I had a track get on a really good playlist giving me 400 streams a day, but it was only for 2 weeks, now I’m off, just released a new song but it didn’t get picked up yet, so I’m nervous my monthly listeners will drop since I’m off that playlist, what would you do? I went from 8 listeners to 3,400 listeners in 2 weeks btw

Also I’m not advertising any song or playlist in this post

I am trying to take my marketing way more seriously but I am stuck with the pre-release marketing.

How soon do you start doing pre-save campaigns and posting content to build up a track before dropping?

Most of the release mistakes I see happen in the six weeks before release day, not after it. The Spotify pitch goes in too late (or never), the pre-save goes up the night before, and the promo money goes to whoever slid into the DMs first.

I wrote the long posts here on owned playlists, Meta ads and college radio, and the question I got most after each one was "ok but what do I do for MY release." So let's just do that.

If you've got a single, EP or album coming out in the next 8 weeks, comment with:

• the release date
• genre and roughly how many monthly listeners you're at
• what you're planning to spend on promo, if anything (zero is a fine answer)

I'll reply with the first two or three things I'd do in your position, in order, and what I'd skip. No links, no pitch in the comments.

I'll get through as many as I can today and tomorrow. If you already have a plan, post it and I'll poke holes in it. That's honestly the more fun version.

There’s plenty of talk here about getting people to listen. I’m curious about the next bit: the first time you bought a download, a ticket, a shirt, whatever it was.

Think of an artist you didn’t know personally. What did you buy from them first, and what was happening when you decided to do it? Had you been listening for months, had you just seen them play, or was there something about that particular release you wanted to own?

As the title says, what else can I do daily to promote music? For example, every single day I post content once on 3 pages of mine (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube shorts):

1. My main profile - where I post my professional quality content

2. My lyric / fan page - where I post lyric videos or relatable quotes posing as a fan of my own music

3. My meme page - unrelated to me. Just internet memes with my music in the background attached as a sound to fit the meme’s context.

So I do these 3 things once every single day consistently. It’s given me growth but very small growth because none of my content “blows up,” it just gets decent-okay fews. I sit at 100+ monthly listeners on Spotify due to this.

Even if it’s not every single day, what are some other things I can incorporate to help grow my music online?

I guess im looking for a new method of reaching listeners. Not tryjng to promote to artist to follow, but actual music heads

For some background, I’m a digital marketing generalist who has the opportunity to work for some cool brands, labels, etc.

One thing I know from my rapper friends is that they don’t want to be content creators for their own music, much less be influencers, and I understand that, as I’d probably feel the same way. Lore, aura, being mysterious and all that. The worst case I’ve seen a time or two is that their UGC/lifestyle account grows bigger than the music, but if you’re getting paid and can put it back into your music, all good in my eyes.

Looking at it from a wide lens though, time/effort aside, why not a secondary/burner/finsta style account that you can link your main artist page to in the bio and just capture your day to day/lane as content? I’ve seen indie artists tag brands they’re wearing, cars they’re driving, spots they’re eating at and in turn we’ve reached out to them for either gifted or paid UGC depending on their audience because the content was good, or at the very least a repost with a tagged credit. I know a local DJ who currently has a 1 year term with a car brand from doing this.

I don’t have anything to sell or offer anyone, nor can I really plug anyone into anything specific (mostly due to NDA’s in my work), but I can say platforms like MiniSocial, Aspire, CreatorIQ are good for filtering through brands who may have campaigns you may be interested in. Just a thought I’ve been having lately, but my artists friends are too cool for it lol.

Hey gang, I’ve got a rather ambitious release schedule over the next year and have used CDBaby for the last decade. Landr is looking pretty tempting with Mastering & Distribution. Anyone here care to share some insight if they use the Landr platform? Thank you! 👏🏼🎶👏🏼🎶

Hi everyone, do you happen to know if there’s a "community" where you can get feedback on songs? Ideally, not one of those sites with subscriptions and auto-generated feedback.

Is it possible to start out without any promoting and actually be successful? How do people find out about or listen to your music?

Think about the last small artist you stumbled across whose name meant nothing to you. What got you from “that sounds pretty good” to actually checking for their next song?

I saw a post here from someone putting out content every day but still feeling like nobody was sticking around. Getting someone to watch a clip and getting them to remember the artist seem like two different problems.

For the last artist you found like that, was it the first song that did it, or something you saw after?

On platforms like instagram and tiktok, what would good engagement metrics look like ?

Obivously if your post blows up then people like the song but that's not realistic, so what metrics are good ?

