Is Spotify ACTUALLY Good For Music Discovery?

In this video, I have two main things that we're going to be talking about. The first is people claiming that Spotify isn't actually as good at music discovery, at helping spreading artists as music marketers, music industry people, me and others talk about. The second part is people questioning if met ads can still work or if they're as good as they were even last year or a couple years ago. Like, can you still get really good campaigns? Uh, and the reason why I'm bundling these together is because I I have a pretty baller campaign I'm running right now where the cost per conversion is down to 14 and it is tier one tier one and tier 2 markets, but still 14 cents per conversion is phenomenal. And then the the results on Spotify, this this has been out for I think 8 days at the time of recording this video. We already have 38,000 streams and 16,000 monthly listeners in 8 days with only $500 of ad spend. First, let me kind of say what is it that I've seen people say? I've seen multiple say this specifically on threads. There's kind of a movement of people um who have been very vocal against Spotify for various things which some of it is very deserved. I'm not disputing that here and I have another video actually discussing more about that here if artists should or should not remove their music from Spotify. But the people are kind of saying like, "Hey, Spotify is not as good at discovery, meaning pushing their music out to new people." And the argument that they'll make is like, "Hey, look at my numbers for YouTube. Look at my numbers for Spotify. Look at my numbers for all these other platforms." Like Spotify is actually pretty weak. And in almost every case I do this, I look at their page and they're never actually promoting their Spotify ever. Essentially, they only share YouTube links and then they're getting most of their results on YouTube and then they're like, "Look, YouTube's way better than Spotify." And this is kind of what it comes down to is no platform online gives you something for nothing, right? You don't magically get Instagram followers. You don't magically get Tik Tok followers. You don't magically get Spotify monthly listeners or YouTube viewers or Apple Music listeners. None of that comes by default. The way all of these platforms work is you have to send people to the music or to the content or whatever and then you get enough data for the algorithm to learn who to recommend your music to. If you don't give these platforms data, they have no idea how to recommend you to anyone. And so, I've seen this dozens of times, and it's pretty much the exact same scenario. People saying Spotify is not pushing my content out. You look at all their socials, they're never talking about their music on that platform. They're never marketing anyway. They're usually actively not marketing it, and they're marketing another platform. And that platform is doing good cuz guess what? The platforms you market are the platforms that get the attention. And those are the platforms where you get pushed out algorithmically because you're giving them enough data to learn about your audience. That's the first part about this. But let me show you some numbers to show you why. Yes, Spotify is actually really great for discovery. In Spotify artists, there's this magical area known as uh source of streams, segmentation, source of streams. And we can break this down. I like to do active. And we're going to look at everything first, but active, let's do uh algorithmic other, radio, and then other. So, other listeners, playlist, radio, and then other. Uh, actually, first, you know what? Let's let's make this even simpler. Let's do active, programmed, and other. So, if we look down here, let's break down between active and programmed. I'm getting more from program than I am from active, right? Blue is active, the red is other, which is practically nothing in comparison. Now, let's get a little more granular. If I go to source of streams, flip this to make this more specific. Let's get rid of other because it's practically nothing. And instead of choosing all programmed, let's look at algorithmic, other, and radio. So now we can look at what the breakdown is here. Right? We have active 15,000, algorithmic 400, other listeners 168, radio and autoplay 22,000, which radio and autoplay, by the way, is a form of algorithmic playlist. Spotify just considers them differently in this view. But there's another view in another place where it actually just bundles them all together as algorithms. It's very confusing. If Spotify would be more consistent with this, but radio is an algorithmic playlist that they have. And so here, the radio portion is actually completely dominatingly active. And again, let's get a little more granular, too. Um, I'm just going to turn off algorithmic because, as we just saw, it's it's just a couple hundred. And we're going to turn off other. So, really, we're just looking at active and radio. The active is essentially what's caused by the marketing camp marketing activity, the ads in particular here. So you can see at the beginning and let me actually change this date range. Project comes out the 31st. We start promoting it. It's mostly blue. The blue is active. That's our marketing. We're not getting any algorithmic traction here. That's because there's no data. How could Spotify possibly recommend something if they don't have any data to learn who to recommend it to? Then we get enough data and then radio just kind of explodes. And it doesn't always explode this much. In this case, it ends up like significantly surpassing the active and then staying above it. Some cases it'll be it'll match the active. Some cases it'll be a little below. Some cases it will be bigger than this, too. But this was a pretty nice radio explosion. And this doesn't go away after we stop the ads, by the