Spotify Showcase: 31 streams per listener?
A Spotify Showcase campaign promoting a 16-song relaxing piano album generated 31 streams per listener at a cost of $1.11 per listener, resulting in 2,837 total streams for $100. This analysis covers setup, key stats, and campaign value.
By Andrew Southworth
Happy Monday!
Today we’re going to talk about a Spotify showcase campaign I ran that got 31 streams per listener.
I’m going to go over the setup, some key stats and talk about if it was worth it or not.
Campaign Setup & Analysis
This campaign was run using Spotify showcase, which is an ad platform inside of Spotify for artists that runs ads on the home page of the Spotify mobile app. You pay per click. It looks like this…
In this campaign I chose a 16 song album to promote, for $100 in the United States. This album is relaxing piano music which is often a ‘bingeable’ genre. So keep that in mind as we go through the stats.
Clicks | 255 |
Converted Listeners | 90 |
Cost per listener | $1.11 |
Active streams per listener | 31.21 |
Intent Rate | 6.67% |
Streams | 2,809 |
Saves | 216 |
Playlist adds | 4 |
Other release streams | 28 |
Total Streams | 2,837 |
Cost Per Stream | $0.035 |
Our campaign got 255 clicks, which resulted in 90 listeners that caused 31.21 streams each on average. This means we got 2,809 streams for our $100 campaign, 2,837 if we count additional streams on other releases, giving an average cost per stream of $0.035 - or 3.5 cents per stream.
Typically for 255 clicks on a Showcase / Marquee campaign I would want about 50% to convert into listeners which is about 123 listeners, but in our case we only had 90 listeners which is about 35%.
Worth it?
Whether this campaign was worth it or not depends a lot on your goals and which metrics you value most. Let’s first look at the money side of things…
The number of streams this campaign generated is about $10 in royalties. So the campaign was not profitable, and we lost $90. However another angle to consider is that we’ve had a noticeable stream lift after the campaign, which only ran from June 18th-19th.
USA, active streams only, June 18th to July 15th
In the 12 days since the attribution stopped tracking there have been another 371 USA active streams from 22 listeners, if this continued for about 3 years we’d actually break even.
But, it probably won’t. So from the financial side this campaign was not worth it.
However a lot of the time the goal is not financial. Growing a music project takes a certain amount of ‘escape velocity’. It can take years of running at a loss before a music project becomes profitable, and many regular businesses are like this too (Spotify, for example, has never had a profitable year).
It’s also not all about the streams. You need fans to book shows, get collabs, get the attention of a label, sell merch etc. You keep pushing the snowball up the hill and at some point you can comfortably roll down the other side of the mountain.
That’s why my opinion of Spotify Showcase is that it’s a great tool that can get you somewhat predictable results, but it can’t be the only tool. You should also be releasing great music regularly, posting engaging social media content, running ad campaigns, playing shows, collaborating with other artists and anything else you can.
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