Over the course of my career as a recording artist, I’ve released 13 albums on CD. Two of those got second pressings. Five years ago, there were 5000 CDs in my garage. Now I’m down to a few hundred copies of my third CD, which I’ll likely take to the grave. How did I do…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for equality! And yet when I target tier 1 and 2 countries, the vast majority of my advertising budget goes to Brazil and Mexico. That’s not equality, it’s a bramexitocracy! (it’s a word, look it up) Historically my solution was to devote a separate ad group to Brazil and…
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but is it worth 15 seconds of audio? Meta Ads Manager seemed to think so: And so I tried it with a conversions campaign directing to a smart link for my latest single, “Undone.” Color Theory · Undone I let the campaign run for a week…
Facebook and Instagram ads, hereafter referred to as Meta ads, are the centerpiece of my music promotion efforts. I recently wrote about two excellent services that create high quality Meta ad campaigns on your behalf: Southworth Media and Members Media. Pricing starts at $750 and $1095 respectively. They’re absolutely worth it, but what if you…
Southworth Media as in Andrew Southworth? Yes. If you don’t already subscribe to Andrew’s YouTube channel, you definitely should. It’s basically what I do here but in video format, with new content every week instead of every… whenever I find the time. When Andrew offered to let me kick the tires on his new service,…
A reader of my How I’m Promoting My Music This Month monthly email recently told me: You always begin your letter by saying that your promotion is on autopilot but you never say what it is you do. And so, for the next installment, I wrote a quick and dirty summary of my ongoing promotional…
Members Media (formerly Partnered Projects) offers a variety of campaigns to promote your music. Their latest is Facebook & Instagram Ads, which direct listeners to Spotify and Apple Music. Meta ads are a great way to grow your active audience, as opposed to playlist promotion, which builds passive listenership. By sending people directly to your…
A Color Theory fan and fellow artist told me about Digital DJ Pool way back in February of 2022. Since then I’ve been paying a monthly fee to get my new tracks into DJs’ hands on or before release day. Don’t make dance music? Me neither, and I’ve never been a DJ — I don’t…
My promotion has been on autopilot lately, but I do have something to share with you: a warning of sorts. It concerns Meta’s Performance Bonus Program, which you probably haven’t heard of unless you received an email like this: Honestly, I’m surprised I clicked through because it looks super spammy. Rest assured the images did…
I’d been kicking the idea of a co-op playlist around in my head for a long time. Around the beginning of the year, a friend prodded me to finally give it a go. Here’s what I proposed: Unfortunately the meritocratic approach didn’t pan out. The ad campaign produced no clear winning song, or more precisely,…
I just… can’t. I’m not saying you shouldn’t! You really should. I mean, it would probably be better if you did. After all, social media is where the majority of music discovery occurs. My advice is to record yourself lipsyncing your track the whole way through in 4-6 different locales, chop those into 60-ish 15-30…
I don’t do TikTok. I barely even know how to use the app. When I release a new song, sometimes I’ll post the video I made for Reels, but the text usually gets obscured by TikTok’s interface. Don’t care. That’s not to say I’ve never tried promoting my music there. Back in 2021 I reviewed…
YouTube has been pretty good to me. Since 2012 I’ve racked up 18K subscribers, 9.2M views, and 263K watch hours despite not having any “real” music videos. Granted, more than half of those views were for a song I was hired to cover for a Just Dance game. Embarrassingly, I filled in for Will.i.am on…
Last month I wrote about how Spotify effectively removed audience targeting from Marquee. Worse, my campaign “targeting” all 55.2 million Spotify users in the US only managed to spend 10% of my $500 budget. I concluded that Marquee is now mostly indistinguishable from Showcase, except the latter will quickly blow through any budget you set….
When Spotify launched Marquee two years ago, I was positively giddy. My first post on the subject proclaimed that it was even better than Meta ads. Finally I had a way to reconnect with my listeners on Spotify, or at least those deemed part of my “reachable audience.” That reachable audience quickly climbed from 2.1K…
Before you ask, yes, that’s Christopher Columbus, who set sail across the Atlantic on a voyage to discover some fresh jams. I previously wrote that using Spotify Discovery Mode was a no-brainer. I’ve heard it compared to standing up at the theater. Sure, the first person to stand gets a better view, but before you…
Showcase is the newest campaign type in Spotify’s promotional arsenal, alongside Marquee and Discovery Mode. It inserts a sponsored recommendation on the home screen of the app, like so: You pay whenever someone clicks on it, typically around $0.30-0.40 depending on your targeting. Spotify reports that users who see the recommendation are 6x more likely…
I’d heard good things about Playlist-Promotion.com before their manager Andi reached out to me in mid-July. He offered me a campaign valued at $350 for the purpose of a review. I knew they could deliver a good number of placements and streams safely (my #1 priority), but I worried they didn’t have enough playlists specific…
Three months of no posts! I’m sorry. But I’ve got a good excuse… Earlier this month I released my 13th studio album, Underneath These Dying Stars. I’ve got a lot to share with you, but I thought I’d start with something relatively painless and uncontroversial. When’s the last time you sat down and actively listened…
Over the years I’ve managed to rack up over 17K subscribers to my YouTube channel despite only having a couple of “real” videos. Sure, I could take my phone to the beach and lipsync. But I won’t. I’ve spent my entire adult life learning how to play the piano, sing, write songs, arrange, mix and…
By now you’ve likely heard of Spotify Discovery Mode. It’s a relatively new feature, still in beta, that provides more algorithmic exposure for your music. The tracks you opt in will appear more often in two specific contexts: Radio — Algorithmically generated playlists based on any artist, album, or songAutoplay — When a listener reaches…
I’ve been growing my Spotify audience with Facebook and Instagram ads for years. Facebook Ads Manager is pinned in my browser and I check it multiple times a day, sometimes obsessively. I know my way around, but it’s not exactly intuitive. There’s definitely a learning curve, and the platform is constantly evolving. What if there…
Last August, I took Spotify playlist pitching into my own hands using a service called OKTIV.IO (read the gory details here). My efforts resulted in 16 playlist adds, 2K+ streams, and a monster spreadsheet of leads. I deemed the effort worthwhile, but way too much to take on with every release. A new service called…
Playlist Push is a platform that connects independent artists to Spotify playlist curators, boasting over 4000 playlists. It’s a premium service at a premium price, basically a rich man’s SubmitHub or Groover. I first reviewed Playlist Push back in November of 2017 and my results were pretty meh. I gave them another shot in May…
That's all, folks!
That's all, folks!