I’ve covered Spotify Marquee on my YouTube channel and on my other blog, but this is the first time on this blog. Today i’m going to go over a $500 Spotify Marquee campaign I ran in August 2024. It looks like Spotify added a bunch more analytics to the results page for Marquee, so that’s whats inspiring this post in the first place.
Just in case you’re not familiar with Spotify Marquee, check out this post I wrote, but here’s a breakdown. Marquee is a music marketing tool that runs natively inside the Spotify mobile app, showing popups on the home page when user’s first open the app. You can use Marquee to retarget listeners or reach new listeners.
Here’s what one looks like (for a Brazil campaign, they always translate to the native language):
First, here are some basic details about the campaign:
- Budget: $500
- Release Type: Single
- Country: USA
- Targeting: All (previous and potential)
- Reach: 16,679 (this is how many people saw the ad)
- Clicks: 1,429 (this is how many people clicked on the ad)
- Converted Listeners: 593 (how many people actually listened to the song)
This means our effective cost per listener is $0.84. It’s worth noting that this campaign only ended yesterday and stats do continue to update for 2 weeks after the campaign is over, so these numbers will improve. However, likely only by up to 10%.
The interesting new analytics feature is you can break down stats by ‘targeted segment’, which looks like this:
There is a lot of data in the images above, but one interesting stat is that active listeners have a much higher intent rate than previously active, programmed audience and potential audience. Another stat is that we were able to convert 3% of programmed or new listeners into moderate active listeners, then 0.6% into super listeners.
I’m incredibly glad Spotify is continuing to expand the scope of Spotify for Artists data points. Us music marketers have been talking about save rates, playlist add rates etc. for a while and it’s great to get this data already calculated inside of S4A.
Getting streams may be hard, but getting quality streams is harder. This is where saves, playlist adds and streams per listener rates come in. We want to gain fans that engage with the music and will continue to stream it in the future.
Today i’m not really here to talk about whether this Marquee campaign was worth it or not. It really depends on your goals. But in my opinion for this artist at this stage in their journey the campaign was worth it, because it was run alongside Meta ads and organic promotion. Campaigns like this should be a piece of the puzzle but never the entirety of your marketing plans.
Previously Spotify claimed that Marquee was 10x better than Facebook ads, but in my experience this is false (read more here). You want Marquee to be a small supplement to your marketing strategy most of the time. It’s sometimes an effective marketing tool but not always, and it’s not a silver bullet.