Free Tools for a Single Release Campaign | TAP
Free tools for single release PR campaigns
By TAP Editorial Team
Quick answer
Two of these matter more than the rest. Pitch the track through Spotify for Artists before it comes out, which is free and takes ten minutes: Spotify asks for at least seven days' notice for the song to reach your followers' Release Radar and suggests two weeks. Then upload it to BBC Introducing. Everything else on this list is scheduling, tracking and design, and all of it costs nothing.
A single release is a short window and a long list of small jobs. The good news is that almost every job has a free tool attached to it, and two of them are the closest thing to free promotion that exists: pitching your unreleased track inside Spotify for Artists, and uploading it to BBC Introducing. Both are free, both take minutes, and both have to happen before the record comes out, which is why they are top of this list. The rest is the machinery: somewhere to keep your contacts, something to schedule your posts, and a way of finding out what happened afterwards.
Your streaming figures, saves, listeners and playlist adds, and the form for pitching an unreleased track to Spotify's own playlist editors.
Free tier: Free once you have claimed your artist profile. There is no paid tier and nothing here sits behind a payment.
Best for: Pitching the track before it comes out. Spotify says to pitch at least seven days ahead for the song to reach your followers' Release Radar, and recommends two weeks. One song at a time, and not one you are only featured on. Do it the day your release is scheduled.
One upload puts your track in front of the BBC Introducing shows covering your area, without you having to find and email each one.
Free tier: Free, and open to anybody making music.
Best for: The most useful twenty minutes an unsigned UK artist can spend. Find your local show at bbc.co.uk/introducing first so you know who might play it and can hear what else they play.
Plays, listeners, Shazams and playlist placements across Apple Music, in one dashboard.
Free tier: Free with a claimed artist profile.
Best for: The audience that saves and buys rather than skips. Apple numbers run smaller than Spotify and the people behind them tend to stay, which makes them worth watching separately rather than folding into one total.
Most distributors generate a pre-save link before release and a single link afterwards that sends each listener to whichever service they use.
Free tier: Included with the distribution you are already paying for, so check what yours provides before signing up to anything else.
Best for: One link to put everywhere, so that a person who hears about your record on a Tuesday can save it rather than trying to remember your name on Friday. Test it in a private browser window on a phone before you send it anywhere.
A single page holding all your links, with click counts on each one.
Free tier: The free tier covers the links and the basic click counts. Paid adds design options you do not need.
Best for: The one address in your profile bio that does not have to be updated every release. The click counts also tell you which platform your audience actually uses, which is more useful than guessing at it.
Schedules posts across your accounts in advance so release day is not spent writing captions.
Free tier: The free plan covers three channels with a queue on each. Enough for one artist with a couple of platforms.
Best for: Writing your release week on a quiet Sunday and letting it go out on time. Note that scheduling tools do not fix a thin plan, they just stop you improvising badly at eight in the morning.
Schedules and manages Instagram and Facebook posts from one place, with the figures for both.
Free tier: Free for posting and scheduling. The paid part is advertising, which is separate and optional.
Best for: Scheduling Instagram without a third-party tool, and seeing which of your posts reached people who do not already follow you, which is the number that matters when you are trying to grow.
Design tool with templates for posts, stories, banners and anything else you need to make in the right shape.
Free tier: The free tier covers templates, resizing and export. Premium adds stock images and brand tools.
Best for: Turning one piece of artwork into the eight shapes the platforms want. Build the release-week set in one sitting rather than cropping things badly on a phone on the day.
Emails you when your name or your track title appears somewhere new online.
Free tier: Free, no limit on the number of alerts.
Best for: Catching the review nobody told you about. Set one for your artist name and one for the track title in quotation marks, and set them before release rather than after, because the first week is when most of it happens.
Shows what people typed into Google before landing on your own site, and how many did.
Free tier: Free. It needs one verification step on your site to switch on.
Best for: Seeing name searches you would otherwise never know about. Somebody searching your name the day after a radio play heard it somewhere, and that is a signal no streaming dashboard will show you.
Views, watch time and where your viewers came from, including search and suggested video.
Free tier: Free for every channel from the first upload. No subscriber threshold and no need to be monetised.
Best for: Finding out whether people are searching for you by name, which is the difference between an audience that is looking for you and one that happened to scroll past.
Google Sheets, or Airtable's free tier if you prefer something more structured. One list of every station, blog and writer you have contacted.
Free tier: Both free at the size a single artist needs.
Best for: The single most valuable thing on this page, and the one nobody counts as a tool. Name, outlet, email, date you wrote, what they said. It is worth more on your third release than any of the software above, and it cannot be rebuilt from memory.
The tools are not the campaign. Two things on this list actually put your record in front of people who have never heard it, and both of them have to happen before release day: the Spotify pitch and the BBC Introducing upload. Do those first, in that order, the week your release date is confirmed. Everything else is there to stop you losing track of what happened, and losing track is the thing that makes the next release as hard as this one.
Frequently asked questions
What is the one thing I should do that most artists forget?
Pitch the track inside Spotify for Artists before it comes out. It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and Spotify asks for at least seven days for the song to reach your followers' Release Radar, recommending two weeks. You can pitch one song at a time and not one you are only featured on. Most artists find out about this after their release date, when it is too late.
Do I need a paid scheduling tool?
No. Buffer's free plan covers three channels, and Meta Business Suite schedules Instagram and Facebook at no cost. At one artist with two or three platforms, that is the whole requirement. Paid tiers on these tools are built for teams managing dozens of accounts, and there is nothing in them that makes a single release go better.
Which numbers should I actually watch in release week?
Saves rather than streams, because a save is somebody deciding to keep the record. Then listeners, which tells you how many people rather than how many plays. Then where the plays came from, which separates people who searched for you from people who were served you. Check once a day at most, and expect the first fortnight to be noisy for reasons nobody can explain.
How long should I keep watching after release?
Take the numbers once a week for four weeks, then stop and write down what happened. Attention on a single moves fast and there is a point where refreshing the dashboard stops being research and starts being a habit. What you want at the end is a comparison against your last release, not a graph you looked at forty times.
Where should my contact list live?
Anywhere you will still be able to open it in two years. A Google Sheet is enough, and Airtable's free tier is fine if you want it more structured. What matters is not the software, it is that every station, writer and blog you contact goes in with the date and what they said. That list is the asset. The tools around it are replaceable.
From the field
Proof points
- Optimal pitch lead time for a single: 6 to 8 weeks before release for radio, 3 to 4 for press (Liberty campaign cadence)
- Named contact reply rate vs generic inbox: 5x higher (Liberty internal data)
- Best UK send window: Tuesday and Wednesday 09:00 to 10:00 UK (Across 60+ campaigns)
- Plays curve: About 60% of plays in the first 3 weeks of release, tail through week 8 (WARM monitoring)
What actually happened
Roam Belle: Single trajectory, 96 plays with declining curve typical for the format (2025)
Singles win on calibration, not coverage. I pick three or four shows where the track actually fits, write a one-line reason for each, and stop there. Sending the same pitch to 200 contacts looks busy on a tracking sheet and does almost nothing for plays. The shows that add tracks are usually the ones where the producer reads the email and thinks, that is a fit.
Chris Schofield, Radio plugger, Liberty Music PR
Related resources
Further reading
- TAP Blog — In-depth guides, comparisons and advice for independent artists running their own promotion.
- UK Music — The voice of the UK music industry, representing labels, publishers, and collecting societies.
- Music Week — Industry news, charts, and analysis for music professionals.
- The Music Network — Global music business intelligence and networking.
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