 I'm sure you see it just as much as me. Musicians on social media are constantly asking you to pre-save a song you've never even heard. And they treat it like it's one of the most important things you can do to help them for some reason. It's both annoying to us, the listeners, and kind of sad for them. Well, yes, Super Hands will help you out by doing whatever you ask them to do, but flooding your feet with this harkens back to asking people to like you on Facebook to hear a track and other archaic music promotion cringe that I thought we got rid of along with Neon Clothes and Kanye West being a relevant music artist. But there's a reason musicians do this. They've been promised these pre-saves are going to do big things for them. But I'm here to tell you, it's all bullshit. So in this video, I'm going to tell you why you need to stop trying to get people to pre-save your songs and what you should be doing to promote your music instead of that. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to go from zero to ten thousand fans on YouTube. And this is Muse Formation. So since I'm a gracious YouTuber, I'm going to take the position of you, the viewer, who are like, what the fuck are you talking about? How could this holy grail of music promotion be wrong? If all these very cool musicians that I love do this, how could they be wrong? And it seems to be working out great for them. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in music, most people are just imitating what someone else does. And that consistently leads musicians to doing a lot of things that don't make much sense, like this Noel Gallagher from Oasis tweet. You know, I once heard someone say Noel Gallagher's brain is a lot like David Crosby's penis. It's amazing either one work and you definitely don't want to see either one in action. But seriously, I can't tell you why musicians started to think pre-saves were the most important thing in the world, but it sure is conventional wisdom at this point in 2020. And like most conventional wisdom, it's misguided. I imagine some idiot who writes for a site like MusicThinkingSortium, wrote it for their college paper and then landed it on that blog since they need to fill it with useless junk to keep clicks up, even though the writer has never done a real campaign and it trickled out like most of the bad wisdom I've seen in music promotion that goes around today. But let's back up. You may not even understand what a pre-save is for Spotify. There's tons of companies like Ling Fire, Tone Den, along with every music distributor who make great looking tools that allow fans to save a song to their library on Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer. And this is before it's even out, so it sounds pretty fun, right? The way they see is when the song is released, it will be in the listeners library on release day. But while that's all well and good, so many musicians believe this one gets them on editorial playlists on Spotify, two gets them more listens, and three is how they build a fan base, all of which are wrong. And I'm going to explain why. First, let's talk about the myth that they help get you on editorial playlists. Ever since I made this video on why you should never do teasers or promote songs before they are released, I've heard a ton of shit for it. And so many people just love disagreeing with it. I say this because if a song is not able to be streamed, then fans can't build a relationship with it. And as per usual, if you haven't seen that video, it's linked in the card right now or in the description below. But all I've heard from musicians is how will I ever get on playlists if I don't get my presaves to be humongous and make that first day burst? As I've talked about in many videos, I'm lucky enough to be in the music business and hang out with tons of cool people like Spotify Playlist curators and employees and people who pitch these for a living. And at one point, one of them told me that presaves are not considered at all for playlist consideration. And I was like, huh? So the next time I heard this, I inquired and the playlist curators said that it isn't possible for Spotify curators to see them. And I started scratching my head and then just stopped advising any of the musicians I work on promotions with to do them since it seemed they were pretty irrelevant for our goals, which is usually to do lots of promotion based on playlists. But I never went down the rabbit hole until I was having a great talk with YouTube resident Facebook ad expert Andrew Southworth on his channel. If you don't subscribe to his channel, there's a link for that you can click right now. And right after that, there will be a link to humanized discussion on this, which is in the cards or in the description below. Andrew confirmed what I had heard, which is that Spotify playlist curators have absolutely no way to see how many presaves you have and how much activity you're generating there. And this stems from the fact that all these companies that make these widgets use Spotify's API and then are able to control your Spotify profile. And then they log into your Spotify account on the day that the song comes out and save it that day. So Spotify is totally blind to anything that's happened in that process. I wanted to be sure this was true. So I enlisted the help of my friend who's a crazy hacker type, but he says his work won't allow him to be quoted without permission from his PR department. So let's just call him Mr. Robo. I wanted to make sure this was the case, since I don't want to give out bad information. And he's one of the few people I trust to decipher all that weird code stuff on websites, since I'm not smart enough to do that. He confirmed that there is indeed no way for Spotify to see presaves until release day. It's his Spotify doesn't consider songs for playlists that are already released. That's not very helpful for getting you on playlists. For more confirmation, I read the language, some of my favorite presave link generators. And this one at Linkfire really spelled it out. And that language sure looks like it says the case, that they're the ones who do this work. So they do not help you get on an editorial playlist. So let's clear that from your brain. But I also said I would tell you why they don't help you build your fan base or get listens. In fact, there's harm in doing them. That video I made on why teasers and promoting your songs goes through this very eloquently. So yet again, I'm going to recommend it. But the shore of it is, it's so hard to get potential fans' attention. So promoting something they can't listen to and start to get addicted to and build a relationship with. Instead of something they can hear and build a relationship with and start to want to listen to that song over and over and over again, it's just so much less effective. You need to be making sure that you always promote your songs with things people can listen to and keep listening to over and over and over again and build a bond. Since if you happen to get a fan's attention and it goes away, they're never going to build a relationship with your music and get them addicted to it. The fact is you lose so many opportunities to get a fan when you promote songs they can't yet hear or tell their friends about you lose out on them clicking a song they can hear at the moment that they are most enthusiastic about it and are most likely to share with a friend. So that's what presaves do since it's a big ass to save a song you may be annoyed to see in your library later since you don't know if you will like it later. Here's another weird thing. It seems Spotify has de-emphasized this in their interface. I don't even have a tab for songs in my Spotify anymore. It seems on both mobile and desktop Spotify has dropped the library function to favor playlists. So it's safe to say I don't think people are scrolling through their saved songs and seeing your song in there and then building a relationship with it. So that makes this presave even more relevant. But they are digging through their playlists. So that's where I would focus my own promotion energy. People look in playlists, which is why we see such astronomical figures about playlist consumption these days. I mean, it really is astounding whenever you see a statistic about how many people are listening to playlists these days compared to albums or individual songs. In fact, I can get why when I like an album, I just make it a playlist on Spotify and I may delete songs off of it or rearrange them or add songs from the band's catalog to it and make it my own listening experience the way I want to hear it, since that's such a more superior way to listen to music. But you're probably saying, God damn it, you just deflated all my plans. So what do you do to promote your music instead of presaves? Actually, let's calm down the pipe or believe this a little bit. I think it's fine to do one or two posts where you have a new single next week. And sure, you drop a presave link in there for the fans that are already there and are probably going to be really into it. But you should do this with the option for them to follow you since so many of these companies presaves widgets actually allow you to do follow widgets, which gets you into Spotify's release radar. I think it's fine to announce a song for your biggest fans, but putting all your effort into this is a fool's game. And I want to ensure you're not doing that. What's more effective, though, is to use these presave widgets after the song is out, since they turn to save widgets after the song is out and you can use them to get follows and get listens after your song is out. As well, do something helpful. Ask your fans to add your song to a playlist, since that actually is something that playlist curators look at and see and see the enthusiasm from, which will help you in the future. And we'll remind them to listen to your songs later. Most of all, tell them to share their playlists with friends if you're on them. That's the thing that really helps your numbers go up. But really, instead, you should be working on building your community, getting followers on Spotify, which can make more effective with nudges. Get better at your playlist pitches and use a good release strategy. I have a nice playlist that describes all this in depth that's going to come up on the end screen now or is in the description below. This playlist has tons of strategies to help you build up your music instead of doing this silly practice. Thanks for watching.