Release plans

What it is

A release plan is a structured launch roadmap attached to a single track. It's generated from a short questionnaire about your release. Budget, timeline, marketing goals, and comes back with a checklist of milestones, todos, and draft social posts you can start working through right away.

Lifetime fans are people who subscribe once to your artist profile and then automatically have every future release saved to their Spotify library the moment it goes public. They also get an email notification. You collect fans through your public profile page or from a presave link attached to a specific track.

Using it

Creating a release plan

1. Open a track and go to the Release plans tab.
2. Click New plan (a finished track without a plan also offers Plan the release in its sidebar footer, where Submit otherwise sits). The questionnaire opens as one compact sheet, already filled from what Aden knows: genre and tags from the track, platforms from the team's connected accounts and the track's streaming links, lyrics and version count from the track versions, vertical footage from the media library, and content capacity, promo hours, audience and budget from the team's most recent plan. The sheet only asks what it couldn't find: everything it filled in waits behind Filled in for you at the bottom, each answer with a green dot saying where it came from. A yes/no counts as found only when Aden found the yes (lyrics on a version, vertical clips in the library), so a track without lyrics added is asked, not answered no. Each question is one row in its section (Campaign, Sound, Reach, Resources): the question on the left, the answer on the right. Genres, platforms and audience take the full row; yes/no questions are switches. Hovering a row shows an info icon with more context. Change anything, then Create plan.
3. Aden generates a set of milestones, per-milestone todos, and draft social posts based on your answers and saves them straight into the plan, which opens in the editor. There is no preview step: every milestone, date and task is editable in place. Every pre-release date is squeezed into the time left before the release date, so a plan made two weeks out spreads its tasks across those two weeks instead of dating half of them in the past. If the act has Identity filled in, those drafts pick up the tagline, persona, sound, and visual notes. Empty identity keeps the plain templates. A later identity edit does not rewrite a saved plan. The identity card on the plan still shows the live version.
4. The plan is saved in draft status. Move it to active when you're working it, completed when the launch is done, or archived to shelve it.
5. Market-wakeup posts from the questionnaire are materialised immediately as draft posts in your Posts dashboard, wired to the connected accounts you selected: ready to review and schedule.

A goal for the plan

Every plan can have one goal: the result the release is for, like "+1K followers by release" or "10K streams in the first 4 weeks". The first field of the sheet suggests one from your team's own goals (a team goal about followers suggests the followers preset, one about posting the posting one), and the dot before it names that team goal. Pick another preset, or type your own words in the search, like "20 radio plays".

The goal becomes a team goal on your Goals page, counted from the day the plan is made until the release (or a few weeks after it, for streams and shows). Posting goals count themselves; followers, streams, presaves and playlist adds are logged by hand with Log progress until Aden reads them from your streaming stats.

Beside the plan, What it takes works the goal back through the promotion pillars: the impressions, clicks and fan results it needs, from your last 90 days of ads (typical music ad results until you have some). The plan page shows the goal, how far it got, and lets you change or clear it.

Official or unofficial

A release is official when it goes out through a distributor to Spotify and every store, and unofficial when it can't: a remix of someone else's song, an edit, a bootleg. The sheet's Release question picks one. Your own song, or a track with an ISRC, a distributor or a Spotify or Apple Music link, is official and filed under Filled in for you; a remix with none of those is asked.

An unofficial plan is built for SoundCloud: upload it privately and schedule it for release day, add the SoundCloud link as the track's listen link so it plays on your profile, set up a free download, and send it to the original artist's label (a remix that takes off can be signed as official). The first clip posts the track as its own sound, since no distributor delivers it to TikTok or Instagram. Pitching goes to SoundCloud repost channels and curators, and posts ask fans to follow and listen on SoundCloud instead of pre-saving. Picking Unofficial also takes Spotify and Apple Music off the target platforms. Official plans keep the distributor, pre-save and Spotify editorial tasks, and on release day switch clips to the official sound. A revival of an unofficial track skips the remix contest and refreshes its SoundCloud page instead of store metadata.

Unofficial plans wear an Unofficial badge on the team board, the track's plans list and the plan page.

Pillars on milestones

Every promotion milestone works on one pillar: awareness (getting heard), conversion (getting the click) or fans (keeping listeners). Aden sets it for the milestones it generates; admin work like masters and metadata has none. Change it from the chip beside the milestone's due date. Posts made from the plan carry the pillar of their kind (teasers are awareness, the announcement is conversion, behind-the-scenes is fans), so Analytics, Ads shows them in the right pillar.

Posts, week by week

The plan's Posts tab lists every post for the release by week, counted from the release week ("6 weeks before", "Release week"). The plan's ideas and the posts already written for the song sit in one list, each marked Idea, Draft, Scheduled, Posted or Failed. Write turns an idea into a draft and opens it; Write this week drafts the next week's ideas in one go. Click an idea's title for its caption and hashtags. The lightbulb opens Post ideas with the song picked.

Starting from a template

Templates in the new-plan sheet's header opens the templates under it: other artists' published plans first, then Aden's own (single without an ad budget, single with paid ads, market wakeup push; catalogue revival for released tracks). Four show at a time, See all opens the rest. Pick one to preview its milestones on this track's dates, its date range and budget, then Use for this track. Dates move to the release date in the sheet below, or count from today when none is set. The plan saves and opens in the editor like a generated one.

