How to Promote Your Music on Deezer and Audiomack with Feature.fm
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.
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 great if you could promote your music directly on streaming services?
That’s becoming a reality on Spotify with Marquee, which I’ll be writing about soon. But it’s already here today on both Deezer and Audiomack, courtesy of Feature.fm.
Unlike Marquee, which prompts the user to listen to your track via a pop-up, Feature.fm campaigns automatically insert your music into the listener’s queue, where they’re forced to listen for at least 30 seconds before they can skip.
Feature.fm has had these sorts of campaigns available for years now. I tried one on 8tracks way back in 2016 and another on Deezer in 2017. Since then, Deezer has added an artist analytics dashboard called Deezer for Creators that makes it easy to see the fruits of your promotional labors.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll share all the juicy details in a bit, but first, let’s set up the two campaigns. Feature.fm let me test out $250 campaigns for both Deezer and Audiomack on their dime, and even walked me through the creation process.
I went with a tried and true song, which was at the top of my Vocal Synthwave Retrowave playlist for months because it performed so well in ads.
Feature.fm Deezer Campaign Creation
It shouldn’t take more than five minutes to launch a campaign. There are a total of three screens and the first is so basic (campaign name, song name, song image) that I’m not going to bother with a screenshot.
The second is devoted to targeting. We kept it pretty broad with no location, age, or gender restrictions (click to enlarge any of the images with small text):
There were a decent number of synthwave and synthpop targets including the almighty Depeche Mode, so I felt comfortable with my ability to reach potential fans.
The third and final page is devoted to budgeting. We ran both of the campaigns for one week.
That’s all there is to it!
Feature.fm Audiomack Campaign Creation
Audiomack campaigns are more or less identical, with the same three screens.
The first potential hurdle is getting your music on the platform to begin with! Years ago, I created an account and uploaded a track that has been gathering dust ever since.
DistroKid doesn’t send your music to Audiomack by default, but they will for no extra charge if you follow the process here. Now my latest album and follow-up EP are both available, and all future releases will be distributed to Audiomack with the click of a box at the bottom of the upload page.
Targeting options on Audiomack were few and far between. We were racking our brains to come up with available targets and I’m not even sure the ones we chose were connected to the correct artist profiles.
I guess it’s not too hard to check!
I just searched and The Midnight is missing their major releases, Power Glove is an “authenticated account” with no uploads, and Erasure and Gunship aren’t there at all. Kavinsky and Caroline Polachek are legit.
The scheduling and budget options are slightly different but we did the math to make it work out the same.
Feature.fm Deezer Campaign Results
So, am I “Deezer famous” yet?
It’s obvious which campaign performed better. The Deezer campaign is technically still in progress but out of budget, hence the gray dot and red end date.
What’s an engagement, you wonder?
You can see exactly when users engaged, or more often, skipped the track:
Not surprisingly, most of the skips occur shortly after the 30-second mark. Engagements are spread out over the duration of the song.
Deezer pretty much hit my ideal demographic here: older males.
To my surprise, the engagement skewed younger and more female. Huh.
Most of my engagements were “added to favorite,” suggesting that listeners would listen to the track again. But did they?
With Deezer for Creators, we can find out!
Here are my total streams for two months, starting two weeks before the campaign. Obviously this doesn’t include the promoted plays, just organic engagement:
On the day the campaign launched, I got 19 streams. By the fifth day of the campaign, it was up to 73:
As you can see, my total streams and unique listeners were elevated for some time and are still higher today than before the start of the campaign.
The effect is more pronounced at the song level. I bet you can guess which line represents “The Limit.”
Let’s put some numbers on it:
Last but not least, what countries are these songs being promoted to? I was expecting mostly France since that’s where Deezer is headquartered, but Brazil beat it out.
I was pleased to see a decent chunk of streams to the UK and especially the US, which yielded an impressive engagement rate.
And… that’s it for Deezer!
In short, it works! People hear your song and some percentage of them like it enough to seek it out again.
We don’t earn royalties on the promoted spins, but the earned ones provide at least a smidge of ROI.
Long-term, who knows? It would be interesting to devote $10 a day to Deezer and see where things stand in six months, if only I had the budget.
If I restricted my targeting by country, age, and gender, and dialed in my genres and similar artists a little better, I bet I could build a respectable audience on the platform.
Feature.fm Audiomack Campaign Results
This may seem like an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s really not.
Audiomack sponsored songs are, for now, only on desktop. A mobile option should be available in the next few months.
