Should You Promote Older Music with Meta Ads?

In this video, I'm going to talk about if you should be running ads on older songs. Whether that means the song is just over a month old or it means the song is several years old. Should you be running ads to it? And I've seen people online saying things like the only time you should promote your song is during the first 3 to 7 days. And after that, it just doesn't matter. During that early period is when the algorithm locks in on who is going to like your song and then they recommend it. And at that point, there's no point in promoting it any further. And honestly, I I think that's actually like borderline a harmful piece of advice or whatever to to give someone because the worst time of your campaign's entire life is at the beginning [music] >> so um if you want to spend something like 50% or all of your budget in the first 3 to seven days of you running a campaign on your song, uh that's literally the worst first time to run a campaign, right? Um the your campaign's still learning. Like typically the first day is the most expensive, the second day is the second most expensive, and the third day is the third most expensive. And then the campaign gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper for quite a while, weeks, months, and then eventually it starts slowly creeping up. And that's a very normal kind of cost per conversion curve over a period of time. The campaign's never the cheapest at the start. So, uh that's that part of it. like from the campaign side, uh it's just it's just a bad idea to have everything be so crunched in a time window. You do want your campaigns to be running for weeks or even months depending on what you're doing. Now, that being said, I do recommend that you kind of frontload your marketing campaigns and I also do recommend that you um start your campaigns from the day that your song comes out. And there's a few reasons for this. Well, it's not true that the algorithm like sees what you're doing in the first 3 to 7 days and magically just locks in on it and then like that's your ticket for the rest of the song's life. That's the the part that's not true in this. What is true is the Spotify algorithm is always calculating who's listening to your song. And specifically, they seem to do everything on a rolling 28 day window. And I've run several decently comprehensive algorithmic studies. I'll link to the most recent one up here where we took a bunch of data from from you that people submitted and uh analyzed it to try to see how the Spotify algorithm worked and everything seems to be kind of optimized in 28 day windows. So there's nothing inherently special about the first 28 days of a song's life versus a 28 day period 6 months later or 2 years later. You can, and I have had this happen probably hundreds of times, get a song that's over a year old moving in the radio algorithm, discover weekly algorithm, mixes your DJ, like, etc. Like, you can get older songs triggering and riding the an algorithmic playlist. Now, here's why I still frontload and launch songs on release day. Well, it really comes down to human behaviors and a couple of Spotify behaviors and really just not just Spotify, but all platforms. For example, when you have a new song come out, chances are you're talking about in social media. You probably filmed a bunch of content and you're posting it most heavily during the launch window. You also have fans who are hearing about the song for the first time who already know who you are and they're going to check it out for the very first time and they're going to listen the most when the song's new because that's when they're most excited about that song. Next, you have things like Release Radar on Spotify and Apple. I forgot what their Apple Music playlist is called, but they have a very similar new music playlist and every DSP essentially has that same thing, some type of playlist where you can find new music right when it comes out. So, you have all these people who are flooding in to check out your song when it's new. And that's why I regularly say that like new songs do have an advantage over older songs because you have this flood this flood of new traffic coming in that you don't get at any other point in the song's life. If you promote a song 2 years down the line, you don't have that advantage. So, it's just a little bit harder to get a song moving. You basically have to drive all of that traction from that that activity and you don't have the advantage of it being a new song with you have a flood of people checking out the new song. Now, to look at this another way, why would you promote an older song, right? Like I just told you that yes, new songs do have an advantage. It's just that they don't have this magical like blackmagic advantage of like, oh, there's some special tactic you can get in these first 37 days. But, they do still have an advantage. So, why would you promote an older song? And there's a couple of scenarios in which this makes sense. One, let's say you've been promoting every single song that you release. Some songs are just going to do better and some songs are just going to do worse. That's just how it goes. No matter how much you test, some songs will never perform well. But also, some songs are going to just always perform well and just work way better than other songs. So, let's say you you're promoting a song every two months or whatever and you find this winner, this absolute slam dunk of a winner and you run that campaign and then you turn it off and move on to the next one. Well, why would you turn it off, right? That song is still new to probably at least 7 billion people, right? If you think about it, uh even if even if like once you get to the point where a billion people heard your song, you're maybe you can relax a little bit, right? But um chances are if if you're watching this