Last May I said I’d pick Spotify Marquee over Facebook Ads. Now I’m not so sure. With 28 Marquee campaigns under my belt, I’ve got a lot more data to draw conclusions from. I’ll share all the important metrics and compare them to my current Facebook Ads campaign below. For a detailed explanation of what…
You’ve got a new song and you want people to hear it. Despite all the iOS tracking changes, I still think Facebook and Instagram ads to Spotify are your best bet. For an overview, check out my post on Facebook Ads for Spotify Best Practices. I’m going to tackle a very specific problem here. Are…
I’ve written about Facebook and Instagram ads for Spotify many times, like here, here, and this one from April of 2018 where I noted that I’d spent $5888.35 on Facebook ads to date. Three years later, it’s $20,614.84. While there are still useful angles to explore in those older articles, this post supersedes them. Not…
UPDATE: I’m doing things differently now! There are still some great pointers here, but don’t miss my latest post on the subject, Facebook Ads for Spotify Best Practices. As of today, I’ve spent $5888.35 on Facebook ads. Does that make me an expert? No way! Promoting music on Facebook, and Instagram through Facebook Ads, is…
I recently explained my strategy for choosing the 22 Spotify countries I typically promote to Now minus one evil empire, it’s 21. Those countries were chosen with the express goal of growing my audience on Spotify. If I were planning a tour (I don’t perform, but hypothetically) I’d make different selections. Similarly, if I wanted…
UPDATE: I’m doing things differently now! There are still some great pointers here, but don’t miss my latest post on the subject, Facebook Ads for Spotify Best Practices. If you were wondering how I found your work, it was through Spotify. I was looking for vocal synthwave playlists. Yours had the most followers and I…
You may have noticed that whenever you schedule a video release on YouTube or Facebook, you have the option of making it a premiere. In the spirit of “why not?” I tested the feature out on both platforms to determine the premiére premiere-er. The winner, in my mind, was cliére (I’ll stop). The idea is…
UPDATE: Be sure to check out my latest post on Spotify Ad Studio here! I’ve been looking for ways to boost my Spotify streams. What could be better than advertising directly on Spotify with an audio ad? That way people will hear my music without needing to click on anything first. And if they hear…
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’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…
When it comes to Spotify promotion, I’ve tried just about everything short of billboard ads. Here’s a quick and dirty list of ways to promote your music on Spotify, with links to my posts on each topic: You can use Spotify’s own tools, like Marquee and Spotify Ad Studio. You can direct potential fans to…
This changes everything. Over the course of many posts, we’ve established that I can get potential fans from Facebook and Instagram to my latest release on Spotify for about $0.20. Today I’m going to make a case for paying $0.50 to do the same thing from within the Spotify app instead. Let me back up……
How do I promote my music to streaming? You’d be forgiven if you thought it was 100% Facebook and Instagram ads to Spotify. I’ve written about Facebook Ads many times, and they’ve become my most popular posts. The biggest challenge is getting potential listeners off Facebook and Instagram and over to Spotify. Wouldn’t it be…
In our last installment, I detailed a process to evenly distribute your Facebook and Instagram advertising budget across Spotify countries by splitting them into tiers. But what if you’d rather focus on only the countries most receptive to your music? I had an idea to do just that, and so far it’s worked out pretty…
I’ve been releasing a new track every 4-6 weeks for some time now, and I daresay I’ve got it down to a science. I upload the track to DistroKid a month or so before release, then work my way through the checklist below. Many of the items won’t apply to you, but they’re sure to…
I gave up on Spotify playlist pitching services. They just aren’t worth it. First off, there’s the risk of bots, which could get you booted off Spotify. Every service denies using them, but what human would choose to listen to unthemed collections of random songs by unknown artists? And yet there they are, sometimes with…
Matt Mancid and I just released an album of 80s covers that we’ve worked on since 2013. As much as we would’ve loved pressing CDs or even vinyl, paying the rights for 1000 CDs doubles the cost. We would’ve absolutely, positively lost money. So we released it digitally in two flavors: a 12-track standard edition…
It’s been four months since my last post. Sorry about that! My new album of 80s covers with Matt Mancid has been keeping me busy, among other things. On the promotional front, I’ve got plenty of irons on the fire, including three big reviews in progress. I share all the details in my How I’m…
Strangers routinely hit me up in my DMs with overly broad questions like, “I’ve got a new song coming out. How should I promote it?” I’d generally just refer them to my blog, where they wouldn’t find a dedicated answer to that question. UNTIL NOW. It obviously depends on the budget. And to be honest,…
Way back in 2001, my song “Ponytail Girl” spread like wildfire on Napster, mislabeled as an unreleased Depeche Mode b-side. Turning lemons into lemonade, I used the incident as the basis for a tribute album to the band. It quickly became my top seller, and the initial CD pressing sold out. Not wanting to become…
Seven months ago, I added a WooCommerce shop to my site for a free CD offer, which I discussed here and here. It ran from May through the beginning of August, netting $3249, which I used to press 1000 copies of each of my last two albums on CD. At the end of September, I…
In my last installment, I detailed the mechanics of my free + s/h funnel. If “free + s/h funnel” is gibberish to you, you can get yourself up to speed here. When I started, I had eight titles available on CD. Now I’m down to five, with less than 20 copies of the two I’d…
Why would anyone buy a CD in 2020? Let me count the ways: I first heard about the “free + s/h funnel” through Chris Robley, who heard about it through Indepreneur. It’s a pretty simple idea: you offer a CD for free. The buyer (air quotes) just has to cover the shipping & handling. Throwing…
It’s been over two years since I wrote How To Promote Your Music with Facebook Ads, and it’s still one of the most popular articles on the site. I’ve learned a lot since then, and I’m still learning! The truth is, the platform is constantly evolving, along with the Ads Manager interface. It’s hard to…
That's all, folks!
That's all, folks!