Show.co, the music marketing services platform that CD Baby acquired last year, announced today that it has enabled “pre-save” Spotify campaigns, allowing artists' fans to save upcoming releases to their Spotify library ahead of release day.
Over the past year, several major artists have leveraged pre-saves as part of their album rollouts, including Kendrick Lamar, Avicii, Liam Payne, Miley Cyrus and Fifth Harmony. Show.co’s announcement expands access to this feature to the DIY community by opening up pre-saves to all CD Baby artists for free; non-CD Baby artists can also build pre-save campaigns through Show.co’s marketing services, which cost up to $9 a month.
Pre-saves are the streaming analog to album pre-sales, and are particularly effective for streaming fans who may have previously been downloaders, and who demand the same anticipatory mechanisms in their music consumption experience. Record labels tend to devote much of their Spotify marketing attention to encouraging fans to save songs to their collections after listening to those songs on an already-existing playlist, but such behavior is ultimately reactive rather than proactive when it comes to gauging interest in upcoming releases.