Music promotion for independent labels

The most common label mistake is treating promotion as a shared pot: one list, one mailbox, every artist batched into the same week. It produces three problems at once. The mailbox reputation absorbs the whole roster’s volume, the press and curators receive near-identical emails from the same label, and nobody can tell which artist’s campaign actually worked.

Separate the campaigns, then share the plumbing. Each release gets its own contact segment, its own sender name matching the artist, its own send dates and its own reporting. The label shares the domain, the verification discipline and the templates. That structure is also what makes a small label look professional: a curator receiving three pitches from three artists over three months, each written for them, remembers the label.

A label needs more than one mailbox. If every artist sends from the same address, a bad list for one release contaminates deliverability for the rest. Use enough sending identities that volume is spread and a problem can be isolated, and keep each identity’s volume steady rather than spiking on release day.

Verification is the other shared discipline: every address checked before it enters a segment, and every hard bounce removed after a send. Allowances should match the roster’s realistic monthly output, not its ambitions. On this platform the tiers scale managed mailboxes from 1 to 15 and email allowances from 2,000 to 500,000, which maps to a roster size rather than a single artist. The published per-tier numbers are on the pricing page, and the release timeline guide covers how to sequence the campaign around them.

Press and curators do not want the label’s catalogue; they want the one record that fits what they cover. Build segments by genre, outlet type and region, and record the last time each contact heard from the label. If two artists on the roster fit the same outlet, space the pitches out and give each one a different angle rather than sending both in the same week.

Keep a shared suppression list at label level: anyone who has asked not to be contacted again, hard bounces, and addresses that generated a complaint. That list is the single most valuable asset a small label builds, because it is the only thing standing between a growing roster and a blocked domain.

Report per release: contacts attempted, delivered, replies, positive replies, pieces of coverage and playlist additions you can verify. Do not report open rates as success; opens are affected by privacy features and say little about whether a curator cared. Positive replies per hundred contacts is the number that tells a label whether the list or the pitch needs work.

Artists on the roster deserve the same numbers, including the unflattering ones. A label that reports "campaign sent" and nothing else trains its artists to expect magic. A label that reports 40 contacts and two replies teaches them what promotion actually costs in effort, which is also how you justify the next campaign.

A small label has four releases in a quarter and a Pro Industry plan: 3 managed mailboxes, 10,000 emails a month and up to 10,000 contacts. Each release gets one mailbox and one segment of 250 contacts, matched by genre. That is 1,000 first emails across the quarter plus follow-ups, comfortably inside the allowance and spread across three sending identities.

Week one of each release is list preparation and verification. Week two is the first wave. Week three is follow-ups with one new asset. The label reviews positive replies per 100 contacts at the end of each release and changes the segment or the first line for the next one. Nobody sends more than 250 emails in a day, and no campaign shares a mailbox with another release in the same week.