uh after your campaign's done, there's still at least 7 billion people in the world who haven't heard your song. And so then your song is still new. So if that song is super cheap cost per conversion wise and it has really good engagement data and it gets really good algorithmic traction, why turn it off? And especially if your next song is twice as expensive, maybe your last song was also twice as expensive. So, the the strategy is keep promoting that song because it's it's going to be new to anyone who hasn't heard it before. And that's the thing that pulls in fans. You probably noticed that a lot of bands you listen to have like that hit song or maybe they have a couple hit songs that those are the ones that fans find them on and those are the ones that you as a diehard fan you think the people that only like that song are like posers, right? Because they don't they don't listen to the rest of the catalog. They only know and love that one song. Well, almost every artist has something like that, right? Those are the songs that get you to fall in love with an artist. And then you get into the deep cuts and the other songs later, right? For example, I only know two songs by Oasis and they're the probably the exact same ones that that you're thinking of right now, but there's people who know every single song they like, but Oasis has a couple of like m I mean, they have a bunch of hit songs, but if you even if you look at them, they have some standout songs and it's very common. So, that's kind of scenario one. If you have a song that just always working well, keep promoting that thing and milk that sucker dry because those songs don't happen all the time, right? You might only get those one out of every 10 songs, two out of every 10 songs. And that would be a great track record. You're getting two out of 10 songs being a winner. But even then, those two out of 10, there's going to be a winner out of those two. So, another scenario, why would you promote older music? Let's say if you haven't been doing that. Well, imagine you just started getting into marketing your music and you're like, "Oh, cool. I'm pretty happy with how this is going, but I've I've been releasing music for 5 years and I never promoted any of this music and the music isn't worse. I just didn't know what I was doing back then. Well, as you just learned, um it's it's pretty like every song's going to do differently. So, it's it's pretty likely that if you just test 10 songs, you're going to have at least like one winner in there, right? So, if you have this catalog of old songs you've never tried before in ads or social media, the same thing applies for basically every promotional medium you could run, give them a try, right? Like what I what I often will do is I'll get a bunch of songs that I've never tried before, let's say five or maybe 10, depending on how thorough you you want to be, and uh go run an ad campaign putting all of them one campaign and just test them against each other. So instead of having to make like get five to 10 buckets of money or run five to 10 dedicated campaigns with a whole bunch of ad creatives each, just get a handful of videos for each song and do one campaign with one budget and and pit them against each other. So they're competing for money to evaluate this past catalog you have. And then maybe after you do five, you do another five. Then after you do those five, you do another five. Basically, you're just fishing to try to find that winning song because, as I said, you're only going to get so many winning songs over a period of time. You'll be lucky if you have like that slam dunk song that just has amazing cost per conversion, like 25 cents or under, has amazing engagement, really good stream per listener, really good save rate, and then really good algorithm potential. That doesn't happen every song. And you very well, if you have like 10, 20 songs in your catalog before you started marketing, you might have several winning songs in there just waiting, assuming the quality back then is up to par with with what you're seeing now. So, I just want to clarify, I'm not saying don't promote your songs when they're new. Start promoting your songs the day they come out. And do frontload your budget a bit. For example, if I look at a song and let's say I have $1,000, it's like, okay, cool. The $1,000 is $35 a day for a month. Let me just kind of tilt that a little bit. Maybe I'll launch with 50 and then the second week I'll go down to 40, the third week 30, the last week 20 or something like that to try to just kind of tilt the spend a little bit and frontload the campaign a tad just to accelerate the learning period. But I've noticed that when you start getting to like 75, $100, $120 a day, uh you start getting diminishing returns unless you scale up. So if you start super high and then ramp down, you can actually get really bad diminishing returns. It'll better to start in that kind of $35 to $50 a day, scale up, and then start scaling down week over week after that instead of starting super high and trying to cram everything in this tight window. So, I do frontload, but I really, really, really advise against spending most or all of your budget in a 3 to 7 day window. Uh, your campaigns get better over time, right? And so, you want to spend as much money as possible on campaigns that are performing well if you can control it. So, if you want to see how you can actually run the ad campaigns I've been talking about this video, uh if you might be very confused if you've never seen them before, check out this video right here to see the entire process of how to run ad campaigns like this from start to finish. And if you want to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch, check out this video here and make sure you subscribe so you see my upcoming videos. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.