106,000 new tracks a day. Uploading is not a release plan.

Two figures explain why release strategy exists at all.

The first: 106,000 new recordings were delivered to streaming services every day in 2025, up from 99,000 a day in 2024. The second: of the 253 million tracks available at the end of that year, 120.5 million took ten streams or fewer across the whole of 2025, and 88 per cent took fewer than a thousand. Both come from Luminate's year-end report, as detailed by Music Ally in January 2026.

Read those together and the shape of the problem is clear. Getting a record into the shops is a solved problem that costs roughly the price of a pizza per year. Getting it heard is not solved, is not cheap, and is not something a distributor does for you.

What that means in practice

The useful response is not to post more. It is to use the few pieces of leverage that are documented, dated and free:

• The pitch deadlines are real. Spotify asks for an unreleased song at least seven days before release, Apple asks for ten days for full consideration, Deezer wants pitch and audio seven days out. Miss them and the editorial route closes for that release.
• One of those deadlines pays out even if no editor listens. Spotify states that pitching at least seven days ahead puts the song in your followers' Release Radar regardless of the outcome.
• The money is real but concentrated. Spotify says it paid the industry more than $11 billion in 2025, and that more than 13,800 artists made at least $100,000 from Spotify alone. Both things are true: the pot is enormous and most of it goes to a small number of acts.

Everything else on this site is downstream of those two numbers. We publish the deadlines, the prices and the platform rules as the platforms themselves state them, with the date we checked, because all of it changes without announcement.