Launching Hammurabi — Part 2: The Strategy

Good promotion doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen by posting randomly and hoping something lands. It happens when you have a clear structure, a consistent content thread, and a plan that builds — day by day — toward a moment.

For Hammurabi, that moment was 15 April 2026. Everything we did in the seven days before it was designed to make that date feel like an arrival rather than just another upload.

The Campaign Architecture

I structured the campaign in three phases across fifteen days: pre-release (Days 1–7), release day (Day 8), and post-release (Days 9–15). Each phase had a different emotional job to do.

Phase 1: Pre-Release — Build the World (Days 1–7)

The goal of the pre-release period wasn’t primarily to sell the album. It was to make people curious about it. To do that, I leaned into the album’s most unusual and compelling quality: it is a concept album with a genuine subject — a real historical figure, a real story, a real set of ideas about law, power, and what it means to govern.

• Day 1 (8 April): Album announcement on both Facebook and Instagram. Clean, punchy, led by the artwork. Not overselling — just planting the flag. Hammurabi is coming. 15 April. 16 tracks. This is what it sounds like.
• Day 2 (9 April): Historical context post. Who was Hammurabi? Why does he matter? This served a dual purpose: it gave people without a history background a reason to care, and it positioned Steve’s work as thoughtful and researched rather than arbitrary. Posts with genuine informational value tend to travel further organically than pure promotional content.
• Day 3 (10 April): Track 1 reveal. Hammurabi King of Kings — the opening salvo. A lyrics excerpt, the runtime, a description of the sound. Give people something concrete to hold onto.
• Day 4 (11 April): Behind-the-scenes process post. This is where the AI pipeline story gets told — honestly, clearly, and with pride. How does a rock opera actually get made this way? What does Steve do, what does the LLM do, what does Suno do? This kind of content is genuinely rare and genuinely interesting.
• Day 5 (12 April): Full tracklist reveal. On Facebook, a single post with the complete tracklist. On Instagram, a carousel — one track per slide, building anticipation as people swipe through sixteen stops on Hammurabi’s journey. This is a high-engagement format for a content-rich album.
• Day 6 (13 April): Engagement post. A question — something like Which character in a rock opera do you most want to hear from: the king, the queen, or the priest? — paired with Instagram Stories polls. Get the audience involved, even if it’s small. Every comment and reaction is a signal.
• Day 7 (14 April): Eve of release countdown. Emotional, anticipatory, brief. Tomorrow. Hammurabi drops. Sometimes the most effective pre-release content is the simplest.

Phase 2: Release Day (Day 8 — 15 April)

Release day content does one thing: it makes it easy for people to listen. A clear announcement, the streaming links, a pin to the top of the Facebook page. No clutter, no competing messages. The album is out. Here is where you find it. That’s the whole post.

Phase 3: Post-Release — Sustain the Conversation (Days 9–15)

This is where a lot of independent releases go quiet, which is exactly the wrong move. The algorithm is watching what happens after release, not just on the day. The post-release week was structured to keep the album visible:

• Individual track spotlight posts — pulling out lyrics, exploring the character or scene behind each song
• A process deep-dive — more detail on the Suno production side
• The Lead Away visualizer on Day 14 — a glam rock track sitting in the catalog, ready to post and perfectly timed to introduce variety into the feed without pulling focus from Hammurabi too early
• A one-week milestone post on Day 15 — celebrating the release being out in the world, acknowledging the listeners, and signalling what comes next

The Spotify Pitch

Alongside the social campaign, we had one shot at Spotify editorial consideration: the pre-release pitch through Spotify for Artists. This had to be submitted before the release date, which meant getting it right immediately.

The pitch was for Hammurabi King of Kings, Track 1 — the natural choice. It’s the opening statement of the album, the most immediate and aggressive track, and the one that best represents the project’s energy to a playlist curator who might spend thirty seconds deciding whether to listen further.

The pitch description ran to 359 characters (within the 500-character limit) and covered the essential territory: the album’s concept, the historical subject, the sonic approach, and the AI-assisted production context. Transparent, specific, and written for a human reader who is evaluating dozens of pitches and needs to understand quickly why this one is worth their time.

Editorial placement was always a long shot at this listener scale. But pitching is free, the cost of not pitching is zero chance, and the discipline of writing the pitch — of distilling what makes the track worth hearing into a few sentences — is useful in itself. It sharpens the promotional message.

The Platform Split

1. Facebook — highest organic reach (100–300 views per post), most established audience, best for longer-form content and pinned announcements
2. Instagram — complementary, visually led, better for artwork and carousel formats, hashtag reach into new audiences
3. Spotify — passive but important; editorial pitch submitted, Spotify for Artists profile active and optimised
4. YouTube — on hold pending channel access (estimated 4–6 weeks); auto-generated Topic channel active but not directly controllable yet

The decision to concentrate effort on Facebook and Instagram rather than spreading thin across every possible platform was deliberate. Better to do two things well than six things poorly, especially when the content creation load falls on a single person executing a daily campaign.

What the Strategy Was Really Trying to Do

A 16-track concept album by a new artist with a small following is, commercially speaking, a hard sell. The streaming economics of a full album listen are very different from a single. Playlist curators favour shorter, more immediately accessible tracks. The algorithm rewards consistency and engagement signals, both of which take time to accumulate.

So the strategy wasn’t built around an expectation of viral reach or a spike in monthly listeners. It was built around something more durable: establishing the work as legitimate, the artist as serious, and the narrative as interesting. Every post in the campaign added one more brick to that foundation.

Hammurabi was the most ambitious thing Steve had released to that point. The campaign treated it as such.

Next: Part 3 — The Reflection. What worked, what we’d do differently, and what the Hammurabi campaign taught us about promoting AI-assisted music as an independent artist.