 You've probably lost tons of momentum over the years and lost opportunities. If you've released any music before, you've probably looked back and seen what you could have done better each time getting more people to hear it. You think about all that momentum you could have had and all the fans you could have accumulated if you'd just done a few simple things. In this episode, I'm gonna show you with about 30 minutes of time how you keep a tab open on your browser and you can continually get better at promoting your music and build up your fan base so you no longer have these regrets. Hi, I'm Jesse Canada, this is News Formation. And yes, I'm in a new room now. So, a lot of you have been following my advice. I want you to stay organized. So I wanted to pass this on before we get a little too far into these videos and you get overwhelmed when we have to go back and do this later. So I wanna get this going as soon as possible. So I keep hearing from a lot of you that you're about to post your song so I wanna get right into this. So there's this dude, Atul Gawande. He's the head of this organization called Who. Yeah, Who. And they basically try to get less people to die. It's much less noble work than defending Poppunk, but whatever. So what his work was at this Who, which is the World Health Organization, he figured out that the brain sucks and is easily distracted. So since he's tasked with making people die less, he basically figured out that you need to have people do checklists because the brain just forgets everything and little details fall through the cracks and that's how people die. So he implemented all these checklists and lives were saved. Eddie wrote this book about it called The Checklist Manifesto, which is a boring but good read if you're a real productivity nerd like me, it's very good. But I'm gonna pass on the basic essences of it to you. Basically, when you're repeating tasks time and time again, our brains wanna make shortcuts, figure out ways to cut those corners and we have to go against that or else those details will be left open. So that's why we make checklists. Now I know this isn't the funnest topic, but I'm gonna explain to you why this is so important. So there's this other smart dude named Daniel Levitan and he was so smart, he used to be a record producer and then left doing that and became a neuroscientist because he's really smart, truly a wise man. Anyway, he wrote two of the best books I've ever read. One is called This Is Your Brain on Music and the other one is called The Organized Mind. So what I wanna talk about though is that book The Organized Mind. It talks about a lot of different things but most importantly, he shows your brain becomes less of a mess and your thoughts get more clear when you write things down. If you're thinking about, if you're gonna have to go get toilet paper after work instead of having a surplus of it around or remembering what you have to buy in the future, this bogs your brain down from the creative tasks and all the other things you could be thinking about doing. They show time and time again, our heads get less cluttered and we get more creative if we don't have all this. So things like automatic bill payments, subscriptions to things, keep your mind free and clear and ready to focus on real shit instead of minutia bullshit that you will be able to focus somewhere else. Seriously, try making sure more things are automated and written down and that you keep things on a to-do list. I bet it'll blow your mind at how much more attention you have for other things and how much easier it is to do your life. Well, all this sounds obvious. You probably aren't doing things like this. So because of that, we're gonna start making spreadsheets so you make sure you do things since I have bad news for you. If you manage musicians or your own career, it's basically repeating actions over and over and over again. Every album cycles the same fucking thing. Every video is the same thing. Every single is the same thing. You have to do these things over and over but if you've done this before, you've probably messed up a lot of these things and that's why I wanna talk to you about how we prevent you from doing that over and over and over again. So have I sold you on checklists yet? Great. So let's talk about this one. As you can see on the tabs on the left, I have each task outlined of what I do every time I release a single. Up here is all of my group in cell hypey singles. Each one is in a category and what I'm gonna do as I go through the release cycle is I'm gonna put an X as each time. So as you can see on my website of these little tabs, you can go to pin and they will leave them there and what I do when I'm working on an album cycle is I pin this tab here and I keep that there and I open that each day. It then reminds me what I have to get done and what's the next steps in my single release plan. So I keep momentum of my project going and as well it makes it so that I don't forget anything. So I'm always remembering new things I have to do as I do these things. So what I will do then is I will enter them. So let's say I just remembered to post artwork on Twitter header. So that's gonna be after release and then I add it to my workflow right here and then it's there for all the rest of them so I remember and if I remember this four in, I can, if it's something I should go back to I can do that right then and there. So let's go through what this actually looks like. After I get a master back, that's when this starts. I prepare the artwork. I should already have the artwork done because really the second you start mixing a song, the artwork better start getting done because if you're hiring out artists, they're gonna be late because that's what artists like to do. Then I add it to Distro Kids, SoundCloud and Bandcamp since those are the three separate places I have to add it to. I send it to the rest of my team because people who work for you like to be looped in on what you're doing and they don't wanna hear the song when everybody else does, they wanna feel special. I very importantly put it in a backup folder on the Dropbox and on G Drive so in case anything ever happens to it, I have it saved there. I send the final master to the music video director since they've probably been working on a rough cut and now I want them to have that while they're editing. Before the release, I'll make sure I have the Spotify canvas image ready. I'll submit it to Spotify for artists for playlist placement, which we've talked about before. After release signifies after this song is out, I'll do three separate posts that are strategic. I'll have their own images on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and I'll have those all pre-written somewhere and we'll talk about that at some other point. Like I just did post artwork on Twitter header, Reddit forum posts, Facebook groups, post vertical clipped Instagram, post wide clipped Instagram, text contact list. We've talked about this before that you should be texting all the people who are interested in you, that the song is out, get them to help out with promoting it. So then we have, as I've talked about in my plan, every time I release a song, I release both the audio stream and a single screen video. Then I release two weeks later a lyric video. Then two weeks later, I release a music video and then I start over again and do that repeatedly to build up my momentum. We then enter the lyric video phase. So I upload the lyric video, social posts, update cards on single screen videos. So what does that mean? There's cards on every YouTube video. You see cards in my videos oftentimes up top. What you can do on each of your singles is go over to all your other songs and inform people about the newest version or if they're on the single screen version of your video, let them know there's a lyric video or a music video since they may rather be watching that. Definitely put that at the top of the video. So then we get to the music video. I upload it, I do the posts and I update the cards again. Another thing I should have here is set reminder. It's super important to go into your calendar every time you have a big occurrence. If you release that song, you release that amazing video that you have, released an album, whatever it is, put it on a calendar so that every year you can make a post about that to remind people that they should give it another listen. That's a great way to drum up streams for your music. So in the comments of this video, I'm gonna post a link to this template. You're gonna be able to download it and add it to your Google Drive to get you started from this. I highly recommend keeping this pinned on your desktop. As you can see here, I keep a bunch of common things pinned on my browser each day and then I let the other less substantial things float around and disappear throughout the day. But this stays here so I've reminded to always go back to it and keep looking at what I should be doing so I keep making progress on promoting my music. That's it. Am I missing anything? Is there any way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I wanna answer them. So leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did, please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with. As well, I have a Facebook group that's linked below that has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything, playlist or con artists, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you wanna learn more about me, make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, head to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. One last thing, if you liked this video, there's two playlists here with tons more videos that you'll probably enjoy. One's about how you promote your music and the other's about how you make songs you're happy with. Otherwise, you can hit the subscribe button here to see the rest of my videos. Thanks so much for watching.