A few days into the 90% ruling and I’m overwhelmed at the amount of people who have signaled that they’re keen to get into studio. Now, more than ever, upcoming artists should be pushing music producer’s boundaries and try to get into studio as often as they can as a ruling like this can only be taken advantage of by getting into studio and making sure artists put out more music.

I often get asked what an upcoming artists music release pattern should look like and I’m of the opinion that there should be no limiting of the amount of music that is put out. There won’t be a noticeable difference between releasing 10 songs and 20 songs if you are an upcoming artist. The thing is, you’d much rather have more tracks in play and push one or two at a time than only have one or two tracks out at a time. The truth is that no one cares about you or your music until you make a wave. The only way you’ll make a wave is by getting word of your music out there. Once this is done and you have a decent buzz then you can start to be a bit selfish with your music as you have expectant fans and the anticipation can work in your favour. Don’t be too romantic with the idea that you need to wait 3 months before releasing again if you only have 50 listeners. You need to make waves by all means necessary.

My core audience knows how many beats I make and how many songs I put out. They know that I’m sending final masters at least 3 times a week. This means by the end of each year I’m sure I’m releasing at least 1000 songs. I won’t even get into how many beats leave The Sanctuary. At the end of the day, awareness-building through release of music is going to be a key way of winning in this time of change.

If you really are stingy on releasing new music or you feel that you really aren’t in a position to be releasing music so often (because studio is so damn expensive and we don’t like bugging our producer homies about free studio time), your best bet is to release as much content around your music as possible. Build hashtags, tshirts, artwork, blog posts, vlog posts, pics for social media and as many videos of you in studio and on your grind as possible. These things aren’t to show off how much you’re doing as this is pretentious, but you’re trying to build awareness. This awareness around your music leads you up to your release.

Back when Jlawless and I dropped revelation, we spent a bit of time releasing videos of ourselves in studio. Rapping, making beats etc. I built up a system of tweets and Facebook posts that scheduled out every day. By the time we released the project there was so much hype around it, we were sure that it would get into the hands of everyone we needed it to. Before we knew it, 8000 people had downloaded and listened it on various platforms. There was massive awareness online. Our twitter feed was blowing up and a lot of people were talking about the project. We had increased our awareness and we were getting so much new work.

Take some time and make proper plans to release as much music/content as you can. This notion coupled with the fact that radio stations ACTUALLY want to play local stuff now means that you’re in a better situation to be heard than ever before. Don’t hold back.

Let me know if this post resonated with you at all. You can hit me up on +27746057360 or silasbeats@gmail.com or on www.silasbeats.info. let’s keep in touch and grow the industry.

Stay inspired,
SB