Another caveat is that Audiomack has its roots in hip hop. I’m not sure there’s much of an audience for synthwave.
With that in mind, let’s dig into the data!
Like I said, all desktop. A 0.18% engagement rate isn’t impressive in any context, even up against banner ads.
A few good things happened, dwarfed by skips, skips, and more skips:
On the plus side, I received celebratory emails from Audiomack at certain milestones, like hitting 10K streams.
I can confirm my Feature.fm results through Audiomack’s creator dashboard. Here’s a snapshot of the past three months. See if you can spot when the campaign occurred:
Unfortunately, plays of “The Limit” didn’t bleed over to the rest of the album:
All is not lost, as I made two genuine fans, who added me to three playlists each:
DatOneDerp even commented on ROBLOX LOVER’s playlist about my song!
He also appears in my top fans:
The rest of my top fans are questionable. For starters, the default avatar doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
The profile of my top fan with 110 plays asks users to “Follow FOR THE BEST RAP MUSIC” (his emphasis).
Adding to the overall sketchiness, my music is featured on 228 embedded players, most if not all in Nigeria:
You might deduce that the sponsored plays went mostly to Nigeria, but you’d be wrong! For better or worse, they went to the US, which rewarded me with a 0.1% engagement rate.
Nigeria came in a distant second with 393 plays. Nigerian plays from the embedded players above add up to more than that, so I’m not sure what to make of it, and I’m not particularly motivated to investigate further.
Feature.fm Ad Campaigns Conclusion
I’d be up for testing Audiomack again once sponsored songs hit mobile. For now, Deezer is unequivocally the way to go.
If you’re reluctant to put all your eggs into Spotify’s one basket, a Deezer campaign is a great way to diversify your promotional investment.
If you’d like to try it out for yourself, you can get 30% off any Feature.fm annual marketing plan using code PASSIVE30 here.
Be sure to share your results in the comments!
UPDATE 5/25/22: In the month since I published this post, two readers have seen unbelievable engagement numbers in their campaigns. We’re talking over 50% compared to my 2.2%. It appears Deezer is sending back bogus playlist add events. Feature.fm is investigating and hopefully it’ll be resolved soon.
“The Limit” continues to perform exponentially better than the rest of my catalog on Deezer. 333 streams in 30 days is a drop in the bucket compared to Spotify, but far superior to my pre-campaign numbers.
UPDATE 5/30/22: Based on Jorge’s comment below, the add to playlist reporting issue appears to have been resolved.
UPDATE 6/27/22: I attempted another Deezer campaign with my new single. I was hoping to invest a couple bucks a day, but the minimum is $10, so I went with that.
I started off with a handful of reliable countries and saw that the US was producing a 5% engagement rate, so I narrowed it to US-only and the engagement rate dropped to 1.2%
Same idea with age and gender. It seemed the more I tried to narrow the targeting to my ideal fan, the worse my results.
I ended up pulling the plug at $100, which netted me 5K plays and 76 engagements, most of which were “add to favorite.”
Here’s the breakdown by country:
And here’s the stream count for the single (actually a 7-track EP) for the last 30 days:
Clearly, the campaign had an effect. Normally my Deezer streams are negligible. It just wasn’t enough of a boost to justify the cost for me right now.
UPDATE 6/28/22: Deezer campaigns are going bye bye!
I just received an email from Feature.fm stating that the last day to launch a Deezer campaign is Tuesday, July 5. Campaigns will run until July 27. At that point, any remaining budget will be refunded.
It was fun while it lasted!
Thanks so much Brian. I wonder if Deezer will become the new Spotify in the cool kids club over the coming years. I’m at least excited to log in and check my creator stats; I do know I hit checking those way too much on Spotify right now as it is. Thank you for the insight!
Always great to hear from you Jenna! I just noticed there’s a Deezer for Creators app, at least on iPhone. The stats are presented a little differently, and you can only see streams and listeners on a per-releases basis, but it’s a nice compliment to what’s on desktop.
Another fantastic review Brian that I’ll share with my members!
That would be much appreciated Nick!
Thanks Brian – I’ve been a long time reader.
Something I’ve always wanted to ask you – if I’m an artist who creates a wide spectrum of music, would you advise keeping it all under one artist name and risking fan alienation, or dividing it up into projects / risk complexity and increased workload?
Great question Jesse!
I’ve always recommended keeping things under one artist name. If you were releasing under your own name, it wouldn’t even be a question, right? These days I think people tend to see an artist name as just another way to refer to the person, rather than a project.
