How Apple Music Connect can help kickstart your next release
Apple Music has relaunched Apple Music Connect as a promotional toolkit, helping labels and distributors boost new releases on Apple Music.
Apple revives Apple Music Connect
Back in 2015, Apple Music launched Connect as an artist-to-fan social platform alongside the launch of Apple Music. By 2018, Apple quietly pulled the plug on the feature.
Fast forward to today, and Apple is bringing Connect back with a completely different focus. The new Apple Music Connect isn’t a social network. Instead, it’s now a professional toolkit designed to help labels and distributors manage promotion around new releases.
What is Apple Music Connect?
Apple Music is essentially a one-stop hub for labels and distributors planning a release. From there, teams can prepare marketing materials, pitch upcoming releases, and respond to meda requests from Apple’s teams.
While Connect itself is aimed at distributors and label partners, the tools ultimately benefit artists. When used well, it could help a release arrive on Apple Music with stronger visibility, better promotional assets, and more chances of editorial support.
Here’s a look at some of the tools in detail:
Create social assets with Promote
Promote allows teams to generate ready-made social assets to support a release campaign. They can be used for a range of moments across the release cycle, including announcing pre-adds, revealing a new album or single, promoting a music video, or encouraging fans to favorite an artist on Apple Music.
Both static images or short videos can be generated, ready to share to a variety of platforms such as Instagram Stories, X, Snapchat, Facebook, or even email campaigns.
In short, teams can quickly generate clean, platform-ready marketing materials.
Pitch upcoming music to Apple’s editorial team
Another key feature is Apple Music Pitch. This tool allows labels and distributors to submit your upcoming releases directly to Apple Music’s editorial team. By sharing details about priority releases and planned promotion, your music could be featured across Apple Music playlists, radio, genre pages, and category pages around the world.
If successful, pitching tools like this can be particularly helpful to gain editorial support, and boost the visibility of your music.
Managing media requests
Apple Music Connect also streamlines the process of handling media requests. If Apple’s team needs press photos or promotional images for a feature on the platform, labels, and distributors can upload the requested assets directly through Connect.
Essentially, it helps to more easily share promotional materials across Apple Music’s editorial spaces.
Why this matters for artists
It’s important to note that Apple Music Connect is currently designed for labels and distributors, not individual artists managing their own accounts.
However, that doesn’t mean independent artists should ignore it. If your distributor or label has access to Connect, these tools can play a real role in how your next release performs on Apple Music.
For more information about Apple Music Connect and the best practices for using its tools, check out Apple’s guidance here.
Wrapping up
Apple Music Connect makes it easier for labels and distributors to support artists throughout their release journey. For artists, that could translate into better promotional assets, stronger editorial relationships, and more opportunities to stand out when new music drops.
Plus, as MBW points out, the return of Connect reinforces Apple Music’s steadily expanding tools and features. Recently, Apple Music revealed it is introducing “Transparency Tags” to identify AI-generated content, testing an AI “Playlist Playground feature”, and has been working on “Play Full Song” and “Listening Party” features in partnership with TikTok.