Meta Ads For Music: Spotify Growth (Step by Step Tutorial)

Using Meta Ads for music marketing to platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and more is one of the most effective ways to grow your fanbase. Everything in this post is going to focus on Spotify because it’s currently the largest DSP for music with the strongest discovery engine, but this all applies for every other DSP as well.

Also just to clarify… When I say Meta Ads, I mean Facebook Ads, or Instagram Ads. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads and then allows you to run ads to each of these as ‘placements’. In the past we all called these Facebook Ads, but now it’s known as Meta ads.

You’ll also find people referring to this exact type of campaign we’re going to talk about as a ‘Spotify conversion ad’, or a ‘Spotify growth ad’. They’re all the same thing.

This is a long post, so if you want to skip around I won’t be offended! Here’s the table of contents.

For my own music i’ve gotten over 10 million streams across my own projects, and another 400+ million for my clients on Spotify alone using this type of ad campaign. In this post i’m going to show you exactly how I do it.

But first…

Do Meta Ads Work For Music?

Just to get this out of the way because so many people ask this. Meta ads definitely work, for music and for plenty of other industries. Anyone that tells you Meta ads don’t work for music promotion is either lying or doesn’t understand how to use them. But let me prove it to you.

Here’s an EP that was promoted single by single using predominantly Meta ads / Facebook ads.

Here’s the lifetime streams for 8 songs from just one of my own music projects, all of which were promoted with only Meta ads.

And another one…

This is an old screenshot of the follower growth from back when Spotify used to let you graph more than 12 months at a time…

Here’s the last 12 months of my project Murder Nite, promoted entirely with Meta ads (not even social media content):

Just in case you’re wondering, nowadays I spend much more time working on the artists of my label and my agency clients than my own projects. But my main music project nowadays is my alternative metal band Every Waking Moment.

Here’s the last 12 months of data for an artist on my label, promoted 100% with Meta ads.

Here’s a video going over a campaign I ran that got 12 million streams in 6 months.

Here’s another one for a song that got 1.4 million streams in 4 months.

You can also look at the Southworth Media case studies page for more examples.

So the answer to the question “do Meta ads work for music artists?” is: absolutely!

If you want to talk about the profitability or return on investment (ROI) of running Meta ads for streaming, thats a completely different story with its own set of nuances which I might cover in its own post later (update: I talk about it a bit in this article here https://musicgrowthmachine.com/can-you-profit-from-spotify-streams-with-facebook-ads/).

Meta Ads for Music: Spotify Conversion Ads Process

Before we dive into the step by step guide on building your own Meta conversion campaign to promote your music, I want to show you the general process a potential fan will go through when you run this campaign.

They see an ad

The first step of the process is your potential fan will see your ad. We want to make your ad something that a potential fan would enjoy, so it should be a video with music in it. The text of the ad could refer to the genre of the music, contain a cool lyric quote, or be a snappy one-liner that describes the song.

This ad can run on Facebook placements and/or Instagram placements.

They click to go to the landing page

When they click that ‘Listen Now’ button on our ad it takes them to a smart link landing page – we don’t send them directly to Spotify! Here i’m using a FeatureFM landing page.

The reason for this is we want to use our Meta Pixel / Conversion API (depending on our landing page) to track their activity and make sure they click all the way through to one of our music destinations.

You can’t install a Meta Pixel or Conversion API on Spotify itself. Using a traffic campaign direct to Spotify will almost always result in failure with thousands of clicks on ads manager but almost nothing to show for it on Spotify.

They convert to go to a streaming platform

Once they click one of the buttons on a landing page, this triggers a ‘conversion’ in ads manager. At this point you’ve taken them to where you want them to be, but it’s up to them to listen and engage with the music.

Step by Step Guide to Meta Ads For Music

Alright now lets dive into how you can get this up and running for yourself. Meta ads in general is a deep and evolving topic, and you’re going to experience a learning curve just like when you first started making music. I hope this guide makes it easier for you!

Ad Creation

You might be wondering why i’m talking about the ad creation prior to the landing page creation or the Meta ad creation in ads manager. This is because your ads are one of the most important factors that determine how your campaign performs, aside from your music.

Typically I create my ads as a vertical story / Reel 9:16 format (1080×1920 pixels), but I design them where if they’re cropped to a 4:5 they’ll look good on feed placements. This is because on ads manager you can crop your ads, so you can use that vertical video for all placements such as Instagram Feed / Explore, as well as Instagram story / Reels.

Here are some tips when it comes to ad creation:

• Experiment with the type of ad. Every artist will have different types of ads that work best. For many performance ads will work best, others lyric videos or visualizers might be fine, others just a simple animated artwork video may work fine.
• Always test multiple parts of the song on different ads. I’ve had cases where the chorus of the song was 3X more expensive than the verse of the song.
• Keep your ads around 15-30 seconds long. You want to give them a taste of your song but leave them wanting more.

Looking for help with ad creatives?