That said, I released an acoustic album in 2002 that I wish I’d put under my own name. Many fans disagree and feel that even though the instrumentation is different, it’s still inherently Color Theory. Regardless, it would’ve been a nightmare to promote under my own name, and you can bet I’d have integrated it into Color Theory by now rather than maintaining multiple sets of websites and social media profiles.
Thanks Brian, this is really helpful and may help me end years (not kidding) of hesitancy and self-torture!
It actually is indeed just my own name that I’ve been releasing (singer songwriter) music under – but more recently also some quirky kids picture books…and some puppetry, so the question is whether to also include my new ‘adult’ material (sounds like Beirut) under my name alongside the kids stuff, or make it a separate project.
Does that degree of variety in the material change your answer?
Thanks for your time – trying to be concise so I can honor it!
(and curious now to go check out your acoustic album from 2002!)
The album in question (Something Beautiful) is on my Bandcamp but not Spotify. There are plenty of things I’d do differently, most of them vocally! Water under the bridge…
And yes, that does change my answer! For three reasons…
First, you’ve got two distinct audiences here with little to no overlap.
Second, you’ve also likely got two different narrative voices. You probably don’t identify with the persona/protagonist of the kids stuff as an extension of your own personality.
Third, and this is very specific but still important IMHO, you’d have to check the “for kids” box on YouTube, and your channel as a whole might be designated as “for kids” which would severely limit your ad revenue potential.
At the very very least, you should have two YouTube channels!
Great Read, thank you. Curious to hear about your Marquee experience
Two Marquee experiences! Should be in the next week or two tops.
Thanks for these roundups and in-depth reports. It’s helpful that you go through the testing so we’re not all reinventing the wheel.
With a 5% return rate, it seems a Deezer campaign targeted at US and Spain might be money well spent.
For someone who only has plays in the dozens, it’s nice to see how you can get play numbers up relatively quickly. But still, the campaign may never fully pay for itself. Still a bit of a conundrum, to me anyway.
Great point Bill! I’d actually probably opt for a US-only campaign, knowing how my music typically performs in Spain (not particularly well).
I don’t think any of these campaigns could possibly pay for themselves, especially if we’re never taking our newfound fans off-platform and into our email lists.
Dang, Brian! We REALLY do need to move out and into other places to place ads! Though the results might seem a little sketchy, at least you found a few new folks who have heard and dig your music. That’s really ALL you can ask for at the end of the day—and for the cost of a couple of concert tickets…. Sounds pretty worth it. ♀️
As always, thanks for sharing the inside dirt on your ads activity!
My pleasure! Thanks for the optimism! You’re totally right. Bottom line, mission accomplished!
Thanks again for your time Brian – and whoa my guy, you’re voice is astounding!
I had a listen to “Something Beautiful” back to back with “The Skeleton’s Closet” and I see what your fans mean – your voice, even though used differently, is a thread of cohesion between the styles.
Hearing that old album makes me wonder if you’ve ever done musical theater – you definitely have the chops for it!
Tip of the hat from Salt Spring Island 🙂
Thanks for the kind words, and for taking the time to compare and contrast. Yes, that album definitely has a musical theater flavor, for better or worse!
Tried a Deezer campaign – surprisingly decent results! ✨ Shame it blew through the budget in like a day, would have been nice to see it spread out a bit more to maybe benefit from some ad spend learning. Still, can’t complain.
Fantastic! Next time you could set the start and end dates and select “spread budget evenly.”
We might be overly optimistic in thinking the platform optimizes like Facebook and Google ads. More likely it just continues blindly with the pool of listeners defined by our initial selections.
Good point – I’m assuming there’d be some kind of optimization but that might not be the case. In which case I guess it doesn’t matter over how many days the budget is spent.
For what it’s worth, this is what I’m seeing:
▶︎ Budget: $250
▶︎ Sponsored plays: 12,241
▶︎ Engagements: 7,784
▶︎ Engagement rate: 63.59%
Looks like Brazil eating up most of the budget.
Thanks for the very informative article as always.
Hold the phone! Your engagement rate was 64% and mine was 2%? Man I suuuuuuuuuuck!
Assuming that’s correct, which I’d find hard to believe even if the music was composed by the Lord almighty herself™, what was the engagement breakdown? I mostly got adds to favorite.
Sorry, can’t see a Reply button next to your latest comment. Will post a new one.
Quick one to say I e-mailed you a PDF of my results – sorry if my comment was misleading in some way.
(Hahahaha, Lord almighty herself™ – just little old me but I guess I’m missing something.)
