Songwriting

Tips for Successfully Releasing Your Own Worship Music w/ Wisdom Moon

Are you a songwriter? Have you ever wanted to release music with your church? Wisdom Moon, founder of Marketing with Wisdom, sat down with LC Founder Matt McCoy to talk about tips for successfully releasing your own worship music!

The Biggest Mistake

Matt: “What’s the biggest mistake that you see artists making when releasing new music?”

Wisdom: “When you have the recording done and the final master in hand, but you have no clue what you’re doing after that. A lot of producer friends I talk to have artists that once they hand off the final master the artist says ‘Great, now what do I do?’ There’s no plan. The biggest mistake is not having a plan for the music you’re recording before it’s done. A lot of times artists will distribute it on a random day and hope for the best, with no strategy behind it.”

Release Schedule Tips

Matt: “What do you think is a good release schedule?”

Wisdom: “It really depends on your goals. We work with a lot of churches and sometimes churches are more restricted in how they can release music and how creative they can get vs. independent artists that may be more flexible. If you don’t have restrictions, the approach that we recommend is the strategy called waterfalling. When you do a waterfall strategy, you’re releasing one song at a time, typically 4 to 6 weeks apart, and you’re adding on the previous releases every time you add a new release. You continue to build on to the releases and by the time you get to the 10th release if you had a 10 song album, it would take 10 months. That’s really the ideal way to release 10 songs. Offer it to the world one song at a time. There’s a lot of benefits to doing it that way. The key is to use the same ISRC code for the songs. It’s like your social security number. If you use the same ISRC code, you won’t lose the streaming numbers or playlist placement that a previous song had when you re-release it.”

Awareness

Matt: “I think we all know that getting your songs on playlists is important, but are they the most important thing?”

Wisdom: The most important thing is awareness. That’s really the biggest challenge anyone has. There’s over 60,000 songs every day being uploaded to Spotify. Even if only 1,000 of them are Christian songs, that’s still a lot of songs. You’re trying to get the same audience’s attention. You have to create awareness about your music. Play-listing is one way to do that, but not the only way. If you can get on an editorial playlist, that can really help your streams, but the past two or three years things have really shifted. Most of them are released through a big distributor or label that is pitching the songs. Very few now are independent. One helpful way to get on playlists if you’re independent is to partner with a distributor so they pitch for you.

Matt: “Are press releases important? What else can help with awareness?”

Wisdom: “Anything in your strategy can serve a purpose. Any church or artist has limited resources, so you have to decide what works best for you. So press releases, pitching, paid ads, anything takes time and resources. Press releases that are really effective are ones that have a compelling story. Other ways for awareness are getting on podcasts to talk about your song, doing interviews, etc. You want to figure out what are your priorities for the release.

Video can be really important, but again it takes time and resources. I would say it’s better to not release a video, then release a bad quality video. It can actually hurt you. TikTok is now the number one platform for artists and you need to be on TikTok. Short form vertical videos are the best things to create right now. A quick performance video and get creative in how you present your music. The key is in the first two seconds you have to hook the viewer. So if you’re taking two seconds to get situated, you’re gonna lose most people. That’s why editing is really important. Hook them in with something compelling.”

For more tips on releasing your own music, such as distribution platforms and more, watch the full interview below!