Passive Promotion

Introducing the Spotify Campaign Analyzer

June 22, 2026

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.

I got some bad news today.

I learned that I’ve spent over $12K on Spotify Marquee and Showcase campaigns since 2022.

And what did all that money get me besides a hole in the wallet?

Exactly 107,327 streams from 23,100 listeners at an average cost of $0.55 per listener.

And how do I know this?

It’s all thanks to the free Spotify Campaign Analyzer I built for you. Export your results from Spotify for Artists, drag the file onto the page, and you get everything S4A shows you, plus the analysis it doesn’t:

Every campaign in one sortable table. Spend, listeners, streams, and intent rate side by side across your entire campaign history.
The cost metrics Spotify doesn’t calculate: cost per listener, cost per stream, and total streams, including streams of your non-promoted releases.
Side-by-side comparisons. Pick any set of campaigns and see them charted against each other, metric by metric.
Benchmarks with context. Any campaign can be measured against your own history or against typical independent-artist results. Tiny, stopped-early campaigns can be disregarded (you set the dollar threshold) so as to not skew your results.
Apples-to-apples mode. Campaigns that target potential listeners (cold audiences) always look worse on paper. One click recomputes the numbers from warm audiences only.
A straight answer on in-progress campaigns. Enter the numbers from a campaign that’s still running and get a verdict with clear reasoning: keep going, watch it, or stop.
Completely private. It’s a single web page. Your data never leaves your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and there’s no signup. There’s not even a donate button! 🤔

What my 123 campaigns taught me

Pulling my whole history into one place surfaced a few things I would’ve never spotted on Spotify for Artists:

Latin America is a bargain. In Brazil I pay about $0.25 per converted listener and in Mexico $0.38, versus roughly $0.60 in the US and UK. Brazil and Mexico also post my highest intent rates (~22%), well above the US (~17%).
Albums beat singles, by a lot. Album campaigns convert listeners at $0.44 and generate ~5 streams per listener, while single campaigns cost $0.60 for ~1.6 streams each. More tracks means more to explore, but the cost-per-listener differences wasn’t obvious. EPs land in between.
Almost 40% of my streams came from my back catalog. Across these campaigns, listeners drove ~64k streams of the promoted release, plus another ~41k streams of my other releases. Kind of important to factor in, wouldn’t you say? But S4A keeps it tucked away.
Marquee and Showcase are different tools. My Marquee campaigns earn higher intent (~22% vs ~15%), but Showcase drives nearly double the streams per listener (3.0 vs 1.7).

Getting your data in

The tool reads the same results file Spotify already lets you download. It never connects to your account or asks for a login.

In Spotify for Artists, go to Campaigns → Display.
Click the “…” menu next to + Create campaign and choose Download all results. That’s a single CSV covering every campaign you’ve ever run.
Drag that file onto the analyzer. Done.

A few things worth knowing: it’s one file for your whole history. There’s no need to download individual campaigns, but it’ll accept them if you do. Your data stays in your browser; nothing is uploaded. It reads both Marquee and Showcase data all the way back to my first campaign in 2022.

It even works on my iPhone via the Files app! That was a pleasant surprise.

Give it a try at passivepromotion.com/spotify-campaign-analyzer

And share your results and suggestions for improvement in the comments!

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10 responses to “Introducing the Spotify Campaign Analyzer”

Jorge
June 22, 2026

It’s great!!! Thank you very much.

Reply
1. Brian Hazard
  June 22, 2026
  
  Glad you like it Jorge!
  
  Reply
David Nyro
June 22, 2026

Very interesting! Thanks for this new perspective, and for building this tool and offering it free. Brazil may be my next beachhead. (I have a handful of listeners there, but nothing close to you scale.) “The cost metrics Spotify doesn’t calculate: cost per listener, cost per stream, and total streams, including streams of your non-promoted releases.” Very handy!

Reply
1. Brian Hazard
  June 22, 2026
  
  You bet David! Might as well give Brazil a shot, knowing you can pull the plug at any time.
  
  Reply
Brock
June 22, 2026

Hey Brian,

Very cool! I had been thinking about vibe coding something to help me better analyze Spotify For Artists data, and here you’ve gone and done it! At least made a great start!

A few comments / observations:

– I had been analyzing the impact of the 3 different audience types I could potentially target with Showcase Campaigns, and found: Potential Listeners made up 80% of the action. Previous Listeners had great intent rate, playlist ads and saves, but was a much smaller segment. Programmed Listeners – next to 0 intent rate. So based on that, my next campaigns will only target Previous and Potential, to see if that does any better.

– I’ve spent $5400 over 29 campaigns. Damn, it hurts to see it aggregated like that!
– My avg cost / listener is almost the same: $0.58
– My cost / stream is almost double. But then, I’ve almost always only advertised in the US

– The only other country I advertised in was, coincidently, Brazil. I saw the same cost / listener as you reported: $0.25.

