Your music will flop sometimes (and that's okay)
Not every song will succeed in marketing, even if it's well made. Understanding a song’s marketability and adjusting your promotion budget based on real performance can help you maximize your marketing dollars over multiple releases.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the truth is that not every song will perform well. Even if every song you make is well written, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered - it doesn’t mean it’s going to work well in ads, on social media or with any other marketing tactics.
So today we’re going to talk about why this is, but also how to prepare for this so you can get the most out of your marketing dollars.
Why won’t all my songs do well?
As I mentioned, even if you have music that is consistently well-made in all facets, you won’t have consistent winners.
Music may be a product, but it’s also an art, and it’s incredibly subjective in many ways.
Take a look at these campaigns for a single artist i’m working with. My agency has run 6 campaigns for them. All the music is of a similar quality across the board, but yet some songs did $0.83 per conversion (bad) and another did $0.22 per conversion (great).
I call it the ‘marketability’ of a song. Meaning how ‘marketable’ is your song? You might have a masterpiece but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the song that pulls in new fans.
Think of some of your favorite bands. You probably can think of several examples of your favorite song by an artist not being the song you first discovered by that artist. For example Lateralus or Schism or Vicarious often first pull fans into the world of Tool, but some of my favorites are Ticks & Leeches, Rosetta Stoned and Right In Two.
I use this example a good amount, and I mean no disrespect by it, but in my opinion Crank That (Soulja Boy) by Soulja Boy is not a good song - but clearly it was very successful. Yeah the beat goes hard or whatever, but it’s just kind of a stupid song. However it’s a fun song thats easy to remember and it was marketable as hell.
It’s incredibly difficult to measure the marketability of a song prior to releasing it. The best way is to put it out there and see what happens. There are of course some magical A&Rs or producers who have a knack for plucking out successful songs, but the reality is most people don’t have that skill / gift. Which brings us to the next section…
What can I do about it?
You can’t guarantee all of your songs are going to perform well. Some songs are going to flop. Maybe they do bad in their ad campaign, or bad on socials, or the algorithm hates them, or all of the above.
But you can influence what you do with that information once you obtain it.
Instead of going into a release with the mentality of ‘this is the hit song, i’m going to dump 3X the budget into it’, or ‘this song is just a filler to put something out, let’s just skip promoting it’, for most people I recommend promoting every song you put out at least to some capacity.
Here’s how I do it:
Think of how many releases you’re going to put out over the next year
Think about your budget across all those releases
Calculate an average ‘marketing budget per song’
Promote each song as if you’re going with that average
If the song does bad, pull back the budget and save the rest for the next song (or a previous winner)
If the song does great, double down or triple down on the marketing if the data suggests it might be worth it
So let’s say you release a song, launch an ad campaign and after all your visual and audience testing its a flop, you basically have 3 options to handle it:
Keep pushing through no matter what (usually not a great idea, maybe you’ll get the cost down, or maybe you’ll just burn money)
Pull back the spend and save the rest for your next song, because you probably won’t have 2 flops in a row
Pull back the spend and reallocate those funds into another song that’s already out (either one that’s already doing great, or just one you haven’t tried yet)
At my agency we call options 2 or 3 a ‘pivot’. If a song is performing badly we’ll hit up the client and ask them which option they want to go with. We don’t have super precise numbers on this, but my estimate is that about half of the time a pivot to another song (either a future release or an existing one) the new song performs better than the initial song.
Take a look at this example of a client that had a campaign at $0.86 per conversion. We pivoted to another song and this brough the performance down to $0.31 per conversion - roughly 1/3rd the cost, meaning their money was 3X more effective.
Remember that example near the top of this post, the client with the 6 campaigns? I’ll show the screenshot again, but you may have noticed we have MUCH more conversions on the campaigns with a lower cost per conversion. This is because we’re purposefully spending much more on songs that are doing well, and much less on songs that are doing bad.
My big takeaway here is really don’t give up after 1 song. My common advice is that you should assume if you drop 10 songs you’ll end up with this performance spread:
2 songs that perform great
2 songs that perform horrible, absolute flops
6 songs on a bell curve in the middle
I know some artists that do better than this and some artists that do worse than this, but as you might imagine most artists fit this average pretty well. You can’t control how amazing and talented you are (well, over the long term you can with practice and dedication, but not in the short term), but you can control how you react to a songs performance.
Spend less on the losers, spend more on the winners. Don’t let the losers get you down, just pivot that budget over to an existing winner or a future song that will hopefully be a winner.
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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