How Many Spotify Streams Can You Get For $1,000 in Meta Ads?

One super common question I get is, "Hey Andrew, I have $1,000 to promote my song and I want to run meta ads with it. What kind of results can I expect for my $1,000 in ad spend promoting my song on platforms like Spotify and other streaming services?" Well, in this video, I'm going to try to answer that question because, as you might imagine, the answer is it depends. So, there's a huge range of results you could get. So, I picked three campaigns that my agency has run and they represent kind of three different categories of results. and we're going to go through the campaigns and we're also going to go through the Spotify artists so you can kind of get a good feel for what is to be expected for about $1,000 of ad spend. [music] >> All right, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go through the meta ads and then we're going to go through the Spotify for artists. But before we do that, I want to just explain how I picked these songs. These weren't three cherrypicked songs that were designed to be like these are the best results you could possibly get and you should go and run campaigns because of this. I wanted to pick campaigns that represent like a pretty big diversity. So what I did is I looked in our ad account for campaigns that has spent between $990 and $1,100 in ad spend. I went to the period of time that was about a year ago. So we can look at like a year of data. So not just the campaign itself, but also what happened after the campaign was over just to give you the most realistic assumption. And I wanted to grab one song that did kind of on the better end but not like insane and one song that was on the worst end but not horrible. And um so what that means is like essentially the what I consider like the 20% and 80%. So not like 100% best you can get and not 0% worst you can get, but kind of maybe 80 and 20 because what we do is if a campaign is is super bad, we'll recommend the artist turn it off, right? and pivot to a different song or maybe cancel the campaign entirely depending on what the artist wants to do. And so [snorts] campaigns that are really really bad don't don't end up living their whole lives basically. So um and on the other end artists that have a really really good campaign might end up spending more money. So that's why this isn't like the worst of the worst and not the best of the best. But I wanted to have kind of something around here 50% and something in the 20s because I think that represents a pretty great campaign and also a pretty mid questionably bad campaign. Right. this this campaign, we probably kept it running because we probably were optimizing the cost down or maybe the artist was just really happy with the results. But I wanted to just prefer this. These aren't these aren't like super cherry picked. Now, the reason why there's three here is because I wanted to show I was scrolling through and I just found a third song that I thought was interesting and I figured it added an extra data point. So, if you're looking at this, try to get a feel for like what you might be able to accomplish. Um, I figure more data points is just more helpful. So, anyways, that being said, let's start taking a look at these ad campaigns. So, the first thing I want to talk about is there are some genre differences here that I don't think are like critical for anything, but are worth noting. The top song is kind of like a hip-hop track. The middle one's like Prague metal, and the third one is a is a different kind of metal, like a more of like a metal corey, hard rock kind of a thing. So, three different genres. I don't think that's necessarily critical to the performance. You can you can already see like hip-hop and metal can work just as good. I have had Prague metal do great, too. So, I don't think this one did bad because it was Prague metal. I am going to be keeping the artist anonymous in this uh just because I can already feel the comments asking. So, wanted to get that out front. That's why I renamed all of these. And also, you may have noticed that the stream counts are listed right in the title. Um because I didn't want to be a I wanted to remember which one was which without saying the name of the artist. So, I changed the names for the stream for the stream counts. So, these are the stream counts and we're going to go through and you're going to see the evolution of this. Remember, this is a a year of of performance. So, the campaign was run about 12 months ago for about 4 to 6 weeks long. We'll see that when we look in Spotify for artists. And then everything after has just been an organic tail. And what I mean by that is I'll show you one Spotify for Artists right now. This one here is the 34K stream song. And you can see campaign was run back here. Um but there was no additional advertising done after the fact, but there's still like streaming volume happening, right? Obviously, it fell off a lot. Um that does happen, but like it doesn't fall to zero. Now, if you contrast that with the saves, this does fall