DSPs were able to give us this information?

For us to see exactly where our streams are coming from.

For example, if I send out an email campaign, and link users to a smart link such as Linkfire, I should be able to see ”Email” as a channel in my Spotify for Artists and be able to say “hey – I got 100 streams that came from email today. Nice.”)

Or, if I run a pre-save campaign, and Spotify were aware of the user emails that opted into pre-saving, and could report back to us how many of the users who pre-saved actually streamed the song.

Because currently there is no way to measure this.

And being able to measure this is a music marketer and record label’s pipe dream that one can only hope happens someday.

For now, all we can do is guesstimate and cross reference analytics from other data sources and try to correlate things to one another (Ie “hey we have a spike – why? What did we do differently on this day than another day? Did we spend more on ads today? Or did we get a lot of traffic from a TikTok?”)

Anyway – end rant because I could truly go on forever and ever about our non existent attribution.

The Pros of Pre-Saves

Regardless of which smart link service you choose or is granted by your distributor, they all serve the same basic function. On release day, your track will be saved to a user’s library, and that user will now be a follower of your Spotify profile. Not to mention, if they opt-in, they’ll also share their email with you, which means you got yourself an email list now! (More info here.)

So if you get 100 pre-saves, your song on day 1 will have 100 saves, and your Spotify profile will have an additional 100 followers. Pretty neat!

Spotify has a huge emphasis on followers. They compare it to an email list (which is also important). For Spotify, developing followers on the platform is crucial. The biggest reason being their algorithmic playlists.

Algorithmic playlists are created for Spotify users by Spotify’s own algorithm. These include Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Radio etc.

Release Radar is a playlist that gets updated every Friday for Spotify users and contains music from artists they follow.

So the more followers you get = more Release Radar plays.

And more Release Radar plays usually result in other algorithmic playlists triggering, such as Discover Weekly, Radio and more.

In theory, driving pre-saves/artist follows will result in higher Release Radar streams, listeners and an increase in followers.

The Cons of Pre-Saves

Where there are pros, there are cons. And the biggest one (as alluded to earlier) is just the overarching problem in music promotion is the lack of attribution. We cannot directly measure how many Release Radar streams came from those who also pre-saved.

We can assume, we can guess and check, but it will never be accurate.

Here is a release from an artist called Valiant Hearts that we worked via Kontrolla Music Group.

For the first release, “Elevated Being” we did a pre-save campaign via Linkfire. We managed to get 120 pre-saves for this release.

And on release day, the track got 10.7k streams, 6,109 of which came from Release Radar.

But what percentage of those Release Radar streams came from pre-saves? Or what percentage of the total day 1 streams came from the email Spotify sends out to its users showcasing your new release? What about your own email marketing efforts? (See my dilemma with this attribution thing now?)

Another issue we’ve ran into with the pre-save realm is the absolute pain the ass it is to login to Spotify from an in-app browser such as TikTok and Instagram – especially if you login using Facebook.

This affects your conversions like crazy. 

The more steps there are in anything you are trying to get a fan to do, the less inclined they are to do it.

I’m sure you’ve done the same with job applications (god only knows I’m not answering a 10+ questionnaire, AND have to copy/paste my resume into their form fields)

People are lazy. Don’t forget that.

People are lazy, even when they care about an artist.

For example, I’m working with this really dope artist who has been doing a great job the past couple of days driving traffic to their pre-save link.

Their landing page has a CTR (click-thru rate) of 75% which is AMAZING.

The issue I’ve personally ran with this campaign (and other artists) is that their conversions (in this case, pre-saves) are low.

For us to get 75% of our landing page traffic to click on a DSP with the intent of pre-saving, and only to walk away with 20% of those click-thrus actually following through and completing the pre-save, is sad.

90% of our traffic came from TikTok according to our smart link’s analytics. The rest included Instagram, Twitter, direct etc.

There is a huge discrepancy in conversion rates for pre-saves. Plain and simple. Check yours.

How Many Pre-Saves Is Good to Have?

Honestly, there is no magic number to how many pre-saves you should be getting on your song, but generally, get as many pre-saves as you can to have a bigger first day streaming number and Release Radar push from Spotify. A much more important metric I like to look at is the percentage of visitors to your smart link that you are converting to pre-saves, like we mentioned above.

The Best Alternative to Pre-Saves

We’re entering a privacy first internet. Whether we are talking about Apple’s iOS 14, 15 and beyond data tracking, the fact that cookies are going away, privacy is top of mind for the consumer.

With that being said, it is becoming more and more expensive for artists to advertise on ad channels such as Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube (hit us up if you want to lower your costs per conversion – we crush it every time). 

Hence why there should be a focus on building community and 1 to 1 fan messaging within your marketing stack.

This comes through the form of email lists and SMS lists (you can create an email list from past pre saves too btw.)

Services like Laylo provide landing pages that are beautifully designed, fast, and convert at a much higher rate than your typical pre-save landing pages.

Laylo calls their links/landing pages “Drops” in which fans can opt into receiving a notification on the day of whatever it is you are dropping (merch, a song, NFT etc)

Here is one we created for Valiant Heart’s follow up single, Banshee.

The Pros of SMS and Email Lists for Artists

The idea behind Drops is having fans opt into receiving a text or email that will let them know your content is available.

