While the practice of “windowing” releases has seen a lot of popularity among artists like Adele and Beyonce, the article explore why, for most DIY musicians, making it harder for fans to access your music is probably a mistake.
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Guest Post by Chris Robley on The DIY Musician
With this week’s semi-secret release of a Radiohead album that’s NOT available on Spotify, and recent exclusives by Beyoncé and Drake (on TIDAL and Apple Music respectively), there’s a lot of renewed interest in “windowing.”
Windowing is where you stagger your release across platforms, driving diehard fans first to the platform(s) that most benefits you (the artist), and then — maybe — broadening the availability of your music to other platforms or models over time.
For instance, let’s pretend you’re Adele and you know your latest record will sell like crazy. So for the first few weeks you make the album available only as a physical CD and traditional download to make the most money possible in the time when the music is getting the most attention. No streaming.
Then once those sales start to taper off, you introduce the music into the streaming environment.
If you’re a DIY artist, limiting your distribution is probably a mistake
But here’s the truth, and I’m sure you’ve heard it before: you’re not Adele.
Chances are, when you put out a new album, the hype it gets in its first 3 months will be the most attention that music ever sees. Which means you can’t afford to stall people in their possible interactions with your music.
Adele, Beyoncé, Drake, Radiohead — they’re superstars. They can command their audiences to go wherever they please. But if you’re trying to build your audience, you need to go to them, in the places they’re already consuming music. And that means: be everywhere. On iTunes, Amazon, Apple Music, Spotify, Google Play, TIDAL. On YouTube. On CD. Even on vinyl (if you have it the budget).
Once you’ve grown your career to the point where you have a sizeable and loyal fanbase, then it might be time to toy with this model a bit. But until then, don’t make it hard for your fans to find your music. There are too many distractions and alternatives these days; if someone can’t find your song on their preferred platform, they’ll listen to the next artist’s song.
What do you think of windowing? Are you a lesser-known artist who’s had success with this strategy? Let me know in the comments.