Spotify Showcase is Broken Too
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.
WRONG!
My freshly completed Showcase campaign for the same track also managed to only spend 10% of my budget, and this time I only budgeted $100!
As you can see, every previous Showcase campaign targeting “Default audience” (i.e. no targeting) spent my entire budget wham bam thank you ma’am.
If you’d like to see the results of those campaigns and learn how to create your own, see my previous post on the topic.
I won’t bother breaking down down the results of this one other than to say it had a better-than-average 31.58% intent rate.
So if the song doesn’t suck (at least compared to my other songs), why can’t Spotify spend my budget?
My guess is that it’s a simple issue of supply and demand. Showcase and Marquee are opening up to more and more artists, and there may not be enough real estate to go around.
In the case of Marquee, Spotify probably doesn’t want to slam every user with a pop-up every time they open the app, especially with price increases impending here in the US.
With that in mind, here’s a summary of my current advice:
If you can customize your audience: Launch a Marquee campaign in every country available, directing to your This Is playlist if you’ve got one. Pull the plug if you’re not seeing at least 2.5 streams per listener and a 25% intent rate. Follow up successful campaigns with Showcase.
If you’re stuck with “default audience”: Reserve Marquee for EPs and albums, starting in your home country. Follow up successful campaigns with Showcase.
Granted, there’s little harm in launching either campaign type in any country at any budget, as long as you keep an eye on it. You can always pull the plug.
In general, Meta ads have proven more effective than Marquee or Showcase to cold audiences. If your goal is simply to reach new listeners, that’s still your best bet.
Rest assured Meta will always spend your entire budget, whether it’s $1 a day or $10K!
Have you had better luck with Showcase or Marquee? Share your thoughts and results in the comments!
Showcase
Reach 2,550
The number of people who saw the campaign. Clicks 143
New active listeners
53 listeners joined your active audience for the first time by intentionally streaming your promoted release. Of those listeners, 53 were new listeners who hadn’t streamed your music anywhere on Spotify in the last 2 years.
Converted listeners 53
The number of listeners who intentionally streamed the release after seeing the campaign. Conversion rate 2.08%
The percentage of listeners who intentionally streamed the release after seeing the campaign. People showed intent to stream your promoted release in the future after seeing your Showcase. Active streams per listener 1.23
The average number of times your converted listeners intentionally streamed the release. Intent rate 7.55%
The percentage of converted listeners who saved or added a song after streaming.
Playlist add rate 1.89%
The percentage of converted listeners who added a track to a playlist. Playlist adds 1
The total number of tracks added to playlists by people who saw your campaign.
Save rate 5.66%
The percentage of converted listeners who saved a track. Saves 6
Marquee
Reach 458
The number of people who saw the campaign. Clicks 63
New active listeners 36 listeners joined your active audience for the first time by intentionally streaming your promoted release. Of those listeners, 36 were new listeners who hadn’t streamed your music anywhere on Spotify in the last 2 years.
Converted listeners 38
The number of listeners who intentionally streamed the release after seeing the campaign. Conversion rate 8.28%
Active streams per listener 1.29
The average number of times your converted listeners intentionally streamed the release. Intent rate 10.53%
The percentage of converted listeners who saved or added a song after streaming.
Playlist add rate 0%
The percentage of converted listeners who added a track to a playlist. Playlist adds 0
The total number of tracks added to playlists by people who saw your campaign. Save rate 10.53%
The percentage of converted listeners who saved a track. Saves 6
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Probably never gonna use showcase or Marquee again.
Thanks for sharing your results Noah!
The key numbers I’m seeing here are:
Showcase: 1.23 streams per listener, 7.55% intent rate
Marquee: 1.29 streams per listener, 10.53% intent rate
Those fall well below my 2.5 + 25% recommendation, so I agree. Not worth it!
I assume you were directing to a single track and not an album or This Is playlist.