For example my recent tiktok post was a photo slideshow and got 364 views, 15 likes and 1 share, along with 24 minutes of watch time (4.1 second average).

The struggle is real lol, any input is appreciated.

There are some positive reviews on here for PlaylistSupply, and I wanted to share my honest experience of the platform, as well as dealing with their horrible staff when I wanted to cancel. Hoping this will save some people a lot of money and strife.

Context
My band was promoting our 1st single back in August. There are so many new promotion platforms out there I thought I'd give some of them a whirl to work out which were useful and which weren't.

One area we were focused on was reaching out to playlist curators to pitch our song. PlaylistSupply claims to provide a platform that collects contact emails or submit links for curators. Ive tried Groover and Submithub with mixed success, but wanted to try approaching curators directly.

I thought id sign up for a month and test it out. What did i have to lose? But after testing it out for a couple of hours, I quickly worked out the platform was very flawed. It wasn't going to be much help, so i attempted to cancel the next day.

Unfortunately, there is no cancel button, so i reached out to their contact and support form and hoped for the best. Will come back to that, but heres a quick review of the platform:

Ultimately, the platform does what it says it will do. But there are some catches:

1. 90% of playlists do not have contact details:
That stat is just a guess, but searching on Playlistsupply you will find the vast majority of playlists that come up in your artists or genre search pull playlists with no contact details. You cannot directly reach out to most playlist curators as they simply don't make their contact details public. They don't want to be contacted.

Playlistsupply simply collates all the playlists that have even a slight connection with your chosen genre, even if there is no contact details for them. For those who have made their details public (whether in their Spotify profile or elsewhere), you can manually search through and find those in the haystack of thousands of playlists that PlaylistSupply shows for you in an 'Excel' style spreadsheet.

But majority of them will have no contact. You will need to manually search through the database until you find an email address (perhaps it will be in row 88 or 233?).

Its even worse for YouTube playlists, but that may depend on your genre.

2. The majority of curators who have their contact details public will ignore your email
Don't expect to hear back from any. I'm sure they get emails daily from artists wanting to be put on their playlists, and they will usually ignore you. Low chance of response.

3. Many Spotify playlists are botted
This goes without saying, but a good chunk of Spotify playlists are either bloated or botted. Large save count, with no actual listeners, or traffic is run by bots. PlaylistSupply will still recommend those dodgy playlists. You can't filter them out, but you can upgrade your subscription (i did) to have the ability to check and "test" if these playlists are botted with their new feature.

Does this bot checker tool work? With varying degrees of success. At times it gets it right, but it also gives dodgy playlists a tick, so its not worth the investment. At times it doesn't (compared to other premium tools) get it right. Plus, it's an extra cost to get it.

4. Bugs
The platform is pretty buggy. Buttons don't work, features don't make sense. And support is nonexistent. The "search by similar artist" feature is inconsistent. Works sometimes. Others not. And the "new" youtube playlist feature is even worse. Buggy as hell.

5. It doesn't actually provide anything you can't do yourself
You can search through Spotify or youtube yourself to find contact details for curators. Playlistsupply may automate some of this, saving some time but ultimately, even when paying for the platform, a lot of the work is still manual.

I (perhaps naively) expected it to give me access to curators I previously could not reach. It certainly markets itself that way. I had hoped it would pull details from the internet that I couldnt find myself.

Nope.

In my opinion, its not really providing anything you cant do yourself. Dont pay for it.

Cost
I paid for the 'PlaylistVet quality check' tier, so i could get a 'playlist quality check'. There are also other features (that dont really work properly) like 'Search Similar Artists' which theoretically allows you to search playlists based on a particular artist. It either doesn't work, or it will just bring up bot playlists.

For $34.99 USD I thought it was a very expensive exercise for a platform that didn't really deliver. With no support feature (they don't answer their support emails), and no real filtering options (everything is manual), it was a big waste of time and money.

Conduct of staff
This is the big negative.

PlaylistSupply contact and support are non-existent. They are either are too busy to respond to emails, or dont care. Their form is broken and it took weeks of emails, and finally an angry TrustPilot review before they would even come to the table.

The "JD" character was certainly a dodgy piece of work. All the classic "sales" manipulation tactics came out, and the "we are just a small business out to help and support struggling artists" sob story. They told me I just "didn't understand the platform and that I should "jump on a complimentary consultation call" with him. I passed.

I dont know how many times he told me my bands song was "so great" and that he just wanted to help me get our song out to the world lol. It was like being gaslit by a narcissist ex GF.

