I Paid To Have My Music Played On Tour

In this video, I'm going to be walking you through a campaign I ran using the service called Tour Soundtrack. This will kind of be a review, I guess, but in a nutshell, Tour Soundtrack is a service that allows you to promote your song in the set changes of an actual band's live tour. So, if you're going to a show, there'll be music playing between bands that are that are actually performing, and you can essentially pay to have your song placed in there. And the idea is that it's hyperargeted because it's for specific tours that you're opting in on. and I ran one uh a while ago and we're going to go through the results to see if it was actually worth it or not. >> So, first let's walk through tour soundtracks website so we can see with a little more detail what they actually say they're going to do. So, um they don't have any active tours right now, so I can't show you how like a specific tour is presented on their website um because right now they're not on here. But uh they do have this page that walks you through how it works. So uh essentially the first way is you look and find a tour that is on this service and there is a section on here for tours to join the service. So if you're a band that wants to monetize your set changes like um they can do that. So basically they're a service that will match you with this. This service is run by or owned by Aillaa's Chris Fronzac. I don't know if that's how you say his last name. um kind of a kind of a controversial dude in some circles, but um the first time I heard of this I I was very intrigued because it's a very interesting concept and in theory it's like yeah I hear music all the time when I go to shows at set changes or before the first band goes on and I'll Shazam it and check it out and it's like it's a physical real life place where you can monetize your your um or it's a physical real life place that you can advertise your music to people who you know like the type of music that you play. assuming you pick the right tour. Now, the tour that I picked was uh Slaughter Trooper or Zatillaa Slaughter Trooper Veil and White Chapel. So, a bit heavier than my band. Um but not like like a lot of people that like the type of metal that my band does, which is more like kind of a mainstream metal I would I would call it. Um they're also fans of the heavier metal. Like for example, I I like I I I've heard some Attila stuff and it's cool. Um, I don't really like White Chapel, but I dig Slaughter to Prevail and like other stuff that's equally as heavy. Like there's plenty of bands that I listen to and I like the kind of more mainstream metal, if you will, the more poppy metal. So, um, this is this is the kind of pitch and that's what I did. But let's go back here. Um, you select your tour, you submit your track, you get placement, and you also get added to their Spotify playlist. Um, and your song plays every night on tour paired with a radio style audio drop plus digital ads and a social media post from the Spotify playlist. So, um, let's go through what what happened, right? So, uh, the platform gives you this back end where it shows you the entire tour and stops on the tour and the potential listeners. Um, this is the only report that you get. Uh there was there was I think one email exchange with them where uh I think they needed like a graphic for the social media post and they had to change part of what was initially in the package. They they said they weren't doing the Spotify playlist this time which made me think maybe they didn't get enough artists to bother doing a playlist. So they did a they still did a social media post and they basically boosted that post. Um, and I thought this was probably a waste of time for them to do that, but I'm glad they at least did something on that. Um, it would have been better probably to, you know, do like a conversion based campaign to a Spotify playlist and just put other, you know, promote the playlist in a different way if they're going to do that, not just like boost a post in that manner. Um, but the the page is make a collaboration post between the band, my band, and their like page, which is cool. and the the itilla dude Chris um commented on the page too. So like he seems actively involved in it which it is a cool concept. Um and this video is not to dog on it but um that was one of my one of my kind of critiques. It felt a little like this is the only report you get. So it's kind of at the end you're like what even happened? And I'm going to walk you through what I what like I actually saw in the stats but this is the only report that I got. And it updates every night, so you can see where the band's playing, which is cool. And it's nice to be able to see like, oh wow, like my music was played in all these places. And this is just the total list of like people that went to the shows. And it's probably not even the final count, I'm guessing. Um, it's probably just like what was the capacity of each venue or something like that. Um, but that's besides the point. Now, this campaign ran from March 21st through April April 22nd. And um it cost $917 to have my music played in set changes for all of this. And and when they say radio style drop, like when they're saying like, "Oh, your song's going to play with a radio style drop." Like what I imagine it was like, "This is claustrophobic by every waking moment." And then it starts playing it or whatever. Um, and I was kind of hoping that there might be some like proof or whatever showing like, you know, just a random video showing the song being played at a at a couple set changes that would have like really been like, oh wow, like I can see for a fact my music's actually playing these places and it would take them like even if they only did it like four days of the tour and they took five minutes per thing. So, it' be like a half an hour work for a whole tour. And it would be a cool little thing to see like, oh, like I can see a video in a couple of places of my song playing in front of like 5,000 people who I know are music fans. And I I can even see the reactions. Like they can set up a quick camera. Um, it's 30 seconds long and like you'd be able to see if anyone's like, "Oh man, this song sucks." Or whatever. You know, I don't know if the legalities of that, but that's kind of one thing I wish there was just more more like proof, I guess, more validation that things are happening. But now that we know the time window, March 21st, April 22nd, we can go see if there's any bump in stats and try to figure out if anything happened. I asked them if they could give any type of report. And their answer was basically um check Shazams in Apple Music, which was my first thing before I worked with them. I just expected they would have some type of like more detailed reporting like, you know, videos showing the song being