Albums

What it is

An album is a release project that groups tracks together. An EP, LP, single bundle, or any collection you want to release as one. It lives alongside your tracks in your team workspace and gives you a single place to manage cover art, collaborators, documents, and release details.

Albums move through a simple status: from first idea, through in progress, to ready to be released, and finally released. Once released (or scheduled), Aden can automatically save the album to your lifetime fans on Spotify.

Using it

Create an album. From your team's Albums page, click New album. Give it a title, artist name, and optional release date. You can add existing tracks during creation or later. The form asks which team the album belongs to, but when you belong to only one team that team is auto-selected so you don't have to pick from a list of one.

Add tracks. Open the album and drag tracks from your library into it, or add them from the album's track list. Each track slot has an order number; drag to reorder within the album.

Play an album from the list. Every album card and table row carries the same play button the track cards do, next to the title. Pressing it queues the whole record and starts at track 1, so the bottom bar's next and previous walk the album. The queue (one presigned URL per track) is resolved on that first press, not with the list: a board of albums would otherwise presign the whole catalogue's audio before painting a card. Albums with no tracks show no button. Turn it off with the Audio player card field.

Play the album. Hover the cover art in the right sidebar and press play: the album starts at track 1 and every track lands in the player queue, so the bottom bar's next and previous buttons walk the record. Each track row has the same button on its artwork, which plays the album from that track. A track plays its final version, or its first version when none is marked final; tracks with no audio are skipped.

Upload audio to create tracks. Both the create-album form and the album's Add tracks dialog take audio files directly. Drop a folder's worth of WAVs and each file becomes its own track on the album, in the order you dropped them. Titles come from the file names and stay editable before you save, and BPM, key, duration and the waveform are read off each file. Everything else about a track is edited on its own page afterwards.

Read the tracklist. The list view is rows, not cards: a number, the artwork, a play button, the title, then the track's release date, priority and status on the trailing edge. Rows tint on hover; the only surface on the page is the panel a row opens, which holds that track's versions and the add-version control. Playing a row queues the whole album from that track.

Switch how tracks display. The album's track section has three views, picked with the switcher in its toolbar and remembered in the URL (display): List (the full expandable rows with versions), Board (a kanban by track status; dragging a card to another column updates the track's status) and Recent (most recently updated first).

Browse the album list. /app/albums is the same list surface the tracks page is, built from the shared entity-list components: search on the left of the toolbar, then Filter and Display. Four views, remembered in the URL (display): Board (kanban by status, drag to change status), List, Recent and Table. On the board, Columns regroups the cards by genre, tags, artist, label or visibility instead of status; dragging between genre or tag columns rewrites that value, artist/label/visibility columns are view-only.

Choose what the cards show. The Display popover's card fields drive every view, the table included: cover, artist, status, tracks, visibility, genre, tags, description, UPC, label, for sale, team, release/created/updated dates. Show empty fields turns an enabled-but-empty field into an inline add affordance instead of hiding the row.

Filter the list. Years, months, genres, tags, artists, label, teams, language, for sale, visibility, status, with/empty tracks and a created-date range. Each section has its own reset, and a section whose value the cards currently hide offers Show on cards. Filter combinations save as presets.

Edit details in the sidebar. The album detail's right sidebar mirrors the track sidebar: title and status under the cover art, a collapsed Details section with inline-editable visibility (public/private plus the public link's address), release date, genres (up to 5 chips, stored comma-joined in albums.genre), tags, UPC and created/updated dates. A release date in the past on an unreleased album highlights the date amber with an explanatory tooltip. Share and Download pin to the bottom; deleting the album lives in the album actions menu in the page header.

Edit release metadata. /app/albums/[albumId]/metadata is four tabs, remembered in the URL (tab), the same shape as a track's metadata page: Details (title, artist, UPC, credits), Platforms (find the release on streaming services and store its links), Sale (sell it through the shop add-on) and Domain (give it its own address). The lifetime-fans notice sits above the tabs, since it is about the release rather than any one tab.

Upload cover art and media. In the album detail, upload a cover image and any promotional media (press photos, artwork variants). The cover appears on the public profile if the album is public.

See who worked on what. The album's Collaborators → People tab opens with the teams on the release, then a per-track credit list: one row per track with its collaborators' avatars, and roles and splits in each avatar's hover card. A record credited to the same lineup start to finish collapses to a single line instead of repeating identical rows; the breakdown only appears once the tracks actually differ. A track with nobody on it links straight to its own collaborators page.

Link a team vs add a collaborator. Two different jobs, and the People tab keeps them apart. Add collaborator credits one person on this album with roles and split percentages. Link a team (in the Teams card) hands a whole team access to work on it, by handle or by invite link, and credits nobody. Linking lives behind one button rather than an always-open handle field, which used to read as a second way to add a person.

Invite collaborators. Use the Collaborators tab to send email invitations. Each collaborator gets split percentages (publishing, royalty, mechanical, sync, composition, master). Invited collaborators receive an email and confirm via a link; once confirmed their user_id is attached and their details populate.

Import from Spotify. If your team has a Spotify URL in its social links, use the Spotify import flow to pull in your existing discography. Choose which albums to batch-import; Aden downloads metadata and artwork for each.

Move to released. When the album is ready, change its status to released (or ready to be released for a scheduled date). This triggers the lifetime fans workflow to save the release to fans who follow you on Spotify.

Organisation albums. A label, agency, or any other organisation can also run an album across its roster from Albums in the organisation workspace. The org creates the album, adds the participating artist teams, and pulls tracks from each team's catalog into one tracklist. Every artist keeps ownership of their own tracks and sees the album in their team's Albums list; the organisation manages the shared release project (status, details, teams, tracklist). Removing a team from the album takes that team's tracks out of the tracklist but never out of the team's workspace.

Several organisations together. An album can be co-managed by more than one organisation: the creating org invites partner organisations from the album's Organisations card, the invited org accepts or declines from its own Albums page, and once confirmed both manage the album with the same access. Each org adds artists from its own roster. Signing with multiple organisations also works at the submission level, for albums and tracks alike: each organisation keeps its own submission and contract record.