Setting Up A Release Calendar

A release calendar can be a helpful tool to build and strengthen an international community. But setting one up can be quite a task. This page is there to help you out!

✧ Getting Started

Reaching out to your community
Enlist the help of others! Ask if members of your community want to help you out or have some ideas. You can make a thread in the International Forum (or your country's forum, if there is one) to discuss the possibility of setting up a calendar. You can find a list of the international communities here, and you can see who speaks your language here.

What are your community’s needs?
Before you excitedly get going and set up the pages, take a moment to calm down and think. What does your community need? Try to answer these questions so that you can set your page up accordingly:

• What benefits does the calendar bring to my community?
• What is currently missing in my community? How will the calendar fit in?
• How big is my community? How many people will contribute to the calendar?
• How many new albums/singles come out? Does my community need a yearly, monthly or quarterly calendar?
• Will the calendar group all genres together? Will there be different calendars for different genres?
• Who goes in the calendar? Only artists who sing in your language, or also singers who sing in English?

Where to find music to add?
Once you've created the page, it's best to fill it up with a few examples so that others can see how it’s done. Finding new albums can be difficult, though. You might be able to find some resources for your specific country, but here are some general ones that can help you out.

✧ Album Release Calendar

Now that you've thought well about how you want the calendar to look like, it's time to get started. Use the following examples to model your calendar after:

• Yearly Calendar → example
• Monthly Calendar → example
• Quarterly Calendar → currently no example available

The fun thing about calendars is that you can personalize them to whatever works best for your community. However, these are some things you might need to keep in mind:

• The song bio.
• How to organize the albums?
• What goes in the annotation?
• 'TBA': when and how to use it?

✧ Singles Release Calendar

A singles release calendar is easier to set up, but harder to keep up to date. These calendars usually generate less traffic than the album ones, so keep that in mind when creating the page.

Use these examples to model your calendar after:

• Yearly Calendar → example
• Monthly Calendar → example
• Quarterly Calendar → currently no example available
• Weekly Calendar → example

Some other things to keep in mind:

• The song bio.
• How to organize the singles?
• Adding shell pages.

✧ Maintenance

Spread the news!
Promote your calendar! Let your community know that it's there. Announce it in a thread, put the calendar on a prominent place on your country's artist page and mention it to new users. The calendar is not going to be a success if others don't know that it exists.

Keeping your calendar up to date
Setting up the page is just the beginning. Once that it’s live, it’s important to keep the calendars up to date. Add more albums, get new users involved, accept/edit annotations that are made on the page, etc. If an album is added by someone else, always check if the release is confirmed by an official source.

You might also consider reaching out to verified artists from your country to ask them if they want to add their own albums to the calendar.

Keep tabs on how it's going
After you’ve set up the calendar, check how it's received. Use this information to decide what your next steps are going to be. Look at page views, number of albums added, number of contributors, etc. If it's going well, you might consider upsizing. If it's not going so well, consider downsizing or getting more users involved. Ask for feedback to help the calendar get back on its feet.

✧ Advanced

If you’ve got your calendar up and running, you might consider the possibility of doing more to engage the community. Some ideas:

• If you've got your own calendar up, you might consider adding the most notable releases to the main Album or Single Release Calendar on Genius.
• If your country has a forum, you might want to start a monthly/weekly thread that lists all the important albums that are dropping.
• Create a New Music Friday transcription project. Read more about it here.

✧ Calendars by International Communities

2020

• Album Release Calendars
• Singles Release Calendars