played, maybe final ticket counts, anything, right? any type of data they could possibly give. Um, but I was expecting to have to do Shazams. And so this is that particular song. I'm looking at all Shazams here. But if I look at just claustrophobic Shazams, which is really what I want. Um, we can look at this time period. So it was May May 21st through April 22nd. So basically the window of time we're looking at is from here to here is right 22nd and things might be off by a day. So we can just kind of count this spike to this spike and let me zoom in. So this range here is kind of what we're working with. And are there more Shazams here? Yes. Right. For sure. If you look after that fact, they definitely went down. Before that, they were definitely less. This back here, I was probably running ads on it. Um, but this song came out like 2023, so I wasn't running much ads here. And the amount of Shazams here is pretty weak. So, like this shows me that the song played um because there were was some data happening. But it also tells me uh it didn't really do much, right? Like back here, I was probably spending $10 a day in like the normal Spotify conversion ads. And this was like nothing. And granted, maybe people didn't have to jam it because there's a radio style drop that says the name of the song. So, they can go type it in. But like even if I looked at streams, which we'll see in a sec, you're going to see there isn't really much of an increase. We can try to filter this. We can say like, well, maybe let's just look at Shazam's in North America. Um, and they are all in essentially all in North America. And I'm assuming this is going to be all US. If we were to get even more granular, it is essentially all US, which which confirms the fact that like this probably all was coming from that campaign. It it just really shows like this this wasn't wasn't doing much. And I'll zoom out to lifetime for this song for Shazam's. So, you can see um how much more significant a meta conversion ad campaign was in terms of like driving people to this song, right? So looking at the entire history of Shazams in the song, this tour actually did put it kind of up to par with what the entire history of advertising was. So in terms of Shazams, like it did do something, but like you got to remember with with those with those songs that I'm running ads on, the goal isn't Shazams. The goal is like driving listeners. Um, and I bet if we were to flip over into streams, if we zoom back in and look at just streams or plays as Apple Music calls them for just uh claustrophobic this year and we look at that same time period, we we don't really see anything happening, right? Um, it it was kind of exactly the same. So, in terms of like streaming activity, there's not much of a of a like I can't point to much and say like this did this. I can see that the campaign ran, but even if I look at just US during that time window, there's really nothing substantial. Flipping over into Spotify, it's more or less the same story. If I look at saves, which is going to be more indicative of like fans checking something out or finding something during this window here of March 21st through April 22nd or whatever it is, it it's it's actually kind of like a weaker window for the song, not a stronger window. And same for streams. It's it's like from here to here. Not not a particularly strong showing, right? Like I had bigger stuff going on beforehand. Um and about the same happening after. Now, this spike happening after was because we dropped an album. That's really one reason why we timed this release or this campaign where we did is it ran right up into our album release day on I think actually it was April 22nd um if I recall. But like it it came out um or maybe it was April 24th. Yeah, that rings a bell. So, this is when our album came out and that's why this stuff happened. Um, after the fact when we look at saves, you see a big increase in saves happening then. That's because we we dropped an album and we're we're promoting it essentially. Um, but during this window of the campaign, there's essentially nothing happening. So, as you can probably guess, not that stoked with how this went. Overall, it needs way more reporting, way more kind of validation for like what actually happened. I don't know how that can happen because it's happening in real life in a tour. So, there's only so much you can really do, but it needs more of that. I went into this with the expectation that I might just be wasting my money and this might do nothing or that it might just be this amazing new technique that would be amazing until everyone does it and then it's horrible. Um, and because if you just think about it, like it does make sense. You have this real place that's hyperargeted fans that already love a certain band that are basically forced to hear your song. And if they all if enough people go check it out, the algorithms and all these streaming platforms are going to be like, "Oh, all these people that like this band are checking out this song, we should recommend it to more fans of that band." And and maybe I didn't pick the right song, but I think I did. And I think this made sense, but I I I'm totally open to the fact that like maybe I made a miscalculation, but the platform doesn't give you any data on the back end to tell if you made a miscalculation. And again, I don't know what they could do to rectify that because just the nature of this, there's not much data you can get, but there should be something, as I said earlier in the video, some type of way to tell like how did the crowd actually react to the song would make this feel a lot more better. It doesn't have to be the super involved thing. Like this, this might seem like a lot of money, like $900, cuz it is, but like when it comes to the music marketing world, you know, you it's not like a ton of money. there's not much margin in there for them to actually make a profit. So, they can't be like taking videos every single night and making extensive reports. That's for $900 service. They can't do that. But just a couple things, maybe just asking a few fans who are there like, "What do you think of that song?" just a couple dates at the tour with a couple videos or whatever would make this feel like I'm getting real feedback that lets me know how this did and how people responded to the song to let me know if maybe I made a miscalculated error and how can I adjust going forward. Anyways, that's the platform. If you want to see how I recommend that you market your music, then check out this video right here to see how you can run ads to promote your music from start to finish to get way more results than you saw in this video. And if you want to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch next, then check out this video right here. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.