Your Catalog Might Be Your Best Marketing Asset, Here’s How To Use It

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MARCH 16: Lizzo performs in concert at Irving Plaza on March 16, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Atlantic Records)

Getty Images for Atlantic Records

The music industry’s attention is almost always pointed forward. New single, new rollout, new era. Marketing teams are typically built around what’s next, and catalogs tend to get treated as finished business, something to maintain rather than actively work. But some of the most effective marketing moves of the past year did not come from what an artist released next. They came from what an artist already had sitting in plain sight.

I asked marketing executives across labels, distributors, and artist services companies what they believe is the one thing artists and their teams can do to consistently market their catalogue. Their answers pointed to a shared idea: a catalog is not a finished archive. It is an evergreen part of your story, and the artists who treat it that way keep finding new ways in. Beyond what they shared directly, the current landscape offers a few more examples of the same principle at work, from anniversary campaigns to fan-driven revivals that outperform the original release entirely.

Treat the Catalog as a Launchpad, Not a Library

Caroline Halloran, Director of Audience Development at mtheory, argues that catalog marketing works best when it is framed as preparation for what comes next rather than a look backward.

“Treat your catalog as the launchpad for your next release, not just a library of past work,” Halloran says. “Revisiting existing hits can reawaken dormant listeners, expand reach by pulling in new audiences with music that’s already proven to resonate, and excite core fans with familiar favorites.”

Tinashe and Discolines’ 2025 hit “No Broke Boys” is a clear example of this in motion. The track began as a solo follow-up single to “Nasty” on Tinashe’s 2024 album Quantum Baby, and it did not match the success of its predecessor on release. A year later, Discolines built an EDM version of the song that reached an entirely new dance music audience and became a much bigger cultural moment than the original. Tinashe’s foundation stayed intact. The song simply found a second life through a new entry point, exactly the kind of launchpad thinking Halloran describes.

Reframe Old Songs for the Current Moment

Monique Mendoza, Digital Marketing Manager at UnitedMasters, focuses on the mechanics of keeping a catalog culturally present, whether through repurposed content, anniversary tie-ins, or connecting older songs to new releases.

“Consistent catalog marketing is key to keeping an artist culturally relevant while continuously introducing their music to audiences who may have missed it the first time around,” Mendoza says. “When you can reframe a song for today’s moment, you create new entry points that keep the catalog alive long after its initial release.”

Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” remains one of the most instructive examples of this principle at full scale. The song was originally released in 2017 and did not chart. It was not until a dance scene in the 2019 Netflix film Someone Great placed it in front of a new audience that the song took off, eventually becoming Lizzo’s first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and earning her a Grammy for Best Pop Solo Performance. The song did not need to be rewritten. It needed a new context, which is the sync and placement strategy Mendoza points to as a repeatable tool rather than a lucky break.

Rework What You Still Believe In

Justin Feldshon, a creative and artist marketing strategist, takes the most hands-on approach of the three, encouraging labels and artists to actively revisit and rebuild songs they still believe in, rather than treating a lukewarm release as a closed chapter.

“There’s a missed opportunity when artists abandon their past work because of the pressure of the algorithm and the public’s short attention span,” Feldshon says. “If a record didn’t perform the way you hoped and you still believe in the song, the concept, the melody, or the production, there’s nothing wrong with revisiting it.”

Trim’s “Coconut Water” is the most current example of this approach paying off. Before the song became a viral hit and led to a brand partnership with Vita Coco, Trim had already built a version of its melodic and lyrical structure into her earlier single “Guapo,” a song that resonated with her existing fanbase but did not break beyond it. Rather than treating “Guapo” as a finished attempt, Trim and her team carried its most infectious elements into “Coconut Water,” which became one of her highest streaming songs to date.

A similar dynamic played out with Doechii’s “Swamp Bitches,” a 2022 collaboration with Rico Nasty from the EP she / her / black bitch. The song did not reach hit status on release, but its DNA resurfaced in Fred again.., Skepta and Plaqueboymax’s Grammy-nominated “Victory Lap,” which sampled the track and introduced it to a far larger audience. Feldshon’s framing applies directly here: the song was never a failure. It was simply early.

Build Anniversary Campaigns Into the Calendar

Beyond the strategies labels and marketers described directly, one of the more consistent catalog tools in the current landscape is the anniversary campaign, treating a milestone release date as a built-in press and content moment rather than waiting for an arbitrary reason to talk about older music.

Taylor Swift’s re-recording campaign is the clearest large-scale proof of this. Each Taylor’s Version release turned a catalog she no longer controlled into a fresh news cycle, complete with vault tracks, new documentary content, and renewed chart activity for songs that were, in some cases, over a decade old. The strategy did not just reclaim ownership. It gave her team a recurring, predictable marketing moment that reintroduced her back catalog to an audience that had grown significantly since the original releases. Artists without the same rights situation can still borrow the underlying logic: an album anniversary, a deluxe reissue, or a stripped-down acoustic version can all function as a reason to put older music back in front of both media and algorithms.

Let Fans Do the Resurrection Work

Not every catalog moment needs to originate from the label or the artist’s team at all. Some of the biggest recent examples of catalog songs breaking through happened because fans found them first, and the smartest teams recognized the moment fast enough to support it rather than compete with it.

Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” originally released in 1985, returned to number one on charts worldwide after its placement in a pivotal Stranger Things scene in 2022, introducing the song to an audience that had not been born when it first came out. More recently, Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” spent nearly two years circulating on TikTok before it became her breakout mainstream moment, well after its original 2020 release. In both cases, the songs did not change. The audience’s context did, and the teams around those songs were positioned to capitalize once the resurgence started rather than treat it as a fluke to wait out.

The Bigger Shift

What connects all of these approaches is a rejection of the idea that an artist is ever fully “off cycle.” If a team is only building forward, they are leaving half of their available marketing material untouched. A catalog is not static inventory. It is a set of unfinished opportunities, waiting on the right context, the right placement, the right anniversary, or the right fan discovery to find their audience.

The artists getting the most value out of their catalogs right now are not the ones creating the most new content. They are the ones treating everything they have already released as still in play.