My current free music marketing experiment
Running a free, organic music marketing experiment with a brand new AI-generated instrumental project to isolate social media effects without paid ads or existing fanbase influence. Early results show promising organic reach and streaming activity across platforms.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about an organic / free music marketing experiment i’m running right now.
I talk a lot about paid music marketing strategies and show a lot of case studies around that too. While I also cover free music promotion strategies I don’t do it very often, and I don’t usually have examples or case studies to go over.
To fix that, i’m currently running a free music marketing strategy on a new music project so we can all see how effective certain strategies are without it being blended into an existing project with existing fans and a budget.
It’s VERY early into the process but I want to share some early findings with you, and also set the stage for how i’m running this test as it will evolve into future experiments as well.
Experiment Setup
Anytime I run an experiment I like to reduce the variables or factors I have to take into account. For example, it’s hard to see the effects of a social media strategy when you’re also running ads - which traffic source is responsible for how many streams? This also makes it difficult to use my own existing music projects for something like this as well.
So essentially I need a brand new music project that I can release music regularly to, with brand new social media channels. Additionally to avoid ruining the experiment I can’t make the project public, or I won’t know if people from my own audience are listening instead of the actual marketing efforts.
The easiest and cheapest way to do this is with AI music. I know, many of you probably hate AI music, but for experiments like this it’s perfect. I don’t have time to compose a ton of music for a side project just for content / education’s sake and I don’t have the budget to outsource it at the scale I need.
Since we’re using AI music and no paid marketing, I figured instrumental music would be easier. While I have done previous experiments with paid marketing and vocal AI music, making social media content for music with vocals without showing a vocalist is a tricky problem. With instrumental music it’s normal to not see a performer, specifically in orchestral, cinematic or ambient music genres.
So here’s where that leaves us:
I made an instrumental AI music project
The genre is orchestral / cinematic music, a very ‘binge-able’ style of music
The project has a YouTube channel, a Facebook page and an Instagram page
I released a 25 song album for the project on all streaming services
Eventually I will share the project with everyone, but for now it will stay a secret.
Promotion Methods
Now that you know what the project is and the reason for it’s existence, let’s talk about how we’re promoting this project at first.
Releasing a high volume of music. I’m thinking an album every month, or however much I can handle with my time.
Releasing a high volume of long YouTube videos, 30 minutes to 2 hours in length, ideally a new video every 2-7 days.
Releasing a high volume of short video content on YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels, ideally a new video every 2-4 days.
I skipped TikTok for now because it’s future is hazy, recently being banned and un-banned in the US, and I don’t have time to handle another social media platform. That might change going forward.
Eventually with this project we may venture into other free marketing strategies, maybe some very low budget marketing strategies like SubmitHub or Groover, or eventually even higher budget paid strategies that I don’t typically utilize depending on how the project evolves.
But by starting off with social media content we can see exactly how many streams we’re getting solely from that social media content.
Initial Results
As I said in the beginning, this experiment is very early and results are preliminary. But I was shocked at how fast we were able to see tangible results on Spotify. Honestly I was expecting to get practically no streams in the first month.
While we only have 23 monthly listeners so far, i’m impressed we have any. Plus since this genre is a style people tend to binge and listen to many songs in a row, those 23 listeners generated 202 streams.
Plus there were also streams on other platforms as well. In fact, most of the streams came from other DSPs.
Additionally somehow music from this album was used in 40 TikTok videos by other people, and it’s received over 50,000 views on TikTok from those videos. I had nothing to do with this, it happened organically, we aren’t even posting on TikTok.
Now let’s go over the social media numbers, starting with YouTube. So far i’ve posted 4 full length videos and 7 Shorts. The full length videos only have 283 views but the shorts have 2,100 views.
I’m quite happy that we also have 8 subscribers and 32 hours of watch time. To get monetized on YouTube you need 4,000 watch time hours within a 365 day period and over 1,000 subscribers - so we’re 1% of our way towards monetization already!
Unfortunately Facebook and Instagram didn’t fare nearly as well, but i’ve also posted much less than on YouTube so far. This will change going forward it just took me some time to get the content scheduled on Meta. Here’s the Instagram stats:
I’m not sure why the reach is only 363 when on IG I can see that I have 1,700 views. Instagram must count views from Reels differently or something.
Facebook was practically zero, we only reached 3 people and got 2 views (although just like IG, on FB I can see we actually have 6 views on the Reels). Not too surprised by that though, Instagram is almost always better organically than Facebook for most people.
Conclusion
I want to re-iterate that these results are super early. I’ve only put maybe 8 hours of work into this entire project, which includes making the music, the social media platforms, making the videos and posting everything.
My hope is that by the end of 2025 we can hit 1,000 monthly listeners and get monetized on YouTube. It’s definitely possible but it’s not guaranteed by any means.
Remember that this is AI generated instrumental music with very simple videos i’m posting. This is not prime-time content. I’m literally throwing AI generated slop online and seeing what sticks. A real music artist with talent and passion should be able to do orders of magnitude better than this project.
Many artists think that growing for free with social media is impossible, these early results already prove them wrong. Granted these are tiny numbers, but I think this can scale quite nicely.
New Content
In this video I go over a campaign I ran to get 100k Spotify streams in 3 months using Facebook ads.
Spotify's algorithmic playlist Release Radar is changing, and not for the better. Alternate versions such as acoustic versions of songs will no longer be eligible for Release Radar.
How to Promote Your Music on Spotify with Facebook Ads (2025):
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 specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or my team here.
My Links:
🌍 MusicFunnels - Best website / store / funnels for music artists (get your 14-day FREE trial!)
🧑💻 Consultations
🎬 Get 15% off Melodist music distribution with code ANDREW15 here
Discount / Affiliate Links:
►► FeatureFM - use code ASOUTH30 for 30% off annual plans!
If you’d rather just purchase the e-book, or physical book or audiobook you can do so here.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Music Marketing Monday! Please give your feedback using the poll below.
** There are affiliate links on this site, meaning I may receive a kickback when you purchase a product or service using my links at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products I’d recommend to friends, but i’m obligated to inform you that these affiliate links are present. Overall affiliate income is not my focus and is a relatively small part of my income.
In case you’re curious what platform i’m using to run this newsletter, it’s called beehiiv.
Turn Meta ads into real streaming growth
Learn the campaign structure Andrew uses to promote songs without guessing at every step.