Your song does not come out everywhere at once
By default the stores open a release at local midnight, store by store. New Zealand and Australia get it first, then Asia, then the Gulf, then Europe, then Africa and the Americas — and by the time Los Angeles wakes up, roughly twenty-six hours have passed since the first person heard it. That is why the play counts on the first morning look strange, and why a link posted at breakfast in London still returns "not found" for a friend in California. Nothing is broken; the release has simply not reached them yet.
The other option, and when to use it
Many distributors will also let you set one global moment, usually 00:00 UTC, so every market opens on the same instant. It is the right choice when a release is tied to something that happens at a fixed hour — a video premiere, a broadcast, a festival set, a coordinated announcement. It is the wrong choice for most singles, because it drops your track at odd hours in the markets you care about and you lose the full local first day of listening that the default gives you. Switch the selector above to see both and compare them against your own clock.
Why the dates before release day matter more
Release day is the last thing that happens, not the first. The pitch has to be in four weeks ahead or the editorial teams never see it. The files have to be with your distributor three weeks ahead or the stores cannot ingest them in time, and a rejected delivery leaves you no room to fix it. The pre-save has to exist long enough for people to use it. Everything on this page below the table is counted backwards from the date you typed, so you can see exactly which of those windows you have already missed.
How the times are worked out
Every market here is an IANA time zone, and each moment is formatted with your browser's own internationalisation engine for the exact date you chose. No offsets are written into this page, so a release in late March or early November lands on the correct side of a daylight saving change in each country by itself. Your own zone is whatever your device reports. If that looks wrong, it is your device clock, and the times in the last column will be wrong too.