Digital Music Marketing in 2020s
As an independent musician I’m sure you have heard about some other musician who has made it huge on Spotify. Regardless of how you feel about music streaming as a whole, you cannot underestimate it’s influence on the industry. Marketing your music on Spotify can be tricky. It can be fraught with bots, clickfarms and shady companies charging thousands of dollars for very questionable results. But how do you gain traction on Spotify and how do you spend your marketing dollars wisely?
Spotify Playlist marketing
Just in case you don’t know, one of the best features about Spotify is their playlist features. As a user you can create all sorts of playlists for work, for workouts, studying etc. and other users can follow that playlist and listen to it. Some of these playlists have tens of thousands of listeners and Spotify also has its own editorial playlists. So if you can get your song on a playlist with lots of followers, that’d be great right? Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. If you are only just finding out about Spotify playlists you are quite late to the game.
Shady Playlist Marketing
Spotify has become such an important platform for musicians that shady industries have emerged around it. There are playlist companies that charge musicians to put their song on to a playlist. At some point someone realized that if they get a few hundred people to follow a playlist they can sell placements on that playlist to independent musicians. But who are these followers that are listening to this random playlist? Best case scenario is that the owner of the playlist marketed it via Facebook ads to less affluent countries. Worst case scenario, it’s all bots and clickfarms.
Silver Lining
I am not saying that Spotify playlists is entirely pointless. If you want to deep dive in to how Spotify works, you can find out a whole bunch about a particular playlist before paying for placement. It may be worth it, it may have artists on it that are very similar to you in terms of genre and it will get your song in front of new ears. You have to do your research! Do not spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on playlist promotion companies. They make bogus claims about how they will put your song (regardless of quality of the song) on playlists with at least 10,000 followers for $1000. Seriously, that is taken from a real advertisement I saw.
Facebook Music Marketing
If you are an independent musician I’m sure you’ve seen those swipe up ads on your Instagram feed. I’m also pretty confident that you thought to yourself, does this actually work? The short answer is yes IF YOUR MUSIC IS GOOD! If your song is not great then you won’t get great results from one of those campaigns. While music taste is subjective, production quality is not. Your music can be of any genre but the production has to sound professional to get good results. It also helps if you have some one who knows what they’re doing to set up your campaign, like us!
Facebook to Spotify Conversion Ads
Facebook advertising platform allows us to target listeners based on which major artists they like. So if your song sounds like Taylor Swift, that’s usually a good target audience to start with. What this does is it targets listeners who are likely to enjoy your music and become fans. There is no point marketing your metal band to Justin Beiber fans, it’s a waste of time and money! Facebook allows us to get very specific with our target audiences and ensures cheap conversions. Soon you will have real fans adding you to their own playlists, literally hundreds of them!
Facebook Music Marketing vs. Spotify playlists
Bottom line is this, you are an independent music business. You cannot expect your business to grow without first investing money in to it’s growth at the beginning. As with any kind of business there are plenty of services/companies out there who will take your money and leave you regretting the decision almost immediately. Businesses take time to grow, nothing happens over night. So if anyone is promising to make a star tomorrow, beware! If you are just starting out focus on building a real fanbase first – 10 real fans is better than a million fake ones. So Facebook 🙂