How to Never Miss a New Album or Movie Release Again
We built Calendia because we kept missing releases we cared about, and not niche stuff either, but big albums and movies from artists and directors we follow on every platform imaginable. We spent a long time trying to figure out why this keeps happening to so many people, ourselves included, and what a solution would actually look like.
How most people track releases right now
Following artists on social media. Instagram and TikTok will show you what their algorithm thinks will keep you scrolling, which is almost never the release announcement you actually need to see. We've talked to users who follow an artist, engage with their posts every single day, and still completely miss it when a new album drops because the platforms just don't surface that stuff reliably.
Spotify's Release Radar. Updates once a week on Fridays, mixes in artists you've listened to exactly once with artists you actually care about, and if you also watch movies or play games... well, Spotify can't help you there.
Manually checking news sites. Nobody does this for more than a week. There are too many sites covering too many things and you'd have to check Pitchfork, Collider, IGN, and a dozen others every single day to have any shot at catching everything.
Adding dates to Google Calendar. We know people who do this and honestly, respect. It breaks down the second a release date shifts though (which happens constantly with movies), and the bigger issue is that it assumes you heard about the release in the first place, which is the entire problem we're trying to solve.
Reddit and Discord. Surprisingly good if you're deep into one specific scene. The r/hiphopheads release calendar is honestly better than most dedicated apps. But unless you want to be active in a separate community for every type of media you follow, it doesn't scale at all.
All of these either require you to constantly be checking things, or they only cover one slice of what you care about and leave everything else to chance.
What we built around
We had a few core ideas that shaped how Calendia works, and even if you end up not using our app, they're worth thinking about if you're trying to solve this problem.
One app or nothing. Before we started building, we tracked our own behavior for a while and the pattern was always the same: when we had separate apps for movies, TV, and music, we'd open the movie one because that's where the habit was, and the music tracker would just sit there accumulating notification badges that we'd clear without reading. Consolidation isn't some nice-to-have feature, it's the entire reason anyone actually opens a tracker consistently.
Let people import what they already have. We almost shipped without Spotify import because it was honestly a pain to build, and we're glad we didn't because asking someone to manually search and follow 200 artists they listen to is basically asking them to give up somewhere around artist number fifteen. Calendia imports from Spotify and Apple Music so you're fully set up in under a minute.
Notifications need a dial, not a switch. Release day alerts, absolutely. "Hey, an artist you follow just posted on social media," no thanks. We were getting way too many pings from our own app during internal testing and had to completely rethink the defaults before shipping.
People are more interesting than titles. This was actually a late addition that ended up being one of the best things in the app. You can follow actors, directors, and authors directly, so when someone like Denis Villeneuve signs onto a new project you just know about it without having to go looking, which is way better than trying to follow individual movies and hoping you catch wind of the next one.
What a normal week looks like
Monday morning we get a notification that a band we follow put out a new single, which makes for good commute music. Tuesday we open the app to see what's coming up and realize that show we like is back on Thursday, which we would have totally missed because we'd stopped seeing promos for it months ago.
Wednesday and Thursday, nothing. Quiet days. Fine.
Saturday, a game we've been loosely tracking finally got an official release date. Good to know.
No drama. Just fewer of those "wait, that already came out?" conversations that used to happen all the time.
Get started
Download Calendia on iOS or Android, import your music library, spend a few minutes following shows and movies and games and actors and authors, and set your notification preferences. After that you don't really have to think about it.