Spotify Playlist Promotion vs Meta Ads for Music

A lot of people have asked me, "What's the difference in promoting your music on Spotify with playlisting?" Meaning paying to get your music added to Spotify playlist that already have a built-in audience versus running ad campaigns on platforms like Meta to promote your music. Meaning people see an ad, click on it, land at a landing page, and then go stream the song [music] on Spotify or other places. And they're actually vastly different in terms of what you see in the metrics in Spotify for Artists. Uh, and so first I want to show you some numbers [music] so that you know exactly what we're talking about, what the differences are, and then we'll flip over and we'll talk about the why behind some of these numbers are so different and when and where you might use these two different promotional strategies. [music] So, first let's do some numbers. So, first I want to show you a song that's essentially 100% promoted with playlist. I don't think this artist is running any ads in this song. They do have some social media stuff going on. They're posting on socials and whatever. And they do have an existing audience to some degree. And if we look at the stats, you're going to see something that that may actually be obvious and may not. If we look at some of these numbers, uh, first look at listeners and compare the listeners to saves, right? 24,000 listeners, 155 saves. 10% would be 2400. 1% would be 240. So, this is like a half a percent. A half a percent of people are saving the song. Uh, when it comes to the amount of people that added it to a playlist, it's maybe 5%. So, this is an example of an artist essentially either paying directly to get on playlists or going to a platform where you pitch to get on playlist. And these playlists are legitimate. I've looked at them. They're not like botted lists. In fact, one red flag of a botted Spotify playlist is actually that the numbers are suspiciously good, not that they're they're bad. So, keep that in mind. But let's flip over to a song that's essentially 100% promoted with ads. So this is a song that in terms of the marketing method that we actually paid money was 100% running meta ads, conversion campaigns, landing page. If you want to learn more about that, I I'll link to a video up here where you can see how that works. I'll also link it at the end of the video too uh so you can finish watching this. But this was promoted 100% with ads. And what happens is some people get served the song in algorithmic playlist. Some people add it to their own playlist because they like it. Uh, and in this case, the reason why there's 8% playlists here is because the artist has their own playlist that they're also running ads on. So, this 8%, I believe, is mostly the artist's own playlist. But this big chunk here, this like 70% of their streams are coming from their actual marketing activities. The other artist was 90% other listeners playlist. So, this is like almost the polar opposite. And if we look at the stats here, we look at 12,000 listeners and we have 3,200 say. So the other one was a half a percent. So not 1% half of 1% save rate. This case it's about a 25% save rate, right? And if we look at the source of streams, the reason why it's actually only 25%. Is because we have all these other things, right? Like when a song's brand new, these numbers change because there's no algorithmic. And see this big 50% here? These people can't save the song twice. So, like a lot of the people streaming the song in the past month have already saved the song. So, if we were to look uh at and this is the last 28 days of the song. If I look at the last 12 months of the song, [music] the save rate is actually even higher. It's not 25%, it's it's over 33%. It's more than a third. So, the numbers change based on that. Um, so keep that in mind. The number is actually better than 25%. Next, if we look at the playlist ad rate, it is about a little under 10%. So, the other one was 5%. This one is maybe like 8%. So, pretty similar, but still better. And the other one, the stream per listener was like 1.2 or 1.3. This is a 2.4. And this is actually, I'd say, average to maybe on the lower end of average. I'd say I'd normally like to see between a 2.5 and a 3.5 stream per listener. Sometimes people get better. Sometimes people get worse, too. So, so this isn't anything crazy, but the other one was like a half of this, right? It was like a 1.3 or something. So, the huge difference here, what I'm what I want to kind of immediately teach you that I'm hoping you you've gathered it on your own is playlisting has very low engagement and running promoting your music with ads has very high engagement. And in fact, if you compare the stats you get from running ads to the stats you get from an organic push like getting traction on social media, getting people finding music there or influencer marketing or edit campaigns or like any type of like in social media as thing, it all kind of looks the same. So that's the difference between a high intent traffic source and a low intent traffic source. The playlisting is very low intent. And let's go over kind of the why these numbers are so different. When someone sees an ad of your song on Instagram or Facebook or whatever you're running it on, they're seeing your song, they're hopefully liking it, where they should like it if if they're going to click, they're going to click next, go to a landing page, and they click again to go over to the streaming platform and then listen to it. So, by the time they've gotten there, they click twice and they've already heard the song, right? So, they they have to like interpret the song, enjoy it enough to click twice, and then to jump over. [laughter] So, with the playlisting, you're pay essentially just paying to get your music added to these playlists where hopefully the song fits reasonably well. And in the case I showed you that the song was a good fit for that playlist. Like this wasn't a horrible match of a playlist. It wasn't like perfect, but it wasn't bad either. People aren't choosing the song, right? They are listening to a playlist and the song just comes on. That's one angle of it is they're not choosing. It's just coming on. But the second part is they're they're playing this playlist specifically because they don't want to be engaged with the act of picking music, right? If they putting on a playlist, they're probably putting it on and then like working or working out or going on a car ride. So unless they really love the song, they're not going to take out their phone, unlock it, and add it to their playlist or add it to their library and save it. They're going to have to really love it for them to do that because they've already kind of made a conscious decision. I'm listening to this playlist. I don't want to be in charge of what I want to play. I want to find