Album release checklist for the DIY musician - success plan!

This kind of post comes up all the time and this latest one from CD Baby listing what you need to do when that huge box of CD's has just been delivered is a good checklist to have to hand.

When your album is finished, your work is only half done; and oftentimes, that first half is the easy part.

Radio promotion, PR, booking, web maintenance, and all the other “business” elements of a music career generally don’t come naturally to artists. But if you can learn to embrace the fact that these tasks NEED to get done in order for anyone to hear your music (and chances are that no one else is going to handle all those things FOR you), then you’ll eventually find a sense of fun and accomplishment in the non-musical chores too!

Not only does it then list 12 steps that you need to go through but it also links to loads of further articles that expand on those steps. This is one worth bookmarking!

Whilst we're on the subject, there's a great pre-release checklist on MusicianWages here and you'll then need to check out Cameron's mind bogglingly good series of posts on everything you need to know about self-releasing an album here. It's awesome!

BUT, and this is CRUCIAL, this is all bollocks unless your album is worth releasing in the first place (read our post here) and you MUST have built a fanbase first - READ this post from Topspin dude Ian Rogers (he really is actually a dude) which is the best one post description of how to build that fanbase that I have ever seen.

I'll be sending endless people who contact me and ask about how they should release their album to read this post - I'd hope you'd bookmark it and refer to it as this is pretty much the plan on how you acheive DIY success!