to zero. And and a lot of people ask me this when they're running ads for the first time is like, "Whoa, I turned on my ads and the saves just dropped off a cliff." And the reason is people can only save a song once. So, as soon as you stop sending new people to your music, you stop getting saves essentially, right? Because the only new people can saves, you stop sending new people, the saves go away. What you don't want to happen is the listeners to go to zero, right? The listeners fall off, right? You can clearly see this line here where the ads were stopped, but then they don't just completely fall off a clip. It looks like here what they did is they they might have done like a little bit of submit hub playlisting cuz it was kind of short and not too impactful. Um, so you know, that's worth noting and we'll go through that when we go through Spotify artists in more detail. But basically, this is what I wanted to have. It's like kind of a year tail so you can see what happened afterwards for each one of these songs. This is the 20k song. I turn this off. You can see the tail much more steep decline after, but they're still getting streams from this campaign a year out. And then this one as well. This one had almost no algorithmic. Um, so it did have a very steep decay. So that's what I mean by trying to get uh realistic numbers to show you. So let's dive into this 34K stream song. So uh you'll notice that's pretty simple campaign structure. So we have 1 2 3 four adets. And the way we structured this is initially we launched this campaign most likely at least with um these three HP adsets. And we say HP that's kind of like tier one. I'm I'm in the process of kind of reconsidering my country tiers right now. So this might change in the near future. But right now where we do things we have this kind of tier one list, but it's basically the highest paying countries on Spotify. So I looked at like my distributor statements and found the highest paying countries on Spotify. And basically, it's like tier one countries plus some unexpected ones. Like, for example, a lot of people don't include United United Arab Emirates in their tier one list, but they're one of the highest paying countries on Spotify. And also, they're not super big. Uh, and so they they don't like take a bunch of budget either. So, this is typically what we start with. And then if we can't get a good enough result with that, then we expand it to include tier one, tier two, which that list includes Brazil and Mexico plus a few other countries that are also on the cheaper side as well. So we started with these three. So we have add one, add two. So this is eight visuals of visuals that my team created with like stock footage and flow stage and other things like that. And then we had artist visuals that the artist sent us. And um so basically we had over eight videos, probably 12. I don't want to actually let me open this up real quick so I can tell you. I'm not showing the visuals just to keep the artist anonymous um because they show them. But these visuals there is I think 10 here. Um these visuals that the artist sent us are actually um they're kind of like flow stage visuals. They're they're like I believe this is the artist in like fancy cars in VHS footage. I might be wrong if if it's actually the artist or not. U but there's no lyrics on screen. And then the other visuals we have are kind of like that viby footage as well. So we have like a night driving one um where there's like a car driving at night and it's like bass boosted and all that stuff. So this is kind of like an R&B hip song, hip-hop song. I probably should have clarified. Now, if I back out and um look at the performance on an adset basis here, we can see where the money actually went. We didn't try a ton of stuff because things just went well, right? Even our tier our HP market here, which got about half the spend, right? $500 out of a,000 was 20 cents a conversion. So, 20 cents in tier one markets is phenomenal. Um but then we get 18 cents in tier 2 and basically we we let it kind of do its own thing because it spent about half and half. And if I can go in here and we can look at the actual breakdown of the countries and we can see where money actually spent. So this is the tier 2 adset and we can see on a country bycountry basis what actually happened. So this 431 uh Brazil didn't get much. Australia got more than Brazil. Malaysia got a little bit. Mexico got a little bit. It's actually most of the US. So even our tier 2 adset was mostly US and our tier one ads set was mostly US. So, this whole campaign is actually a mostly US campaign, which is really good. Honestly, this artist should have considered spending even more money. I don't know why they didn't. Like, it might have been they were moving on to another song. It might have, you know, myriad of reason didn't have any more budget to spend, right? That's a valid concern as well. Um, this would be a song that if if it were my band song, I would have like spent even more budget. like I would have considered what's the max I could do in this potentially to try to trigger the algorithm even more aggressively and also it's in the US which is the if the artist is US-based which I'm assuming they are in this case um that's the most beneficial market for you right so it's it's a super good cost per conversion in the best market that makes sense for you all right so let's jump over to Spotify artist to see how things actually transpired first we're going to look at saves and you can see this campaign ran from about December 11th or so to January 15th or so right now it's early nove November. I don't know when this video is going to go live, but that's about a year of data, right? 