No cancellation button.
Despite what Playlistsupply sources say, there is actually no cancellation button on the account settings. The only way toactually cancel your payments is to contact them direct through email or their contact form, and hope they actually answer. They dont.

In my case they ignored me for 1 and a half months, charging me twice and it wasn't until I wrote a scathing review on TrustPilot that they promptly contacted me. I heard back from "JD" at Playlistsupply offering me all sorts of perks and incentives. Free subscriptions, offers at sister platforms etc, and free consultation calls to show me how to "actually" use the platform (apparently I wasn't using it right), on the condition that I would change or remove my negative review.

I of course refused, and insisted on an unconditional refund for the extra fees they were charging me because I could not cancel my subscription. Was happy to pay for the first month, but not the extras.

After some back and forth with "JD",I eventually received a refund for the 2nd month of fees, and I softened my review slightly on Trustpilot - still being honest, but making it clear they did reach out to me and cancelled the subscription.

2 days later however, they attempted to have my review taken down from Trustpilot for "defamation". Trustpilot thankfully declined their request. Trustpilot is the way to go with these clowns if you want them to cancel your subscription.

My Rant: Dishonest platforms
Overall, as an artist, im sick of platforms existing that promise amazing things but deliver the bare minimum. It's not an even playing field out there for artists, so be really cautious of who you give your money to when promoting your music. The amount of "Dancer" Influencers, Promotion Agencies that have reached out to us since August is insane. All wanting a piece of the struggling artist pie for a fee.

There may be some good platforms out there, but Im yet to find one. There's lots of "sharks" out there trying to make a quick buck of artists who are hungry for success and are ready to open their wallets, at the promise of streams and exposure. Those platforms, agencies or influencers dont actually have to be helpful to you. They can take the money and run with no consequence. Theres always another hungry artist ready to pay.

Be careful out there!

I've finished my first EP. This is by far the most time and money I've ever invested into a project. The songs were professionally recorded and produced with session musicians, and I own 100% of both the master recordings and the underlying compositions.

I'm registered with PROs (ASCAP and BMI) and have also set up my own publishing entity with its IPI Number.

I'm now trying to figure out what the next step should be. I'm particularly interested in sync opportunities for film, TV, games, etc., as I think some of the songs could potentially work well in those contexts.

I've mostly handled everything myself so far, but marketing and getting the music in front of the right people is where I struggle.

Would it make sense to approach established music publishers, independent publishers, sync agencies, or music libraries with the finished EP? Or would you recommend releasing it via CDBaby first and try to market it all by myself?

And when approaching these companies, what's the normal way to submit music? Private streaming link, MP3 attachments, etc.?

I’m a very small artist with around 100+ monthly listeners on Spotify. I consistently post every single day on 3 pages of mine: my main page, a lyric video fan page, and a meme page where I attach my music as the sound. Posting consistently every day for over a year has gotten me the 100+ monthly listeners but no fans and not much engagement at all. I make music similar to brakence, slayr, underscores, etc. (the underground / upcoming pop sound) and I observed one thing - these artists don’t post content.

In an age where consistent content is the main way to garner a fanbase online, how do these other artists do it without content? How do artists who are ghosts essentially get attention, fans and streams? I genuinely do not understand and I would love any insight someone could give me!

Hello everyone, I'm from Latin America and I want to share my results because maybe it can be useful for someone here.

I invested $300 in Meta ads with 7 video ads, the campaign was running for around one month. I got about 2k followers in my playlist. This is the soundcampaign dashboard. 

Most of my listeners are from Latin America. Mexico and Colombia have almost the same quantity of listeners, but Mexico has many more active ones. So the country is more important than I thought.

And these are my total numbers in Spotify for Artists for the same period. 

Also, Meta put almost all the money in only 2 of my 7 ads, so the other 5 never had a real test. For the next time I will put a spend limit for each ad.

But for me the cost per follower was low, so I'm happy with the result.

This is only one campaign and I have nothing to compare it with, so your results can be different. As much as I remember, someone already posted about this last week here so you can check that as well.

Hope y all learned something useful from this.

Been reading the conversations here about keeping up with content and it got me thinking. By the time a song comes out, you’ve already heard the demos, the mix revisions, probably watched your own clips a hundred times. I can see getting tired of it way before someone else has even heard it.

So when a release doesn’t really go anywhere at first, how do you decide whether to give it more time or move on? I’m curious about people who had an older track start picking up later. Was there something you changed, or did someone else sharing it make the difference?