a playlist that fits the vibe and they're going to go listen to that. So, they might follow the playlist. They might love the playlist, but unless your song is so amazing that it stands out to them enough, they're not actually going to save the song, go to your profile image, and they're very likely never going to hear another song from you again. Now, it's not all doom and gloom, right? There are there are chunks of people, a percentage of people that will go and save it and all that. In fact, if I flip back to that other artist for a sec, we don't have a good save rate or a good playlist ad rate, but like we did have something happening, right? We did have 1,400 playlist the song got added to and 155 people did save the song. It just happens to be a very small percentage of people because most people are listening passively. That's specifically why they put the playlist on because they didn't want to manually pick what they were listening to. And a couple months ago, I did a data study on Spotify's algorithm to figure out roughly how many streams it takes to trigger different algorithmic playlists. And a lot of people were asking like, do I can I just do this with playlisting? Right? Because one big perk of playlisting is it's it's quite cheap per stream in the short term. A lot of times playlisting is sold by like the bundle of stream ranges. So it's like p this much money will get you between 10 and 20,000 streams. And and the reason they're able to do that is because they have an approximation of how much streaming volume they get. And a lot of playlisting companies will straight up ask you for Spotify for artist access. So they can like ensure that they're actually delivering the streams that they promised you. And then of course remove your song from the playlist when they've given you what they've promised you. In fact, if you take a look at this graph here, this artist ran a playlisting campaign from for this like roughly 5 6 week period. And you can see the pretty dramatic fall here. Now, they were also running ads here. So that's why you see like a lot of this residual graphs and like the save rates way better than the other example we looked at because they they have multiple things going on. They're doing playlisting, they're running ads, and they also have an organic following and I think they have like 100,000 monthly listeners. So there's multiple things at play here in this graph, but you can see the pretty dramatic fall. And the other issue with playlist is because you're kind of paying for these stream ranges and you're getting added and removed. You can kind of end up with these really wild graphs kind of like this, like it's kind of up and down. It's like a roller coaster, which can happen with any promotional method. But if we were to compare this with something that's just ad based, um, these stats, like you can see it's kind of slow growing over time. there's spikes as we trigger algorithmic playlists, but it it's less of this like roller coaster of up and down because they're not getting added to a playlist and taken off and then added and then taken off. It's a little more consistent and there's this kind of snowballing effect, but it takes a while for this to ramp up. This is a year graph. Um, and we're not looking at a song here. We're looking at a whole discoraphy from an art. I mean, it's like 10 10 12 song discoraphy. We're looking at a whole artist catalog, not just one song. And same with that other graph I showed you. But moral of the story, ads take a while to ramp up. playlist are instant, but they fall off instantly. And the ads, the tail is actually very long. After you stop a campaign, the vast many vast majority of the streams that you get from a ad campaign happen after the the campaign's over, not even during it. Like it's not unusual for if you were to look a year after the campaign's over, that like a third to twothirds of the streams came after the campaign was done. That's a normal thing to happen. Whereas the playlisting campaign about 99% is going to happen during the campaign because of the lack of engagement. So, when should you use playlisting and when should you use ads? In my opinion, if you're a new artist developing your fan base from scratch, you shouldn't do any playlisting at all yet? Because the whole point of of playlisting isn't to get long-term fans, right? You're getting like a temporary boost and you'll get a tiny conversion rate, but most people are going to vanish. The ads are actually getting you like fans. You're they're clicking twice. They're going to your page. They're engaging really high. They're saving it. They're kind of baking it into their playlist and baking it into their library. And so you're actually like building an audience over time. And so when you're new, you you want to have high engagement data, people that actually like your song that you're kind of curating because they have to click twice to go listen to you to kind of train these algorithms that like, hey, this is who actually likes my music and this is who doesn't like my music, right? So you're getting high engagement so they can kind of learn enough data. With the playlisting, if it gets a wrong fit, it might be a mismatch for that. But really, like even if it's a perfect fit, it's not teaching Spotify a whole lot about who's actually engaging with your music and sticking with it for the long haul. So, if you're new, I think the answer is is super clear. Like, don't do the playlisting, do the ads. Like, if you have money to put into your music, do the ads. Of course, you can promote with free as well. So, this is really an argument of just like which paid thing would you do when. Uh, the second part of it is if you only have a smaller budget, I I think you should still just do ads because like in my opinion, the playlisting is something you add on to think of like adding fuel to the fire. Put the icing on the cake. It shouldn't be the cake. It shouldn't be the fire. It should be like the little boost you add to a song. And I've had several cases where we used playlisting strategically during a song that was taking off to kind of boost it further and hopefully show the Spotify algorithm that, hey, this song is popping off. Keep pushing it in the algorithm as well. And [snorts] that's the way that I try to use playlisting. But it isn't quite as simple as just never use playlisting. As I said, you can kind of use it to accelerate things further, which can actually be very helpful as long as you hire the right company to do it. Now, if you want to see how you can run ad campaigns like I talked about in this video, check out this playlist right here to see the entire process from start to finish and also a whole bunch of other videos teaching you how to do it. And make sure you subscribe to see the next video I upload. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.