A follower is somebody who asked to hear about your next releases. They leave an address on your website or your links page, and TAP mails them on the day a release of yours is out. You never see the address.
What a fan does
- They type their address into the follow form and press Follow.
- TAP mails them a link. Nothing counts until they open it and press Confirm: an address somebody typed is not proof they own the mailbox.
- From then on TAP mails them on the day each release of yours is out.
Before the first follow they answer once that they are 16 or older. We keep only that answer, never the other one.
A fan who pre-saved a release is offered the same thing on the release page, as one press. That is a separate decision from the pre-save, and a separate one per artist: following you never follows the artist you released a single with.
The release-day mail
On the day a release is out, TAP mails every confirmed follower once. The mail names the release and you, links every platform the release page lists, and says why they get it: they are a fan of yours. It closes with a link to their own page, where they stop following.
- It goes out for a release with a full date. A release dated to a month or a year brings no mail.
- It goes out while the release shows on your music page: not hidden, on a published artist with the music page on.
- One mail per fan per release. A fan who follows two artists credited on the release gets one mail, not two.
- A fan who pre-saved the release gets the pre-save mail instead: Pre-save.
- A fan who stopped TAP's mail, or whose address bounced, gets none.
Anybody can stop at any time, from any mail TAP sends or from their own page. A fan who stopped hearing from TAP is not written to again, whatever address is typed into a form; pressing Follow again from a browser that just opened one of our links is consent again, and the mail starts again.
What you see
Stats, under Artist, shows how many people follow you, how many of them connected Apple Music, and in the range you picked how many new followers came. Only confirmed follows count, because those are the ones TAP would actually mail.
You never see a follower's address and there is no way to export one. TAP holds the list and does the mailing. That is the deal a fan agreed to, and it is what makes leaving an address on a stranger's page reasonable at all.