Let’s say you upload a new single to DistroKid. And you’ve set the release date to one-week in the future.

Then on your release date you tell everyone: “My new single just dropped — listen now on Spotify!“

But wait, there’s a problem.

Streaming services release new music in each country according to its timezone. So if your single goes live at midnight in London, it won’t be available to listeners in New York City for another 5 hours.

This staggering made sense in the days of physical record stores. If your album dropped on Tuesday morning, people in Japan naturally got their hands on it before people in Austria. That’s because “Tuesday morning” happens 7 hours earlier in Tokyo than it does in Vienna.

But it makes no sense in today’s world.

When you post a photo to Instagram, it’s available to everyone worldwide immediately. It would be dumb if people in later timezones had to wait 7 hours before they could see it.

Introducing “Synchronized Global Release,” only from DistroKid.

For the first time, it’s now possible for artists & record labels to release music simultaneously in every country — at the exact same time.

You can light up the whole world at once.

Behind-the-scenes, DistroKid calculates the timezone offset of every country, and then sets specific release-times for each country based on that country’s easternmost timezone. An example would be France at 10:00am, UK at 9:00am, US at 4:00am, etc.

Sounds tricky, but it’s not. We made it super easy. Just specify:

1. Desired release date
2. What time you want it to go live in New York, USA (we’ll do all our calculations based on US Eastern Time).
3. Bonus: You can pick any time. Not just midnight. So 10am is okay. So is 5:30pm. Or whenever.

Synchronized Global Release (SGR) is exclusive to DistroKid and available today, for free, to all DistroKid members with Musician Plus or Label plans. It only works for Spotify currently but we plan on bringing SGR to more streaming services in the future.

One of our goals at DistroKid is to modernize the industry.

This is us doing that.

Hope you enjoy!

Introducing “Synchronized Global Release,” a new feature from DistroKid was originally published in DistroKid News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.