Thanks for the PDF. It’s just as you say – your engagement rate is 63.59% due to 7711 playlist adds! That’s just nuts.
You’re not missing anything. The closer it gets to closing time around here, the sillier I get. Now it’s morning and I’m stone-cold serious. 😉
Please share your Deezer for Creators numbers after a week or so! Let’s see how the campaign carries over into the “real world.”
By the way, I pulled up your track on Spotify and it’s great! I’d like to think it’s not 32x better than my song, but those numbers don’t lie!
Haha, either it’s bots or some folks in Brazil really connected with this one – hope it’s the latter.
Will update in a week or so!
I look forward to it!
Hi Brian! Very interesting information, as always. I’ve decided to run a small campaign with a budget of $10/day. After my first day, I’m getting a 48.30% Engagement Rate, almost all of it “playlist addition”. I’m only targeting the US and Spain (I’m based in Spain).
There’s a trick to it: it’s an album of covers of a very well known artist, that I’m targeting exclusively. I think you could do the same with one of your Depeche Mode songs…
I need to try that out Jorge! Between you and Kinoco, it looks like my 2.22% engagement rate is the outlier. You’re both killing it!
I’d love to see what happens with your Deezer for Creators numbers!
Deezer for Creators hasn’t updated yet. I’ll send the numbers to you. I’m curious to see that as well, we’ll see if the engagement is real or not. BTW I just signed up for Deezer for Creators today and was approved very quickly.
I wonder how big the pool of listeners is and what’s the frequency of the ad. That would be extremely useful information.
It took months for me to be approved! You really do have the magic touch.
Yes, it would be awesome to know the frequency. It must be low if nearly half are engaging!
Well I can see I was lucky with Deezer approval. More data: the $10 budget takes about 2-3 hours to be spent. I’m up to 53.25% engagement and out of 1,000 plays there are 513 playlist additions. Still no data in Deezer for Creators. I have close to zero activity on Deezer so it will be a good gauge for the campaign’s effectivity.
That makes me wonder if the budget is being blown through at the same time every day, which could potentially affect frequency. Thanks for the update!
Well, after a few days of watching my stats, it seems that about 800 people added me to a playlist of songs they never want to hear again! The impact of the campaign in listeners and streams has been zero. Well, actually the song I promoted got ONE stream, according to the stats.
So, my campaign results are either a bug or an elaborate scam. Or both. I’ve reached out to Feature.fm and Deezer both. Let’s see what they say.
Dang. We knew it was too good to be true! Please keep us posted.
Same as Jorge for me:
▶︎ The Feature.fm campaign listed north of 7000 playlist adds…
▶︎ …and over a week later I’m looking at 77 streams from 42 listeners.
Not sure what’s going on here but I doubt I’ll be using the service again.
I’ve contacted Feature.fm with both of your cases and will report back when I hear something!
That’s awesome! Thank you so much.
Well, after a loooong time I did receive a campaign credit for the amount spent, and no technical explanation whatsoever of what had happened.
Also, it’s funny that their email with the campaign confirmation has a button to check stats that leads to a dead subdomain. I alerted them to that over a month ago but they didn’t bother fixing it.
After a long wait, apparently it was determined that my great results were a “bug,” I was credited for the amount spent ($30) and I spent it in a campaign with the same settings.
I got 1,504 Sponsored Plays and 16 Engagements; a 1.06% Engagement Rate. There were 13 “added to favorite”, whatever that means, and 3 album page views, which was the call to action.
Even though I only specified two countries, 7 more countries were added to the mix, including “Unknown”. The number of plays was low, but still I don’t understand why.
The “organic” Deezer results: one stream/one listener.
It was an interesting experiment anyway.
Thanks for reporting back Jorge! Hope you don’t mind that I consolidated your comments above.
I suppose it’s nice to see that the added to playlists reporting issue is fixed. “Added to favorite” is probably like hitting the heart in Spotify, a bookmark of sorts that apparently few ever return to.
Since your last comment, I updated the post with my latest Deezer stats. My song is still doing surprisingly well, but of course my campaign was over 6x more expensive.
I still wonder what $10/day would do over the course of a couple of months, but my budget doesn’t have room for it at the moment.
Thanks for reporting back, Jorge!!
My pleasure. I’m glad we all contributed to the collective intel here!
Hi my name is Jefry my artist name is Lil PLUGGS I was hoping if y’all can promote my music
Thank you and have a great day
Nice to meet you Jefry!
There’s no y’all – just me. I do occasionally consult but I don’t promote others’ music.
My hope is that my posts here will give you the info you need to do it yourself!