11 months or so of data. And what we're going to do is we're go to streams, filter by source, and then we're specifically going to look at active, personalized or algorithmic, and other. So other is like third party playlisting. It could also be if an artist has their own playlist they're promoting. Um, and then personalized is like uh radio, discover weekly, release radar, etc. And active is like what our ads are doing. It also would include any social media activity the artist has though. So um the blue here is our active, the pink is our algorithmic and the green is our other listeners playlist or third party playlisting if there was any. And you can see that the um and actually we can break up active into artist profile and listeners own. And I this is kind of a mess here but I want to show this at least for a little bit. Um the the purpley thing is is these immediately what our ads are doing. Let me actually just show these two categories for now. And these two categories, it's it's the the pink is like our ads are running. So this is like the first time someone listens. The green is people's second, third, fourth, fifth listens, etc. And so that's why this green kind of fills up throughout the campaign and then has a much more gradual tail and then it kind of flat lines and keeps going for infinity. But the pink falls off immediately because this relies on new people. The green is like the fans relisting. So there's a lot of people who drop off uh over time as they listen because they get tired of the song, they find new songs, like whatever it is. But then eventually there's a certain amount of people who just like relisten periodically because they just love the song. It's added. It's part of their life at this point. It's baked into their behavior. So, this is kind of like the long-term fan base of the song. So, we can add in the algorithmic and the other again. And we'll consolidate the active into one just to simplify it. And the algorithm didn't trigger super strongly on this campaign. So, this is might be why the more budget didn't happen cuz the the blue went up very quickly and the data was overall pretty good, but the algorithm never really moved that much, right? the the highest we ever like there's just one day where the algorithm is great but for most of it the if we look at the ratio here of active to personalize it's it's like 30 something% maybe less 25% right 25% of the of the active is what we get for algorithmic which is pretty like mid that's not super exciting um so like for example if this pink line was as high as the blue line be like okay cool let's crank this up because Spotify is kind of doubling our efforts. They're barely boosting our efforts in this case. And once we out here, once the campaign's over, the algorithm actually kind of increased a little bit for a period. Um, and then it kind of slowly fell off over time. So that might be why the campaign didn't get continued. If we go over to locations, um, we can look at last 12 months and you can see the evolution of this. Mostly United States. That's because that's where our ads were running. If we look at playlists, we're probably going to see mostly radio and discover weekly radio late night chill. This was probably like a submit hub type playlist they got on. Um, your DJ, which has been a newer kind of heavy hitter, but mostly it's radio here, which is pretty typical. So, with that said, let's jump into this 5K stream song. And this one is 50 cents a conversion. You can see right off the bat that we tried more stuff. If I open up the adsets for this one, you can see that there were six. And I said progressive metal earlier. This was actually more of like a Prague rock and it's kind of like a funky track. So I I I misjudged when I heard it. Um but anyways, it's more of like kind of a Prague rock funky kind of kind of track. Um we tried more stuff and we did get the cost out significantly. So when this campaign was launched, it was a $1.70 a conversion. Let me zoom in here. $1.70, which is pretty brutal. And we had another one that was $1.7. We can see the timeline here. Campaign launched in Halloween of 2025, so not this year, last year. And um a few days later, we added a tier 2 version of that adet. And that significantly brought the cost down. And then about a week later, we added in new visuals. So we added in two sets of new visuals. We added new visuals on the 10th and new