Landing Page Setup

There are many options for smart link landing page services for music. Here are some common choices:

• Hypeddit
• Smart Noise
• FeatureFM – use code ASOUTH30 for 30% off any annual plan
• SubmitHub Links

Previously, the most common landing page tool I saw people using was ToneDen, largely because they have a free tier and it’s easy to get started with them. However nowadays if you’re looking for a free option i’d recommend SubmitHub Links instead.

SubmitHub Links Setup

If you don’t already have a SubmitHub account, you’ll need to make one and then log in. Then, go to free tools and click on ‘Links’.

Click the +Link button and then make your new link by choosing one of the options. Most of the time i’m using the Paste a Spotify URL option for convenience.

Feel free to customize your page as much as you want, but make sure you go to the pixel section and insert your Meta pixel. This step is required for the campaign to work. If you know how, also put in your Conversion API token, but don’t worry if not.

If you aren’t sure where to find your Pixel, you need to go to Events Manager. From Meta Ads Manager click the toolbar on the left and you’ll find this option for Events Manager.

You can see how SubmitHub Links will fire Meta events in this section as well. When people load the page it’s going to fire a Page View event and send it to Meta with your Pixel ID. When people convert on the page to go to a music platform they’ll fire a View Content event and send it to Meta with your Pixel ID.

The process is more or less the same if you’re using Hypeddit, Smart Noise, FeatureFM or any other smart link service.

By the way, want a even more detailed and organized tutorial for how to run campaigns like this? Check out my course Spotify Growth Machine! Completely with my country list and a community to ask questions.

Ads Manager Setup

All right, now we can get to the fun stuff – actually building a campaign! First, click the green ‘Create’ button in ads manager.

Then, choose Engagement as the objective (because it allows for conversion campaigns, here’s why).

Now we have our ‘campaign skeleton’ as I call it. On the left you’ll see we have the campaign level, an ad set level and an ad level. By default you’ll be in the campaign level where you can name the campaign, turn on Campaign Budget and set your daily budget.

Click next on the bottom right to go into the ad set level, where we’ll define our audience. But before we can define our audience we have to tell Meta where our conversion is occurring.

Our conversion is happening on a website, aka our smart link, so we want to choose website. Then select your Meta pixel, and then choose the corresponding conversion event that matches the landing page you’re using:

• SubmitHub Links -> View Content
• FeatureFM -> FeatureFM_Click
• Hypeddit -> Hypeddit Smart Link Click
• Smart Noise -> View Content

Scrolling down a bit until you reach the Audience section. The first thing we want to do is disable Advantage+ Audience. For campaigns like this Advantage+ Audience can ruin the entire thing, because it ignores your targeting options and you end up with all your traffic going to people 65+.

Now you can add your countries, choose your age range and genders. Then i’d recommend targeting by Spotify, and the clicking ‘define further’ and narrow the audience by either a music artist, several music artists or a genre of music.

In this case I chose 18-50, all genders, people who like Spotify AND Linkin Park.

I recommend starting off with just Instagram placements. Specifically Instagram Feed, Explore, Stories and Reels.

Now we can proceed to the ad creation page.

Here you’ll want to choose your Facebook and Instagram pages. Then you can use the Media section to upload your video, and the Website URL section to put your landing page link (SubmitHub Links, Hypeddit, FeatureFM, Smart Noise etc).

This is where you put your smart link URL:

From here you can copy and paste the ads to test different parts of the song. Take a look at this mockup of the campaign structure, you can see it’s laid out like this:

• Campaign
  • Ad set
    • Ad 1
    • Ad 2
    • Ad 3

At this point you have a campaign with 3 ad creatives you can publish and test!

Here’s a video tutorial I have walking through this entire process from start to finish:

Meta Ads For Spotify Tips

Me and my team have run thousands of ad campaigns, so I have plenty of tips of the trade to improve campaigns.

Test different ad creatives

I mentioned this above in the ad creation section but you should use multiple video creatives. At the very least make sure you try different parts of your song, even if the visual is exactly the same between the ads. You can easily cut the cost per conversion in half of your campaign if you test different parts of your song!

On that same note you can also test out different visual styles for the same part of the song. So you could test how a performance video compares to a music video, and how those compare to an artwork animation video.

Test different audiences

When you make your ad sets you can choose different targeting options, and there is essentially an infinite sea of options you could try. It’s not unusual for one set of detailed targeting metrics to be twice as expensive as another – so it’s important you test.

For example, imagine having 4 ad sets targeting these options:

• Alternative Metal
• Metalcore
• Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace, Staind
• Linkin Park

All of these targets could easily work for the same song, but they may perform radically differently.

Try different songs

Different songs will get different results. Even if you think your newest song is your best song yet, it may not be as consumable to a broad audience. I’ve had songs that get incredible feedback, get great results on SubmitHub and even got added to a Spotify editorial playlist, but did bad on Facebook ads.

On the flip side i’ve had songs do awful on SubmitHub and got rejected from Spotify editorial playlists (like most songs do) but do phenomenal with Facebook ads. Its not always clear which song will perform best so if your results aren’t what you hoped for it may be best to save that money for your next release!

Meta Ads For Music FAQ

Here are some frequently asked questions about Meta ads for music.

More Resources

Here are some YouTube video’s i’ve made on this exact topic so you can dive deeper.

Andrew Southworth

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