Should you send fans to a Spotify song, playlist or profile?
Deciding whether to send fans to a Spotify song, playlist, album, or profile depends on your goals. Each option offers different engagement patterns and algorithmic benefits, so choosing the right destination can impact your streaming and fan growth strategy.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Welcome to 2026. I hope you enjoyed your holidays and new years, and you’re ready to tackle 2026 head-on! Today I want to talk about something I get questions about every single week: where you should send people to on Spotify from your ads.
Specifically, when you’re running ‘Spotify conversion ads’ on Meta (Facebook / Instagram) that take people to a landing page (like Hypeddit, FeatureFM, Smart Noise etc). On Spotify you can send people to:
Song
Album
Playlist
Profile
And each of those will give you different results. But which is best? The answer isn’t as clear as you might expect. First off, let’s cover what happens when you drive people to each of these destinations from your landing page.
Profile: The most amount of followers, but streams are distributed across different tracks and low save rates.
Playlist: Many streams per listener across the tracks, followers on the playlist, but not concentrated streams per listener on one track and low save rates.
Album: High stream per listener and save rate for the album, but less concentrated streaming on any given song, with lower song saves.
Song: Concentrated streams per listener on that song, along with the highest save rates, but with an overall lower stream per listener than the album or playlists.
In the journey in discovering our answer I want to quickly eliminate 2 of these options.
Profile: You might think that followers are the most valuable, but on Spotify followers don’t mean that much. It’s much better to have people save your songs and have songs pop off in the algorithm than have people follow you out the gate.
Album: Album links are basically just song links that don’t auto-play. Meaning I can link someone to a song ON an album, it will auto-play that song, and it will give me all the benefits of sending someone to a song but with the benefits of driving people to an album. Promoting an album is actually great, but you want to use the song link, not the album link.
Now this leaves us with two more destinations, songs and playlists - which is best?
The answer is that it depends.
In most cases, if you’re dropping a new song and want it to trigger algorithmic playlists, you want to drive people to the song. This is because the song link causes the most concentrated streams per listener and saves and playlist adds on the given song, leading to the overall highest chance of algorithmic activity.
But there are some other scenarios that exist where the playlist destination makes more sense. For example imagine you’re trying to run a campaign to promote your entire catalog all the time, or in between releases. This is where a playlist campaign is great. You can give many songs a lift, but you’re not necessarily trying to get any specific song to pop off.
Now imagine you’re a record label with a sizable catalog, it gets even more powerful. You can cross promote your artists, build playlists that become assets long term for new releases, and they can start getting organic traction as well. An artist may only have 5 songs that fit in a playlist of theirs, but a label might have 100. Typically a label is running both song ads and playlist ads in combination.
Another scenario is if you’re an instrumental music artist - playlists are king here because people will binge-listen to instrumental music in ways they won’t with vocal driven music. Additionally this type of music is unlikely to have as ‘spikey’ of an algorithmic push, favoring a longer and more subtle lift in many cases.
This is why most of the campaigns my agency Southworth Media runs for artists are going from the landing page to a song, and most of the playlist growth campaigns are either for labels or instrumental artists.
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.
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