visuals on the 12th. And um at that point we stopped. Now this would be one that like it probably in hindsight would have been worth trying even more. But as you might imagine these campaigns things are often in flux and you're seeing results come in on Spotify. So you're not sure, you know, should we try more, should we not? If I open up the actual campaign, you can see we tried um our naming structure here add four. So like this is four batches of visuals. So we tried 16 videos. So could we have tried more? Yes, absolutely. But um we did try 16 videos. So it's not like we tried nothing. We tried four different distinct visual ideas. And it looks like that the artist may have not actually supplied us with any videos. We had to make all of our own. So that's another uh thing that we have to deal with that you don't you as an artist running this yourself. If you are um you can try Infinite Videos and make all your own videos. In fact, what we recommend you saw in the previous one, the artist gave us 10 videos, right? So that previous hip-hop song, we made eight. eight. The artist gave us 10, so we had 18 videos. Um, one of the best things you could do to improve the results of your songs is just try more videos. I've had songs that take 30, 40 videos to find the winner. Um, in this case, we tried 16 and we did significantly improve the results. We got it down from a dollar down to 50. And part of that was through trying just cheaper markets. Um, but we did also try another, you know, another couple batches of videos. Flipping over to that song and Spotify for artists. Um, we're looking at the first 12 months. You can see when the campaign was run. Let me actually zoom out here. We're going to look at saves and that is definitely the time period. We're going to look at source of streams. And we're going to do the same thing that we did in the other one. So, we're going to look at active and algorithmic and other. This artist didn't have any other. It was just active and algorithmic. And early on, it was actually kind of hopeful, right? We see down here that the uh the algorithmic was almost pacing the active which is really exciting. Um that only lasted for a few days of this campaign though and then all of a sudden it just didn't go up anymore. It just kind of flatlined and then after the campaign stopped it it also kind of lowered. So never really reached any kind of algorithmic bliss here. And also if you look at the scale here we we peaked at you know 71 active streams a day. So we never achieved greatness. Now, this was also 50 cents a conversion. So, that's part of the reason why this one was mostly Mexico, too. So, this is we had to pivot to tier 2. The song didn't do good in the US like the other one did. So, that's another thing worth considering here, right? Like, this 20 cents and this 50 cents aren't equal. This 50 cents was mostly in in Mexico and Brazil. This 20 cents was mostly in the States. So, the difference here is staggering. Now, if this top one had triggered algorithmic playlist, that's why I was saying this is one that I like personally, if it was my song, I'd be dumping money into it at the expense of future songs because you're probably not going to get a song that does this good every time. In fact, you're probably not even get one every five songs. So, this is why you want to test every song you do and when you find that winner, you want to double down on it and then spend less than the losers, right? In hindsight, this song probably could have gotten purged earlier and pivoted to a different song, but seeing the result go from a $1.70 down to 50 cents, like we're on to something. Maybe we can keep getting it down. And it didn't work out that way. Now, this third one here, this 19K is also pretty great. 25 cents a conversion. I'm going to look at the breakdowns here by country, and we are going to see how this third one evolved. So this top one we know most of its results um more than half its budget went to the states. This second one here that was the worst one of the bunch most of its budget went to Brazil and then Mexico something like 60% of its 70% of its budget Brazil and Mexico almost no US. And then the 19K1 was 42% Brazil, 15% Mexico, and 11% US. It did 37 cents in the US. So, it got more more US than the second one, but not nearly as much as the first one, and it was mostly in cheaper markets. So, even this this 25cent is not as good as this 20 cents. That being said, the song still got 19,000 streams. So, it had a pretty good tail even though it was mostly in cheaper markets. So, I'm going to pull up the Well, first let's actually look at the campaign, I guess, and then we'll go to Spotify Artist. This one we labeled as kind of orchestral metal, I guess. Same deal as the first one because it just worked well out the gate. We didn't try a ton. Part of this also I think is worth mentioning um is the more you try, the more budget you have to allocate to trying to. So, if you get a 23 cent per conversion, a lot of times what you just want to do is not break it. Um, I think in hindsight