The Singles

First Label Textbook

A 113-page, fully sourced operating manual for releasing music one single at a time — for any genre, any territory. Not a marketing pamphlet: this is the complete system for running a label or an artist career, from cadence and rollout through promotion, commerce, finance and measurement.

Inside — 20 chapters, 274 cited sources

• Why singles-first — the structural argument, and when a project is still right
• Cadence, the buffer and the annual plan — the habit that makes consistency survivable
• Anatomy of a single rollout, week by week (including the post-release weeks almost everyone skips)
• The asset standard: what to have ready, to what specification
• Distribution and metadata — where independent money silently leaks
• Playlists and DSP pitching, including fraud vetting and what editorial actually wants
• Website, SEO, email and direct-to-consumer — owning the audience
• Paid advertising, short-form and creator marketing, with kill and scale rules
• Press and publicity: finding the angle, pitching, premieres
• Radio, sync and publishing — integrating the adjacent revenue systems
• Building a catalogue that compounds
• Label finance: budgeting, cashflow, bookkeeping, funding and grants
• AI in label operations — what it genuinely helps with, soberly
• Measuring what matters: leading indicators vs vanity metrics
• Team, systems and operations; when to level up to an EP or album
• Failure modes, action plans by situation, worksheets and templates throughout

113-page PDF. Every price, platform rule and threshold footnoted to a checkable source — and where a widely-repeated claim couldn’t be verified, the book says so instead of repeating it. Instant download, yours to keep.