People tend to think of album PR as something that happens in the two weeks before release — send some emails, post the cover art, hope for the best. By then it’s basically too late to build anything real. A campaign that actually lands usually starts three or four months out, sometimes longer, and most of that time isn’t spent announcing anything. It’s spent quietly setting things up so the announcement, when it finally comes, actually has somewhere to go.
Around the three-month mark, before a single person outside your circle knows the album exists, the real work is research. Who covers your genre right now, not two years ago. Which playlists are still active. Which writers at which outlets have actually written about artists at your level recently, because pitching someone who only covers arena acts is a waste of an email. This is also when you lock the release date for real — not a soft maybe, an actual date you’re building everything else around.
A couple months out is usually when the lead single drops, and it’s doing more work than people give it credit for. It’s not just a song release, it’s the test run for the whole campaign — does the artwork land, does the press pitch get any replies, does the short clips actually get watched. Whatever works here, you lean into harder for the album rollout. Whatever flops, you quietly drop instead of repeating it three more times.
Six weeks out is roughly when press kits need to be finished, not started. Bio, photos, the album one-sheet, everything an editor would need without asking a follow-up question — all of it ready to send the second someone shows interest, because a slow reply kills momentum fast. This is also a decent window to start reaching out to bigger outlets with an exclusive — a first listen, an interview, something that gives them a reason to cover you before the album’s actually out, instead of after everyone else already has.
A month before release, second single, if there is one, plus the album announcement itself — title, date, cover, tracklist, all landing together rather than dribbled out separately. Pre-saves go live here too. People sleep on pre-saves, honestly, but that number is one of the rare ones that actually means something later — when you’re pitching a curator and need a reason for them to take the meeting seriously. So push for it. Properly. Not just a link dropped once and forgotten.
Then the final two weeks hit, and there’s not much left to launch — mostly it’s follow-up. Check back in with everyone who said “maybe” earlier. Confirm interviews are actually scheduled, not just loosely discussed. Get the merch and tour dates, if there are any, lined up so they’re ready the moment the album drops instead of trailing in a week later looking like an afterthought.
And then release day itself is almost an anticlimax, if everything before it went right. The announcement isn’t really happening on release day — it happened weeks earlier, in small pieces, to people who were already paying attention by the time the album actually showed up. Release day is just where all of it lands at once.