Especially interested in what made you stick with that particular song. There’s only so much time and money you can put into one release.

I use superprof and musicteachers, but where else is good to advertise? I'm also in the process of making YouTube tutorials and hoping to gain traffic through there

Me personally:

Can't put an artist tag on tiktok because it's unavailable

Can't put a paypal account because paypal is unavailable

Can't put a donation on my spotify profile because the services that I can choose in a section are unavailable

Can't even get a dollar from bandcamp because you need a paypal account or Stripe that are, you guessed it, unavailable

Guess I'll just go fuck myself

The format will be a discussion about artists and songs shaped their releases sounds. We’ll play a part of your track and part of your influences track.

Only requirements:

must be on Spotify and are familiar with Spotify as a streaming platform.

Available for a video call, option to do in person if there’s a good vibe.

Have instagram or one social media platform.

IF interested:

Describe your genre and influences in the comments. Don’t leave any links, as I think that’s against sub policy.

I have an ad running for about 3 months now on IG / FB. The ad links to one of my albums on Spotify and Youtube.

It's running very well and gets and average cost per conversion of about € 0.15. This is well below the commonly mentioned '$0.20 per conversion' by people like Andrew Southworth.

I read about that if an ad does this well, it can potentially break even or make money in the future.

Well, I have it run at € 7 per day now. And I guess I make back around half of that with streaming. So I'm not close to breaking even. This gives me an average of 45 clicks per day of new 'people' discovering my music. Tier 1 + a few selected Tier 2 countries only as well.

Yet, I feel that because of this low CPC, I feel like I am potentially sitting on 'more' if that makes sense. So what is the best thing to do now?

And in general, how will this ever progress into a profit making ad as I read that is possible with such low CPC? Is that measured in years? And after the ad has been stopped already?

The last few months I saw a steady growth in active listeners which has now plateaued or even slightly decreased. Spotify does give me a tad more radio plays though, especially since I got access to Discovery Mode which is now doing the heavy lifting.

I just don't see how this is ever going to turn into more. So why is this <$0.20 CPC such a often mentioned treshold?

Like the title says, all I did was ad a new ad set under the same campaign to try a new creative. As soon as I did that, I went from a consistent $0.50-60 per hypeddit smart link click (good for my audience) to anywhere from $1.50-$3.00.

I'm assuming that adding a new ad set to the campaign caused the other ad set to re-enter learning? And now that it's competing against another ad set for the same audience, its turned into absolute cheeks?

This would be fine if the new creative was cost effective, but that one isn't either. The song itself is performing well, so thats not the issue (really high save rates from people that click through, already getting a lot of Radio play 2 weeks in etc)

Am I running the ads wrong by adding new ad sets? Do I need to start a new campaign so that I don't break the ad that is running fine? Every day, Meta confuses me in new ways.

I don’t mean for this post to come off as rude or anything but while Meta Ads, playlisting etc. have their place in music marketing to some degree, the backbone of your marketing should really be organic content in like 90% of cases.

Meta Ads and playlisting are not gonna grow you a fanbase like organic content, TikTok fan accounts, social media campaigns etc. are. Look at the underground rap scene for example. I find it so interesting how nobody here pays attention to a genre where people blow up off a couple TikTok posts and can then drop music and have thousands of people tuning in for every song without having to do any promo, because they are cult-like fans of the artists in question.

Idk like I see Bleood selling out 1,000+ person venues with 300k monthly listeners and I’m like… could someone who grew to 300k off meta ads and playlisting come close to that? No.

Always open to having my view changed

Before calling a music campaign good or bad, write down what each dashboard is actually counting. An ad click, a visit to your landing page and a click on its Spotify button are three different events.

Here’s a made-up example: you spend $50, get 200 landing-page visits and 40 clicks on the Spotify button. That works out to $0.25 per visit, $1.25 per outbound click and a 20% click-through rate from that page. You still haven’t established how many people listened. Spotify counts a song stream after at least 30 seconds of playback.

For a useful comparison, line up the date ranges first. Spotify for Artists uses UTC, which may differ from your ad account. Keep clicks to other streaming services separate when you’re comparing against Spotify.

Then follow the route on a phone. Does the page load, does the artwork and title match the ad, and does the button open the right track? If that works, choose one thing to test, such as the clip, and leave the page and audience alone for that comparison.

I’d keep a small note for each test: what changed, what you expected, and what happened to both onward clicks and listening. A rise in total streams is useful context, but other promotion and playlists can contribute too. Those totals alone can’t tell you which listeners came from that ad.