Why Everyone Now Hates Waterfall Releases

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It’s amazing how one person's decision to spread misinformation can flood the discourse with incorrect information. Unfortunately, today the incentives to keep content up that a user is confronted with being wrong are often not good enough to get them to turn down getting more attention.

Last week, this music marketing channel, Magic Nothing, posted a video that had me getting a dozen messages asking, "Jesse, is it true? Waterfalls are dead and split your popularity score?" Unfortunately, this person based their information on something new to them - that different releases of a song receive their own popularity score - but that doesn't mean it splits it.

While it's true these popularity scores are totally different, the assumptions they made are not true. Frankly, waterfalls aren't dead, but the way we use them has become more complicated.

Unfortunately, this post spread like wildfire in part due to his leaving this post up even after being shown by many people who know better that he was wrong. This dude's whole thing is "music marketing doesn't have to suck," but it sucks when you leave up videos that everyone tells you you're wrong about. The issue is that people are using this information to decide how to accomplish their dreams. People's dreams do ride on good strategy, which is why some of us take this very seriously.

When You Think You’re On To Some Subversive Thoughts, CHECK WITH OTHERS!

It took me five whole minutes to vet this. First, I went to Luke Mansell of Musicstax, which allows you to see Spotify's data and your popularity score (their premium feature is incredible for tracking how your marketing affects your popularity score.” Luke said "not too sure what he's on about - new releases of the same song with the same ISRC get new Spotify UIDs so they get their own popularity score. This has always occurred since we started tracking popularity scores five years ago." Meaning nothing has changed here in the strategy everyone’s used.

Then I spent another minute going to Glenn McDonald, who was Spotify's chief data alchemist, helped write the algorithm, and wrote the amazing book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song. He told me, "No, that TikTok is dumb. Spotify combines play counts for all released appearances of the same song…. Waterfall is a solid default strategy."

I don't know if this could be more definitive, but Magic Nothing is spreading misinformation and wrong about this.

If you want to hear even more details on this, I have a podcast called My Point Four Cents with other music marketers that I really respect, named Dustin Boyer, Andrew Southworth, and Matt Bacon. One of the things we do on that podcast is we bat around these ideas and hold each other accountable. So we got into this even more. Frankly, we differed on some opinions, but it's pretty interesting to see where we land here. So make sure you subscribe to My Point Four Cents on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Why Waterfalls Actually Matter

I know some of you may think the waterfall method is some sort of Brooklyn childbirth method, but it's actually a way to release your music.

Let's say a listener goes to your page and clicks on the release. As long as they don't have repeat on and it's a single, Spotify goes to radio and plays other artists instead of you who they were interested in. But if they click a waterfall release before you released your EP or LP, it'll keep playing the other songs in that waterfall and potentially build a deeper relationship with you and that person will become a fan, which is our end goal, right?

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

This subtlety, when accumulated a bunch of times that you've done it a bunch of different ways, can add up to a lot more plays and a lot more people going deeper with you. I have literally switched people over to waterfalling before and dramatically increased their streams and their streams per listeners.

The Usual Case Scenario

If you're thinking of putting out an EP or LP and you haven't figured out what you're doing and you're just releasing singles till you figure out if it's going to be an album, well, releasing it to a waterfall is a really smart strategy. Some people even release a dozen songs or more into one. Famously, the artist Lauv did this with their classic record How I'm Feeling.

The real answer for how you do this is, however many singles you want to be promoting for 48 weeks at a time. As long as you're not promoting songs that shouldn't get promoted because no one's really going to get into them, you can keep doing this until you release an album.

New Wrench: Spotify Countdowns

But let's throw a wrench at that because there are some new things that make this advice even more complicated. Spotify now has these countdowns where you could slowly make available each song in a release, but this requires you to have 5,000 active listeners in the last twenty-eight days, which a lot of you don't have.

When you create them, you get push notifications sent out to your active listeners. To be honest with you, I found out about a lot of releases I probably wouldn't have found out about by this happening. They also live on top of your Spotify page and they have this great pre-save function that allows them to get added to a user's library.

If you do have all of that planned out and you qualify, countdowns have a huge benefit and are really smart to do since fans can pre-save them to their library and the whole record will be there when it comes out.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Another wrench I'll throw in - I've worked with artists who have diverse sounds. Sometimes they're releasing those diverse songs in one album, or they're currently releasing songs that may go on their next album, but may not. You could be waterfalling those different songs totally separately, especially if you do something like make two different moods.

Let's say you're waterfalling and you make some songs that are club bangers and some that are ballads, but you're going to have a bunch of ballads and a bunch of bangers. You can waterfall into two separate releases. So when people click on them, they're more likely to hear a similar mood. You can choose your own adventure here and really cater to how listeners will most likely drive up your listens and become a bigger fan of you.

The Playlist Game

For those of you who weren't getting stoned in the back of the class, you may have noticed I also mentioned playlists. On your profile, you can highlight playlists you've made. You can share your songs across the internet with playlists so that when people click into them, they can hear a whole bunch of songs of yours - your whole discography, if you'd like it in order you predetermine.

This can be far more effective than a waterfall since you can often have dozens of songs in these that people may listen to as opposed to the three to five in a waterfall. And obviously, as you have more of those songs, and if people keep listening through them because they like what they're hearing, that could double, triple, quadruple your engagement and your songs per listening.

Best Practice Mode

My basic mode here is that waterfalls are really good for people who are clicking through the apps so that we drive up those people whose experience we're not creating for them. But if you're sharing and bringing people in through Instagram stories, mailing lists or SMS blasts, or any other way where you share music, you should be sharing to a playlist at all times.

You should make a waterfall for those who navigate to your profile, perhaps looking for a song they heard on TikTok or Reels. And if they click on your popular releases, they'll get more of your songs.

Extra Sauce for Playlists

If you want a little extra sauce and you're doing playlists, this is what I would really share. I encourage every artist to do this. Put this in the description of your playlist: "Tap the plus to be the first to hear new songs as they're released."

Then, every time you release a new song, you'll have to retitle this playlist. It's gonna be what you share and you put your new song at the top of it. But then all of your previous songs are in there in an order that you can curate as to what will best convert people to new listeners and go deeper with you.

If they actually save that to their playlists, that will be there whenever they go to listen to your song and that playlist they saved. Meaning it's in a listener's library for as long as they keep it there and then they can see that you have new songs and probably check them out.

Your TLDR

Waterfalls are great and don't split up your popularity score. They can be great to use if you don't have enough active monthly listeners and you don't know where you're going or you just want to increase longer sessions with listeners.

If you have an album you're ready to announce and promote and you qualify for countdowns, they are optimal and you should do them and release into those.

If you're sharing your music, it's often best to share a playlist.

I would tell you how to do this on your distributor but each one changes it all the time. All the major distributors have help manuals on how to do waterfalls because they're asked this all the time since waterfalls are something that artists do both big and small every single day.