How to get 1 million streams in 1 year
Combine paid and organic marketing with a $5,000 budget to release 9 singles in 2026, supported by 20 social posts and 2 YouTube videos per song. This approach builds on proven real-world data to help you reach 1 million streams.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today i’m going to go over a strategy you can use to get 1 million streams on your music in 2026.
We’re going to be blending paid marketing with organic marketing, so you’ll need both a budget and the ability to post on social media.
Here’s the high level strategy:
Releases: 9 singles
Budget: $5,000 for the year
Social posts per song: 20
YouTube videos per song: 2
This strategy is based on real world data from my band back in 2022 when we launched. We released 6 songs during the first year with a similar budget per song, with minimal social media content and only 1 YouTube video per song. With this we hit about 750,000 streams across all streaming platforms and YouTube.
That’s why i’m recommending 9 songs, more content and more YouTube videos here - so you’ll hit 1 million. I’ve seen people do drastically better than this too, but of course i’ve also seen people do worse. Embrace the process, and know that even if you fail to hit 1 million in 2026, you’ll probably still get most of the way there as long as your music is good and you try your best.
Now let’s get into the specifics…
Release strategy
With this strategy you’re going to release 9 singles throughout the year, roughly every 6 weeks. This schedule might look something like this:
January 16th
February 27th
April 10th
May 22nd
July 10th
August 14th
September 25th
November 6th
December 11th
Along the way you’re going to waterfall songs as they make sense. Waterfall releases are when you bundle a song with a previously released song. This strategy maximizes the amount of exposure you get to each song and causes increased algorithmic activity as a result.
For example, the releases might look like this…
Release 1: Song 1
Release 2: Song 2, Song 1
Release 3: Song 3, Song 2, Song 1
etc…
Here’s an image to show you what I mean, you can see how Headlocked was released 3 times here and Come Alive was released 2 times here.
Example of a waterfall release strategy
You can group songs however you want, just make sure you don’t hit 7 songs on a release or Spotify will consider it an album. If you have an aversion to this feel free to skip the waterfall portion, some artists hate the way it looks on their discography. But the reality is it just helps a lot.
As a reminder this schedule is hypothetical, pick your own dates. You could do 4 week gaps sometimes and 8 week gaps others.
Budget
You’re budget is $5,000 for the year, and I think you should break it up like this:
$500 Meta ads for streaming conversion ads
$30 on SubmitHub credits to pitch to curators
This will give you $4,770 of spend, leaving you with $230 for other miscellaneous things throughout the year. That could be a CapCut subscription, a budget for YouTube ads to promote a music video etc.
If you want to learn how to run Meta ads like how i’m recommending you use here, in this video I give a tutorial and walk you through more details of this strategy:
I also have a course called Spotify Growth Machine you can learn everything you need to know about how to run ads like this.
If you have a larger budget than what we’re talking about in this article and want to outsource these ads, check out my ad agency Southworth Media.
Content strategy
The content strategy i’m proposing is 20 social media posts and 2 YouTube videos per song. All of the social media posts can be cross-posted to TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels.
I recommend picking a ‘home base’ social media platform that you care the most about, but you can just post the exact same content to the others. Embrace the platforms that give you the best results, some artists just do better on YouTube Shorts, or better on Reels, or better on TikTok, or even Facebook etc.
These 2 YouTube videos i’m talking about are specifically full-length videos. These can be:
Music videos
Visualizer videos
Performance videos
Live footage
Behind the scenes videos
etc.
If you’re wondering what social media content is working right now for artists, I talked about this last week in my post 3 Types of Social Content Working For Artists Right Now.
Other things to try
Collaborations can be one of the biggest growth hacks out there. Find artists with a similar size or larger to you (or just artists you really like) and release some awesome music with them. Some of your audience will check them out and some of theirs will check you out.
Similarly touring can also be a great growth hack. Partially because it allows you to meet other artists in your scene, but also you’ll start to more easily build super fans. Opening for a perfect band will expose their fans to your music in the same way a collaboration might.
Things to avoid
In this case i’m assuming you’re a relatively new project. So with that in mind i’d skip PR. PR is for getting press coverage, like on blogs, magazines, interviews etc. It’s great for when you have something happening but its more about expanding the story to existing fans than getting new fans. Typically PR doesn’t drive streaming or social media activity.
On a similar note if you’re a new project i’d probably skip Spotify playlisting of any significant size. We had $30 allocated for SubmitHub up above but that’s small and pretty targeted. I’m talking about spending bigger money on playlisting. There are times when it makes sense, but building a fanbase from scratch isn’t one of them, because it gets you mostly passive listeners.
Bots. Never use artificial means to inflate your numbers. It can get you banned from the music platforms and it won’t get you real fans - it’s not worth the risk and it doesn’t help you at all. Marketing only helps you if it gets real people listening to your music.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency Southworth Media specializes in running Meta conversion ads to promote your music on streaming platforms, email list growth, tour promotion and more.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels and FanFunnels are the best all-in-one platforms for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels, build a mailing list and more!
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or my team here.
New Content
Did you know you can test unreleased music with Meta ads? This allows you to see which songs or ad creatives will do best before you even release them.
Instead of Spotify fixing the bot problem on their platform, they're just fining artists, labels and distributors.
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