Thanks for sharing! I suspected as much –
I’m curious if you have played around Spotify In Studio Ads yet?
Several times. I’ve written about it twice and Spotify even flew me out to the Bronx to interview me for their artist video series. Despite my initial enthusiasm, I gave up on it after several lukewarm campaigns and haven’t tried it in at least a year.
Ahh thank you Brian! That’s a bummer :/ I’ll have to check out those posts, apologies for missing them.
No apology necessary! They’re pretty dang old at this point.
Hi Brian – Checking in after a long absence. I really appreciate all of these posts. It’s all very helpful. Unfortunately, most of the posts are, “Here’s X and why it doesn’t work very well,” but that ain’t your fault because, well… nothing really works that well – there are no magic bullets. But I digress…
I didn’t know where to ask this so I’m just putting it here. It’s Spotify-related but not Showcase-related. The question is… have you noticed any change in how Fans Also Like (FAL) works? A couple of years back my project released a full-length on Spotify (a UK label released the vinyl) and it did ok. We didn’t do much promotion. Probably spent $500 on finding some playlists, etc. We got up to almost 30,000 monthly listeners (from about 50 playlists) and it kind of levitated there for 6 months or so and (predictably) slowly declined as we were lazy and didn’t release anything else for quite some time. During that six months, however, our FAL was perfect. All of the bands that we would’ve expected were there – House of Love, Bunnymen, Chameleons, etc. It was a perfect reflection of what our (tiny) fan base would be listening to.
Fast forward to recent times. We released a single, did very little promotion, monthly listeners got up to 5,000 or so, predictably declined and… our FAL looks completely different. I haven’t heard of any of the artists and only half are only vaguely related genre-wise (and it’s not the playlists’ fault). But here’s the kicker… other artists similar to us are seeing the exact same thing. It’s as if Spotify has said, “If folks are listening to you and other artists in the same genre as you, we don’t care unless those other artists are as obscure as you (in terms of monthly listeners).” It’s as if there’s now a class system within FAL that you can’t have any artists significantly more popular than you even if that’s what your fans are listening to. Spotify will not abide. Unless you’re monthly listener stats are similar, you are not worthy.
For example, I looked at Color Theory’s FAL and it seems like the same thing’s happening to you. Where is Depeche Mode? That’s an obvious one that should be in your FAL if it’s working even remotely properly. But I see mostly smaller artists who don’t really even fit into your genre of music. And I’m seeing this across the board with a lot of the smaller artists I follow. It’s like FAL has turned into a bizarro world.
Am I crazy here or are you seeing the same thing?
Welcome back David!
I’ve definitely noticed the same phenomenon. One day I fired up the app and my FAL was wrecked. That was many months ago, and while there’s been some movement, it hasn’t fully recovered. The first two artists have about 1K monthly listeners and are completely unrelated. The first is guitar rock and the second is lighter indie rock. Both have zero synths.
Granted, I wouldn’t expect to see Depeche Mode in there. Previously my FAL contained bands in the synth community and around the same level. Which is how it should be IMHO!
I heard someone was able to get a Spotify chat representative to reset their FAL but I haven’t tried that myself. My guess is they’ll just say it’s algorithmically generated and out of their control.
My strategy is to ignore it! It only hurts when someone reminds me. 😉
Last line… ha! Perfect. Ok, well I’m just glad I’m not the only one that’s noticed this. Obviously, it’s not a critical thing – after all, it’s far more helpful to you when YOU’RE on someone ELSE’S FAL – but a simple kinda-sorta fix would be if Spotify allowed the creator (to use Spotify’s term of art) to pick a half dozen (or however many) creators for their FAL and then let the algorithm (as crap as it might be) pick the others. Just so it bears some resemblance to reality. I gotta believe that would be really easy to do. Which is why it’ll never happen.
Keep up the good work!
I imagine if Spotify allowed us to pick our own FAL, big bands would sell their slots! Talk about prime real estate.