PLP 062: Five Surprising Facts About Spotify for Artists

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This episode is all about Spotify and the five surprising things I recently learned from the Spotify Field Guide from Indepreneur.io. I’ll also share results from a couple of my own direct-to-Spotify Facebook ad campaigns. This is a really information-dense episode, so get out your note-taking pens!

You’ll Learn

  • Why you shouldn’t put Spotify on a pedestal
  • Why Spotify is a black-box for musicians
  • Why not all streams are created equal
  • Which metrics are most important on your artist dashboard
  • Why pre-save campaigns probably aren’t worth the effort
  • Why Indepreneur.io provides outstanding value

Resources

Transcript

What’s up Heroes. We’ve been on quite a roll with the interviews for the last couple of months: Dani Felt, Sandra Bullet, Zak Jablow, Approaching Nirvana…. I’ve got Hatorade coming up next week… but I wanted to mix up the tempo a little and do a show just on Spotify because I recently the Spotify Field Guide course from Indepreneur.io and I wanted to share a couple of the most surprising things I learned, as well as the results from a couple of my own recent ad campaigns.

But first, cue the intro music.

I expected the course to start off with a pitch for why Spotify is the greatest music distribution platform EVER…. But Kyle Lemaire, who goes by Circa, didn’t do that. In fact, he made three very profound points trying to really temper expectations for advertising to Spotify.  First, Spotify doesn’t have a great business model.  They launched about 12 years ago, and still struggle to make a profit…. So going “all in” on a platform which may or may not be around a decade from now doesn’t make much sense.   Second, they’re a “black box” meaning they don’t share much information with the artists about fan’s activities, such as where they come from to get to the platform or where they go too afterwards.  This makes it hard to make advertising decisions with the metrics provided by Spotify.   RIP Kenney identified this problem back in episode 49: he’s running Facebook ads to Spotify as well as organic Spotify ads… and when I asked him which one was working better…. He had no idea because Spotify doesn’t give you the data you’d need to tell. The numbers Spotify provides are often just vanity metrics.  Contrast this with Facebook where you can get a tremendous amount of information about your Fans and what they do both on and off of the Facebook site.  Finally, don’t expect to make money trying to run ads to Spotify. The payouts are just too low. 

So…with those three things in mind  why didn’t I just close my browser and call it quits there and move on to some other marketing campaign? Why waste the time?   For me it boiled down to three reasons: first, I’d told Sandra Bullet, my singer and 50% owner on Higher, I was going to run some ads to Spotify and needed to follow through.  Second, it gave me some more experience with Facebook’s add manager, and finally….the vanity numbers.   I wanted bigger numbers to show venues when I eventually start playing out later this year. That’s why I set Spotify growth as one of my goals this year.

The course went over every aspect of Spotify, from user profiles, to merch, to different types of playlists, two how Spotify’s algorithm works based on their ad agencies testing, as well as technical papers and presentations given by Spotify employees.  Here are some of the most interesting things I learned:

Not all streams are equal. You may already know that it takes a 30-second listen to count as a stream. What you may not know is that Spotify pays differently for that stream, depending on which country it came from. That’s because wealthier countries like the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.  have a higher number of paid users to free users…. So one of the clever tricks Circa recommends is restricting your Spotify Ad campaigns to wealthier countries where the payouts are the highest and you have the best chance of recouping your ad dollars.  Now if most of your fans are in … say… Zimbabwe, that may not make much sense.  Spotify ads for free user accounts are .001 to .003, whereas from wealthier countries it can range from .004 to .006.  That’s 2-4 times as much payout, and if you’re talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of streams…that can become a really substantial difference.

Another thing: when you’re looking at your numbers in your Spotify for Artists dashboard, he encourages you to focus on the saves. This is the clearest signal to Spotify that someone likes your track. Ideally you want half of your listeners to save your track, and you also want to see more streams than listeners… indicating people have got your track on repeat.   Interestingly, he doesn’t recommend pre-save campaigns as worth the effort. Here’s why: the people who are most likely to pre-save your track are your existing fans, and they’re already going to receive an email on Friday that you’ve released a new track and it’s on their Release Radar playlist.  Spotify is more interested in saves made by people to whom IT recommended your track, which is a stronger signal that the track is good. 

