Why Spotify Followers Don't Matter
Spotify followers are not a reliable indicator of engagement or future streams. Instead, focus on saves, playlist adds, and streams per listener to measure and grow your active audience effectively.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
I’ve had artists asking me if they can run their ads to optimize for getting more followers on Spotify.
And the answer is: yes, you can!
But, you shouldn’t. Because followers on Spotify are kind of meaningless. Here’s why…
Spotify used to show you how many of your followers streamed your music during the first month of release. They called this release engagement (this still exists, but it was changed).
When this data was visible, it was pretty typical for 2-5% of your followers to stream your music during the first 28 days of a new release. I saw this for new artists, artists with 100k followers, artists with over 1 million monthly listeners etc - it was very consistent. The highest I EVER saw was 10%.
The metric was consistently so bad that Spotify changed it in 2025 to where now you see what percentage of your active audience listens to your new release in the first 28 days. Which is a much more relevant metric anyways.
What is the alternative?
The alternative is focusing on saves, playlist adds and streams per listener. These are quality metrics and indicators of someone’s likelihood to stream a song again in the future. If someone saves a song or adds it to a playlist, it’s almost guaranteed that that person will stream the song again at some point in the future.
Let’s just say it’s only a 50% chance for people to listen again in the future (to be conservative), and let’s say give the followers the benefit of the doubt and say that 5% of followers will stream your new release.
That means that focusing on saves, playlist adds and streams per listener will give you a 10x higher chance of that new fan to stream your music in the future than focusing on followers.
Another angle here is that when people save a song or add it to a playlist, and then listen in the future from those places, that’s all considered active streaming. And in my band’s Release Engagement section our latest album had 40% of our active listeners stream it in the first 28 days.
How to increase followers anyways?
Okay, so you want to increase followers on Spotify even though they’re not worth that much. All you have to do is just send people to your profile instead of your song.
It’s not unusual to get followers for like $2-$5 using this method.
However, the tradeoff is you get less concentrated streams on the song you’re promoting, less saves, less playlist adds etc. All of this leads to a lower algorithmic potential on the song and less overall growth long term.
In my opinion if i’m going to pay $2-$5 to get a Spotify follower I might as well just run an email / SMS growth campaign where often you can get $2 per lead in the USA.
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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