Lala Vale's campaign is mid-flight. Wave 1 went out 1 May to 155 community-radio contacts. Release day was 15 May. Follow-ups have run twice. The campaign window closes 16 June. So this isn't a wrap. It's a retro on the first two weeks, written while the data is still moving.
The reason to write it down now is the bit that surprised me. The compound from Wave 1 wasn't the plays. It was the contact list.
What Wave 1 actually was
1 May, 09:00 UK. 155 cold emails to UK community radio, BBC regional producers, and a clutch of music press contacts. Single-purpose ask: would they consider Lala Vale's "Obvious" for their next playlist or specialist show window.
The send was clean. The bounces came back over 48 hours and the workspace tagged them cooling_off so the T+7 follow-up wave skipped them. The replies trickled in over the following week.
Some of the replies were positive in the obvious way: "yes, send the WAV, we'll have a listen". Mix 92.6, WCR FM, Lee Medd, Cambridge Radio. Spoony's Radio 2 contact came through indirectly via Lauren Brennan, which is how the better stuff often lands.
Some of the replies were more useful than that.
The list changed under me
A producer at one of the BBC regional stations replied to say a colleague had moved on. That colleague was Kris Gruber, who'd been a Marlow contact in my list since 2024. He'd moved to Mix 92.6. The workspace updated the contact record. The next pitch to Mix 92.6 goes to Kris, not the generic studio inbox. Five minutes of work. One year of compounding.
A different reply, less happy. An indie-rock contact on the Lala list had passed away in September 2024. I hadn't known. The workspace marked the contact as deceased, removed them from every other artist's campaign target list, and left a private note on the record so I'd never pitch to that inbox again.
That's two changes to the contact list out of about 50 real replies. Across five concurrent campaigns running through TAP, the contact list improves a little every week. Five small changes from Lala Wave 1. Maybe ten across the same week from the Brii wrap-up. A handful from the Sham G W1 send the following Thursday.
The compound is the list. Not the campaign.
Release-day extras and the second wave
Release day was 15 May. The workspace pushed 149 release-day extras (community stations that only schedule once the track is live, plus a smaller wave to French and Italian indie blogs that hadn't been in the Wave 1 brief).
T+7 follow-up wave fired 13 May (two days before release) referencing the early WARM data as social proof. That's the cadence: prep, prime, release, follow up. The workspace held the timing.
Mersey Radio added the track to rotation within 48 hours of release. That play landed in the monitor before the workspace knew to look for it, which is the right way round.
What I'd do differently
Two things.
First, the Wave 1 send list should have been smaller. 155 was wider than the artist's lane needed. The yield from the named-contact tier was good. The yield from the generic studio inboxes was, predictably, almost nothing. Volume isn't the metric on community radio. Quality is.
Second, the workspace should have caught the deceased contact and the moved-role contact before Wave 1, not after. Both pieces of information existed in the wider Liberty contact graph (other artists' campaigns had bounced or gotten replies that flagged them). The Skills are catching the next round of these. The list is improving on a delay.
What's working
The approve-to-send queue. Every one of the 155 Wave 1 pitches waited for me to read it before going. Most needed no edit. A handful got rewritten because the workspace had pulled in stale context (a producer's show had moved nights; the pitch referenced the old slot). Without the approval queue those would have shipped with the wrong context and burned a contact.
The replies threaded back into the original pitch. Coverage logged itself against the campaign. The wrap report, when this campaign closes in June, will write itself the same way Brii Elliss's did.
Five artists, one workspace, the contact list compounding across all of them. That's the campaign retro.