Which is exactly why you run pre-saves, right?

To get fans to go to their preferred streaming service to stream your song?

Again – there is no way to measure how many fans stream your song from your pre-saves.

And although there is no way to attribute streams to Laylo opt-ins, you at least have some metrics, such as seeing how many messages were sent to your fans, how many clicked thru to your destination, etc. 

Point being – you are certain they actually were reminded of your release, and went to their DSP of choice to stream the song.

Now.. let’s talk about the game changer: conversion rates.

Remember – for the first single, Elevated Being, we ran a pre-save through Linkfire.

Here were our stats: 

705 visits

271 click thru to DSPs

120 successful pre saves

17% conversion rate.

Not bad.

Now let’s look at our Laylo stats:

257 landing page visits

144 total opt-ins

56% conversion rate.

We increased our conversion rate by 39% by switching to a Laylo landing page vs a traditional pre-save page, which is insane.

Wish we had driven more traffic to the page, but it is what it is.

(Just imagine if we had gotten the same traffic as the first link + maintained that same conversion rate. Would have been nuts!)

This insane conversion rate increase is not just us btw.

Here is what Laylo CEO Alec Ellin had to say:

Artists want to give their fans cool, personalized experiences around their releases and the data is proving that approach. On Laylo, we’re seeing average conversion rates of 65% and artists are able to continue using their fan lists for future content, merch and event drops.

Alec Ellin, Laylo CEO

The Cons of SMS/Email Opt-Ins

There are none.

Switch now.

What About Spotify Streams? Or Editorial Placements?

Surprisingly they were pretty on par with one another. 

Both tracks received 3 Editorial Playlist placements through Spotify, and got ~30,000 streams on release weekend.

Song 1 got 29,902 streams.

Song 2 got 30,714 streams.

The biggest difference between the two is Spotify follower growth.

Keep in mind, with pre-saves, those who opt-in not only save the song to their library, but also follow the artist’s profile on Spotify.

With SMS/e-mail landing pages, those who opt-in only get notified that the track is out and save/follow at their own discretion.

For song 1 (the Linkfire Pre-Save) we got an additional 95 Spotify followers.

For song 2 (Laylo) we got an additional 10 Spotify followers on release day.

Are Pre-Saves Valuable to the Industry?

“Pre-saves help get you on editorials”.

“Pre-saves show Spotify people care”.

Yes and no.

If you are an indie artist without a direct contact at Spotify, or at a distribution company, the amount of pre-saves you get do not correlate to securing playlist placements. 

I will admit that having worked with both major label artists and their teams, as well as boutique distribution services such as Vydia, The Orchard, and Stem, have used pre-save numbers to their advantage when pitching to editorial playlists. 

They hold a lot of weight in this realm, as well as amongst A&Rs at labels that are looking to sign an artist and or see how an artist could potentially stream upon a release.

What Should I Do?

Honestly – do what you want. Some artists and their teams care so much about seeing their follower number go up because of pre-save campaigns. They don’t care if their fans get notified of the release or get a personalized message from the artist. 

I’ve received push back from artists on not switching to a sms/email landing page because they are afraid that fans will not input their number or email. But the truth is, fans will. We’ve seen it happen countless times, and will continue to push for artists to switch to a platform like Laylo.

A happy medium I’ve done for artists is to have the Laylo link be displayed on the landing page/Linkfire link in addition to the pre-save.

It’s what we are doing for Go for Gold.

And for those that do opt-in to Laylo, we still do a final ask for a pre-save via their customizable confirmation messages.

Does Laylo also do pre-saves?

An update in May of 2022 from Laylo introduced the concept of “1-click pre-saves,” which gives you the best of both worlds between choosing between traditional pre-save pages and SMS/email landing pages.

This is an absolute game-changer.

The way it works is that fans still enter in their phone number or email on the Laylo landing page, but right after, they are redirected to the Spotify login page to link their Spotify account to their contact info.

In doing this, the fan is authorizing Laylo and Spotify to “pre-save” the song.

The best part about this?

Once a fan enters their contact info + logs into Spotify on ANY Laylo Drop page, the next time they come across YOUR Drop, they do not have to log into Spotify anymore.

This drastically reduces landing page bounce rates and increases your conversion rates.

You’re still collecting first party data, and getting pre-saves as the icing on top.

Running A Pre-Save Without an ISRC

Traditionally you have to have an ISRC or UPC from your distributor or record label in order to generate a pre-save page.

With Laylo, you can enable Spotify pre-saves on their drop pages, where you will collect fan contact info AND pre-saves at the same time.

You don’t even need an ISRC to start collecting pre-saves, which is super convenient if you want to start posting and teasing music on TikTok.

Just make sure to add in your ISRC in your drop’s advanced settings before the drop!

Note: You can also run a pre-save campaign without an ISRC through Feature.fm; read more about how that works and how Emmy Meli got 125M streams here.

All in all, for most artists and their teams, the best option will be to use a landing page with all the available options (pre-save, sms/email opt-in) like Laylo.

If you have any and all questions about your pre-save campaigns, or would like to add any and all info to this post, feel free to hit me up below!

Same with if you need help with running your next marketing campaign, hit me up below! Always looking forward to helping artists and their teams crush their next release.