Pre-release
Announce it once. The link does the rest.
A release campaign starts weeks before the music exists and does not stop the day it arrives. One address should cover the whole of it, and change state on its own at the moment that matters — usually while you are asleep.
Attention peaks before the music exists
The cruelest timing problem in music promotion: your audience is most excited in the weeks before release day — exactly when there is nothing to link to. So artists either promote nothing, or promote a link that will be wrong the moment the release lands, stranding every poster and pinned comment on a dead page.
A pre-release page ends the dilemma. It exists from the day you announce, collects fans the whole way, and converts itself into the release page at the exact moment — same URL, forever. The hype window finally has somewhere to go.
How the transition works
You set a release moment and a timezone. DropRoute schedules the change, runs it, and records what happened. If a provider is slow or a check fails, the page does not flip into a broken state: it stays where it is, tells you, and retries.
The transition is a job in a queue, not a timer in a browser tab. It survives deploys, restarts, and the machine that scheduled it disappearing.
The four states
Before the date
A countdown, the artwork, and one action: pre-save where a service supports it, or "email me on release day" where it does not. Nobody lands on a page that says the release is coming and offers nothing to do about it.
On the day
The page becomes the release page at the moment you set, in the timezone you set. Same address, same QR code, same post from three weeks ago — now pointing at something people can play.
After the transition
Pre-saves are delivered where the provider allows it, and the result is reported: how many were attempted, how many landed, how many failed and why.
When a provider will not play along
Pre-save availability depends on each service’s API, approval status, and region. Where it is unavailable, the page says so and offers the release-day email instead — rather than showing a button that quietly does nothing.
This is the part most tools leave vague. DropRoute states it on the page the fan sees.
What is honest about the numbers
Pre-save conversion is reported as the share of completed pre-saves that transitioned on release day, paired with destination clicks on the converted link in the first seventy-two hours. That is a real, checkable figure.
What you will not see is a pre-save counted as a stream, or a projection of streams derived from clicks. How measurement works.
Plan
Pre-release pages, pre-save workflows, and scheduled destination rescans are part of Artist Pro. Everything else on this page — the countdown, the release-day email capture, the transition itself — is what makes the campaign work rather than an upsell placed in front of it. See the plans.
Set the date once
Build the page now, schedule the transition, and go to bed on release eve knowing the link will change itself.