– I’d previously run some playlist promotions and quite a few of the listeners were in Brazil, so I thought I’d try to build on that, but I’ve since changed my philosophy because while it was getting me cheap streams, I concluded that it was not teaching the Spotify algorithm who the best audience is. (For example, I write songs in the Americana vein, and lyrics are pretty important.)

Currently I have 12,000+ total listeners in Brazil, but only about 500 are active, and intent rate is 4.4%. Whereas I’ve got 5000 total listeners in the US, but the intent rate there is 18.5%. And I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen from my Meta Ads, since I’m targetting all Tier 2 Countries, and most of the budget gets spent outside of the US. I’m pretty sure almost all of that positive impact came from the Showcase / Marquee ads.

– Lastly, I’m getting about 40,000 monthly streams from Discovery Mode, and a bunch of the songs continue to do well months after the release. Almost all the streams come from Radio. So my goal now is to figure out how to support that. That seems like the real prize – not how many streams came from the Showcase Ads, but how the song does subsequently, after I use the Showcase Ad to support the algorithm in finding the right audience.

Let me know what you think about all that! 🙂

Reply
1. Brian Hazard
  June 22, 2026
  
  You’re killing it with 40K Discovery Mode streams! I’m jealous. Mine dipped under 10K for the first time last month, but I’ve been going with Spotify’s recommendations for which songs to include. I used to just include every available track.
  
  If I’m understanding things correctly, Programmed Listeners are the ones from Radio that you steered the algorithm towards. So if you’re doing better with Potential Listeners i.e. cold audiences, which are likely picked via the same algorithm… I don’t know, my brain just exploded. The only difference between the two groups is that Programmed Listeners have already heard your music, so you’d think they’d perform better. They do for me pretty consistently, but Programmed is the worst performing warm audience, which of course makes perfect sense.
  
  I agree that Brazil doesn’t sound like a good bet for you considering that intent rate, assuming that’s something you consistently see. I imagine you’re getting a lot of exposure to Brazil and Mexico through your Tier 2 Meta campaigns already. You might want to make sure you’re only targeting English-speaking users, considering the importance of the lyrics.
  
  Looking at the past 28 days, I’ve got 7.6K listeners in the US and 2.9K in Brazil. I’m guessing the difference is your playlist campaigns. Interesting that we’re getting the same cost per listener in both countries!
  
  Reply
Brock
June 22, 2026

I wish I understood Discovery Mode better. I’ve mostly been adding every available track. The one time I didn’t, those tracks disappeared from Discovery Mode for me.

Programmed Listeners includes listeners from “other listeners’ playlists”. And it keeps track of them for 2 years. So anyone who listened even once in the past two years to a playlist I was on, would be in that group. And since I potentially fed the algorithm a lot of dubious data with my playlist promotion strategy, this might explain why this target group isn’t working that well for me right now.

BTW, I saw the same kind of response as you did to promoting a full album. I’m tempted to do it more to stimulate the back catalog, except I need to save my budget for the monthly releases.

One interesting tidbit – I released a quasi “Christmas” song in November (perhaps seasonal would be a better word), and it got about 5 spins / listener from the Showcase campaign. Which makes sense when you think about how people listen to Christmas music steadily for about a month or so. So I think I’ll run that same campaign again next November and see if it repeats.

Lastly, I’m wondering about using Spotify’s Track Popularity score as a way to tracking how successful promotion is over time. Have you thought about that at all?

Reply
1. Brian Hazard
  June 23, 2026
  
  I just updated my next Discovery Mode campaign to include all available tracks. Historically I maxed out at 55 tracks and now I’m down to 31, so maybe it really is a “use it or lose it” situation.
  
  I didn’t realize that Programmed Listeners included other listeners’ playlists. So not really programmed then! In that case, I’m sure you’re correct that the playlisting campaigns sabotaged you.
  
  Good call on the holiday track! I can’t bring myself to write one, beyond the one I wrote in 1997 which isn’t worth promoting.
  
  I keep my eye on track popularity but I’m not sure it offers anything useful beyond just tracking stream count.
  
  Reply
Brock
June 23, 2026

Re. Spotify Popularity score: I guess it depends if we think the score includes any engagement metrics, saves, adds, low-skip rate, beyond just streams (and the recency of those streams).

If it does, then it might provide a better way to measure the “success” of a campaign beyond just total number of streams. Spotify’s campaigns give engagement rates, but how else can we measure the quality of a campaign outside of Spotify beyond just total streams? That’s what I’m wondering…

Good discussion – thanks Brian!

Reply
1. Brian Hazard
  June 23, 2026
  
  A little AI birdie told me that the popularity score includes stream velocity, save rate, skip rate, playlist adds, repeat listens, completion rate, and geographic diversity.
  
  So yes, it could potentially be a better metric than total streams, but it’s pretty volatile! My latest single is at 36, which is pretty good for me.
  
  And thank you for the thoughtful comments! I’m sure it helps with site visibility, though it’s not as cut and dry as pre-AI when Google ranking was the primary goal.
  
  Reply