To share one of your plans, open it and turn on Publish as template in the "…" menu. Other artists see your team name, the milestone and task titles, their dates relative to release, and budgets. Never the track, notes, links, assignees or comments. Turn it off in the same menu.

Team dashboard

/app/teams/[teamId]/release-plans is the board of every plan on the team, four columns by status. The columns render even when empty, each with one line saying what lands there. Above the board, tracks without a plan appear as chips (first eight, the rest behind the picker) that open that track's prefilled wizard. A team with no tracks gets "Upload track" and "Import catalog" instead of a picker with nothing in it.

Revival plans: making old tracks relevant again

For a track that is already released (including imported back-catalog), the same wizard creates a revival plan instead: the header and default plan name switch to "Revival", and the plan is saved with plan_type: 'revival'. Use it to plan anniversary pushes, remasters, playlist campaigns, or a social re-run for an old song.

Revival plans get their own questionnaire (REVIVAL_QUESTIONNAIRE_STEPS in config/questionnaire.ts): the occasion (anniversary, new version, trend, sync placement, or a plain catalog push), a campaign day instead of a release date, and whether a new version (remaster, sped-up, acoustic) is part of the push. Alongside the reused genre / mood / platform / content-capacity / budget questions. The prefill (buildPrefill) sets the campaign day to the next anniversary of the release date and, when that is within 120 days, presumes the occasion is the anniversary. Generation goes through buildRevivalMilestones / buildRevivalPosts: catalog refresh & audit, story mining, an optional new-version milestone, a remix contest milestone (open a track request from Demos → Track requests with stems and a deadline before campaign day, line up the best entries as campaign-week content, announce the winner), playlist re-pitch, an occasion-specific campaign day, paid promo (if budgeted), and a sustain phase. Revival plans wear a "Revival" badge in the track's plans sidebar and on the team release-plans dashboard cards.

Anniversary radar. A daily cron (track-anniversary-radar, part of the daily umbrella workflow) finds released tracks whose release-date anniversary (1, 5, 10 or 20 years) is exactly 30 days out and notifies every active member of the owning team (track_anniversary notification, in-app + push), deep-linking into the revival-plan wizard. Every released track counts including imported back-catalog, which is exactly the music whose anniversaries matter.

Working a plan

• Each milestone has a due date, an optional budget, and a list of todos.
• Check off todos as you complete them. Milestones track progress across the team.
• When writing a todo, type @ to mention anyone who can work the track. Its collaborators, the owning team's members, and members of any organisation the team belongs to (the same people you can @mention on media and asset comments).
• A todo can carry a link to where it gets done: a page in Aden or an external site. Seeded plans link "Set up pre-save links" to the release tab, "Pitch the track to labels" to submissions, "Create teaser posts" to Posts and "Send a preview to early fans" to a new email campaign with the track attached. Add a link to your own todos from the task's link icon or the task detail.
• Some of those seeded todos tick themselves: creating a campaign that carries the track, creating a post linked to it, or submitting it to a label closes the matching todo (its checkbox is dashed until then).
• The track sidebar ends with Up next: the plan's progress, its next three open todos with their links, and the next linked todo as a button. A track marked Ready with no plan gets a "Plan the release" button there instead.
• You can share the plan with an external contact (label, manager) via a read-only share link: they see the milestones and status without needing an Aden account.
• You can delete a plan from either the plans list or the plan header. When the plan has milestones and tasks, you choose whether to also delete all linked data (milestones and tasks are permanently removed) or keep it (the milestones and tasks stay on the track and are only unlinked from the plan).
• The Content ideas tab opens with a post recipe: an ask, a hook and a shot that fit together. Shuffle until one clicks, then copy it or add it to the plan as a milestone. [song name] fills with the track title.

Collecting lifetime fans

1. Share your public profile link (/@<team>/fans) or embed it on your website.
2. Visitors enter their email. They can optionally connect their Spotify account to get new releases auto-saved to their library.
3. Confirmed fans appear in your Fans dashboard under Teams → [team] → Fans.

What fans receive

When you release a track (status moves to released), every active lifetime fan automatically gets:

• The track saved to their Spotify Liked Songs (if they connected Spotify).
• An email notification about the new release.

This happens on the release date. Fans who signed up after the fact are not back-filled.

The label release schedule (organisations)

Organisations (labels, distributors, managers) get a roster-wide Releases page at Org → Planning → Releases. It aggregates every upcoming track and album across the artist teams the org has release access to:

• Schedule by month: upcoming releases grouped by calendar month, each with cover art, artist team, single/album badge, release date and countdown.
• Release readiness: each upcoming release shows what's still missing for release day: artwork, audio, ISRC (tracks), UPC (albums), a release plan, and distribution (a distributor on the track/album or an active submission to the org). Complete releases show a Ready badge.
• Ready, not scheduled: content marked ready_to_be_released that has no release date yet, so the label can slot it into the calendar.
• Recently released: the last 60 days, for follow-up.

An Upcoming releases widget with the same data (next 8 releases) is on the org dashboard by default. Access is scope-gated: only teams that granted the release scope appear.

Reflect after the release. Once a track is released, leave an optional release retrospective: a 0–5 star rating (half stars allowed) plus what went well, what didn't, and what to do differently next time, about the milestones, the release plan, the content, anything. Retrospectives are visible to the whole team. One click saves the written learnings as a team skill, so the AI assistant automatically applies them the next time it drafts a release plan or milestones, the team stops repeating the same mistakes.