Allow artists to schedule an album release in the future

[floehopper]

See #141 (comment)

[lukaprincic]

actually, (to comment on #141 (comment))
bandcamp does not have a scheduling option for release. this is what i liked about their philosophy of 'soulful' engagement by artists and fans alike: they were instructing you, the artist, to set a future release date only to reflect that on the pre-order/release page, but you had to come and press "release the pre-order" button when it's time and then tell everyone. i see this as keeping your release close to your heart (and excitement) instead of automating things.

anyway, the sense of pre-order is that you create fuss twice and build up anticipation with your audience - first promoting your pre-order and then promoting your release, and less about charts (I\m actually not aware of any charts at bandcamp apart from "best selling").

there's also something else with bc pre-orders: you can create a pre-order with one track and few other (named) tracks that are not available in the preorder or streaming but appear on the release page as part of the album. up to the release you can totally change those tracks, and pretty much everything in the album. in fact, bandcamp, afaik, allows changes even after the release (I always wanted to create this kind of fluid constantly-changing album available in full only to buyers)
Screenshot from 2024-01-19 12-44-48
ok, to explain to those unfamiliar to bc process (which I'm used to and it seems quite logical and useful):

artist upload tracks of the release and marks some of the tracks as being "part of preorder" - which makes them available to fans when they pay for pre-order - this also makes it streamable

once marking this release as pre-order makes it 'in-progress', - when you click "publish" it will go into pre-order phase: the album will be available to be pre-ordered - paid for in full but getting only tracks marked as part of it.

marking it "release pre-order now" will release all tracks to those who paid for pre-order (in their collections), and make it available as normal release to be paid for to everyone else. - pretty much all traces of this being a preorder dissapear. it becomes a normal release. (I will not go into what happens if you change tracks during preorder)

pre-order is of course a remnant of scarcity world where editions were limited and may run out. and, to be honest, it's debatable if perhaps a more clever, post-scarcity-based terminology (or tricks) should be used...