way. Like it'll diminish over time depending, but this is something that can linger for years. the the radio activity and this radio these radio streams are giving us 6,000 streams a day or 5,000 streams a day depending on the day. So, this is fairly significant what we're getting and it's completely dominating or what we're giving from active and I think this campaign is spending a good amount of money. If I look at yesterday, it's spending $100 a day now. This was originally launched at $15 a day and then we saw this result and it's like boom, let's just jack it up or I think we did from 15 and went to 50. Saw it was still good and then we said screw it, let's just go right to 100. Usually I would kind of incrementally scale but we wanted to just jump on this as fast as possible. So we scaled up to $100 a day as quickly as we could and that's that. But I hope this pretty clearly shows that yes, Spotify will push out your music. This is why marketers and industry people say that Spotify is best for discovery because this type of push right where where Spotify gives us more than what we put in and sometimes very significantly does not happen on any other platform now. This never happens on Apple Music. This never happens on dieser. This never happens on title. This never really happens on YouTube music. It sometimes happens on regular YouTube for a music video. But it's not just going to happen for a song. It's going to be like a music video you dropped a lot of money on or at least put a lot of creative effort into. Now, pivoting to this, we've already looked at a little bit of the stats here, but you can see that part of the second question we're talking about here is people saying like, "Oh, I don't feel like ads can work as good as they used to." I mean, this is a campaign I launched very recently. If I go up into the stats here and we look up last 30 days, um, I believe this launched October 31st. Yeah, October 31st. So, I don't know when this video is going to go live, but this ad, I'm filming this on November 9th. So, October 31st to November 8th is the time period we're looking at here. People are always asking this every single year that I do ads. People say, "The ads aren't working for me anymore. I used to get this good result and now I'm not." And that might be true for individual cases, but the reality is every year I've run so many campaigns where typically the the top 10 best campaigns I've ever run have all been within the last few months. This is one of the best performing cost per conversion campaigns I've had in I think two years perhaps and it happened this year and it wasn't anything I did crazy like I did 10 videos I think actually I think more than five videos to test and I only did three very very basic audiences. However, I do want to add a caveat to that because it's not all sunshine and roses. the campaigns you run now, you can still get just as good a result as you ever did, right? Back f like four years ago or whatever when I was running these ads, a a 14 cent prospecting conversion would be a phenomenal result and it was still the case that a 20 to 30 cents would still be a great result. So, the great campaigns are still just as great as they always have been. However, the bad campaigns are not the same level of bad as they once used to be. For example, back in like 2021, a great campaign would still be 20 cents, and that's still the case today. 20 cents is a great result, but a bad result might have been 50 cents back then. And now, a bad result might be $2. So, you have to keep that in mind. The the great number is still just as great. For the most part, at least, I would say most cases, the great number is still just as great. The bad number is way worse. If this was if this was great before, this is great now. This was bad before. And this is bad now. It's just like it's so that you have to be a little more nimble in what you push and what you give up on. For example, if you launch five songs throughout the year and two of them are a dollar a conversion and two of them are 25 cents a conversion and then the last one is 50 cents a conversion. Hopefully you're spending most of your money on the ones that are 25 cents a conversion, the least of your money and the ones that are a dollar. You don't want to spend your money equally anymore. In fact, you probably never did. You want to spend most of your money where you're getting the best results. And so that often means if you have five songs throughout the year, you might end up doing one song that you're putting 70% of your budget on and the other four songs get the other 30% of your budget. And that's because that one song is growing your audience by the most mileage. And this isn't a new thing either. Like this is actually pretty historically normal that for for most artists only 10% of their songs cause 90% of their audience growth. Yes, Spotify is a great platform for music discovery and yes, ads can still work. So, everything, you know, people are always panicking about meta changes and panicking about Spotify changes and yes, there's nuances where things are different and harder in certain circumstances, but the reality is the it's not sexy to talk about, but the things that have worked still do work. Ads are still a great tool to have in your toolkit. Spotify is still a very important platform to the music industry. The things keep chugging along. There's new tools, there's new things to use, and you should try those things. But, you know, at some point, keep it simple. Anyways, if you want to see more about how you can run campaigns like this I show in this video, check out this video right here to see that entire process from start to finish. And click here to see what YouTube thinks you should watch. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss my next video. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you next video. Bye.