with this one, it would have been good to try more visuals anyways because maybe we could have got the tier one cost down into the 20s and then ended up giving the song a lot more US or other tier one market results that it wouldn't be so heavily concentrated in Brazil and Mexico. So, hindsight's 2020. Um, this is part of learning with this. Um, so that's kind of my thought process seeing these campaigns a year in the future. Um, if we open up the S4A now, we see about 19K 20K streams very much concentrated in this beginning. It looks like the there was some playlisting going on this entire time. So, my guess is the artist has their own playlist that they're kind of promoting because this green here is pretty stable. It doesn't like spike up and then fall after after a month, which makes me think that the artists own some of their own playlist that they've grown or maybe they're always running ads to their own playlist. And that's what this is from my guess because I don't think we promoted a a playlist in this case. We promoted a song. So the blue is what we drove and the purple or pink here rather is this algorithmic chunk which it surpassed our actor which is pretty dope. It did fall off pretty heavily here. Um and then it kind of just limped along after the fact. But this was very exciting. Uh and you know there's not always anything you can do about this but this is a very strong algorithm performance. And so like in some of the case studies I've shown on this channel of songs that like really pop off because like remember this isn't a video to show you the best of the best and the worst of the worst. The the best of the best, you have this like this kind of algorithm performance, but then it just stays for months and months and months. So you just keep feeding it and the song keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then Spotify is like doubling or tripling your efforts. Uh just imagine if this never stopped, right? The artist would probably feed even more budget into it because the campaign did quite good. So, their active listeners are growing, but then the algorithm, the algorithmic is forcing it even harder out to new people. And I bet if we looked at their audience level and go to active listeners over the last 12 months. So, if we look right when this campaign started, they had 67 active listeners. And if we look up recently, they've had nearly 200 active listeners. In the middle of the campaign, at the peak, they had 2,000. Right? So, there's obviously a fall-off here, but they still have maintained a couple hundred active [snorts] listeners, um, which is mostly from this campaign cuz it doesn't look like they've run any additional ads ever since on this song or any other songs just based in this graph. So, I thought it'd be kind of cool to show you this meta ad Spotify forecast tool thing I have in my site. So, you can play around with how much results you can get for certain amounts of money. And I thought, let's use this first one as an example here. So, we have $1,000, 20 cents a conversion. Um, we can put in $1,000, right? 20 cents a conversion and we can see some results. Now, this this calculator isn't for like the lifetime of a song. It's just for the like the 4 to 6 week period. Um, and the reason is because longterm the the numbers change dramatically based on all of that. But we can play around with like what level of engagement you're assuming. Are you assuming like pretty weak engagement, medium, or high levels of engagement? But it doesn't include like the tail after. cuz if we were to look at the first um let's just say we look at the first 6 weeks of this campaign. So what I did here is I went from December 11th to January 23rd and so it's probably about five or 6 weeks. I didn't calculate it exactly but we got about 12,000 streams during this campaign because if I recall we were done. Yeah, we were already done by January 15th in this case. um the super like tail end of the song if we look at the last 12 months it doubled in fact it more it nearly tripled over 12 months which is a common thing that I tell people is if you run a song 6 months out it's going to roughly double and 12 months out it's going to be roughly triple with no additional marketing and as I mentioned at the start this isn't the best and the worst case scenario you could have a $1,000 campaign like what all these has been give you under a th000 streams you could have also have a $1,000 campaign generate you over a h 100,000 streams. So those are kind of the more extreme examples. So the real answer is like anywhere from zero to a h 100,000 streams is what you can get for $1,000. But if you're looking for some kind of simple number you could think of. Anywhere from 5,000 to 40,000 is probably like a realistic assumption depending on how your song performs. And if you want to know how you can run campaigns like this, check out this playlist right here to see the entire process from start to finish. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss my next upload. And I'll see you in the next video.