What will Global Release Day mean for YOUR music?
All over the world, the music industry is shifting towards a unified “Global Release Day” in order to deter piracy, avoid fan confusion, and help coordinate marketing efforts across multiple territories.
Instead of album and single releases coming out on Monday in the UK, Tuesday in the US, and so forth — new music will now be released worldwide on Fridays.
Here’s a few things to note about Global Release Day:
1. The first Global Release Day will happen on Friday, July 10th. June 30th will be the last Tuesday street date in the USA.
2. In most regions, new music will become available on Fridays at 12:01am local time.
3. Music retail sales will be reported daily, including sales on cdbaby.com. Both Nielsen (Soundscan) and Border City Media now use a daily sales reporting system.
4. Tour sales can be reported by labels on a weekly basis (since filing sales reports on a daily basis is often difficult when touring). Venue sales must be reported on Thursdays by 3pm, based upon a new venue reporting week of Thursday-Wednesday.
5. Direct-to-Fan sales from your website can be reported weekly as well, as long as they’re submitted on Fridays for the preceding Friday-Thursday period.
6. Vinyl Tuesdays is still a thing. According to A2IM, “Independent retailers will continue to report on a Monday-thru-Sunday week as they launch their Vinyl Tuesdays sales program. Vinyl Tuesdays is an opportunity for Independent Retail to drive traffic to stores on an additional day of the week, as well as highlight key vinyl releases with a dedicated street date.”
7. Digital retailers such as iTunes and Amazon are on board to support Friday as the new standard release day.
8. You can still release new music any day you like. If you own your recording, you decide when you want to make it available for sale based on what’s best for you and your fans.
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Will these changes impact your next release? If so, how? Let us know in the comments below.
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Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.