There are several things I’m already working on that are core to growing spotify numbers. Releasing consistently is one… I released Higher February 5ht, I have two tracks coming out in April and more in the pipeline.  I’d love to get to where I’m releasing monthly.    I’m also putting Canvas videos on all of my new tracks and working to add them to my back-catalog. If you want to learn more about Canvas, check out episode 52.  Additionally, Spotify offers you the ability to “pitch” your track to them a week out from release.  Ensuring you have all your metadata correct there is helpful too. 

So, how did my ad experiment go?  I decided to try two different strategies: a direct to song ad campaign for 7 days first, then a direct to playlist the second time… both targeting the same Facebook audience and using exclusively Instagram Stories as the “placement,” which is advertiser speak for where the ad is going.   These were “cold” audiences, meaning most of the people who saw the ad had never heard of me before.  My target audience was Tiesto listeners who use Spotify and also like Cosplay in wealthier countries. Tiesto’s music catalog is diverse like mine, and I reasoned cosplayers would be more interested in a costumed, heroic ninja DJ.

Overall, the two week ad campaign gave me 92 streams, 40 listeners, 41 views on the Canvas, and 24 saves.  I also gained 27 likes on my Dance Music for Heroes playlist, which I’ll link in the show notes (HINT HINT).

I’m really happy with the ratio of listens to saves on Higher… that is a strong indication people really enjoyed the track. I’m also pretty happy with the 24 subscribers to my playlist which gives me a valuable digital property to advertise future tracks on.   I’m NOT happy with my cost per click, especially for the direct to song.  I spent about $70 total on the two ad-campaigns.

For Direct To Song, I had a ton of people swipe up on the ad, but then never listen to the track according to Spotify.  I suspect that’s because they were not Spotify premium subscribers…and therefore couldn’t listen to the track directly so they just moved on.   In contrast, for the direct-to-playlist, they were interested in a general style and feel of music so having the playlist play at random was more effective in terms of follow through after swiping up.   

Because the direct to playlist worked better and I’ve got several new tracks coming out in April, I’m actually continuing that ad campaign for the next 60 days at just $1/day. We’ll see how that goes. 

So, just to recap:

  • One, don’t put Spotify on a pedestal; they’re still trying to figure this out too.
  • Two, Spotify is a black box because they don’t share much data with musicians.
  • Three, not all streams are equal.
  • Four, some numbers, like saves, are more important than others.
  • Five, Spotify pre-save campaigns probably aren’t worth the effort. 

These are just a few of the things I learned in the Spotify Field Guide course. If this was useful to you, Circa and the team at Indepreneur have a podcast called Creative Juice that is free and that’s a great place to start with them.  They also have 14 different courses.  As an ad agency they’re very Facebook centric, but their courses cover everything from selling tickets to email lists to album launches to spotify playlisting.    They also have a flexible pricing model which I appreciate: you can purchase only the course you want, or you can subscribe to their site for only $37/month and binge-watch the course as you see fit.  

Any course you purchase comes with the Buddy System course, which explains the advertising and psychological framework they take towards building fans.  It basically boils down to treating people online like you would in person, building a relationship over time rather than trying to ram your music down their throats… but Circa does a much better job explaining it in detail and then showing how all of his courses fit within that Framework. Whatever course you buy, start with this one. 

Finally, they also have a friendly, helpful private Facebook community, which Circa is personally involved in.    I opted for the $37 option and then canceled after two months after watching several of their courses that I could apply immediately, however I plan to return for more content  later this year when I’ve got a little more time to dedicate to their courseware.  I’ll have links for everything in the shownotes at ProduceLifePodcast.com, episode 62.

Oh, by the way: if you’re listening to this the week of March 8th, I’ve got a livestream performance coming up at 9pm eastern on Thursday March 11th.  You can get links to details at HouseNinjaMusic.com/shows.  Hope to see you there!

Until next week, this is the House Ninja reminding you to be somebody’s Hero today.

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