Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming platforms in the world. So understandably many artists spend a lot of time and energy trying to grow their following on Spotify. It stands to reason that if you want to grow a following on Spotify, you may be curious about how their ad platform works and if it’s something that you should be taking advantage of. So in this article, I’m going to explain some of the pros and cons of using Spotify ads to promote your music, how to post ads on Spotify, and many more. Hope it will help you decide If you can benefit from running ads on Spotify. Let’s go ahead & get started.
Spotify ad studio has some great features that can help you reach a larger audience with your music. Labels, managers, Independent Artists can all benefit from running targeted ads using Spotify, but the ad platform isn’t just intended for artists that want to promote their music. Any company or brand can advertise on Spotify. Most of the advertising on Spotify has nothing to do with music. The initial thought that goes through most artist’s minds when they hear about Spotify advertising is they think “okay, great. I want My following on Spotify. So it makes sense to advertise on Spotify” Right? Well, not necessarily.
Think about the ads that you hear on the radio. I mean, you’d like to hear music on the radio, right? So wouldn’t it make sense to advertise on the radio? Well, sometimes it does. But what kind of ads do you mostly hear on the Radio? Normally, the vast majority of ads are promoting products and services that have absolutely nothing to do with music. That’s the same for Spotify. just because you want to get played on the radio more doesn’t mean that the radio is the best place for you to invest your advertising money. The same holds for Spotify, just because you want to get more streams on Spotify doesn’t mean advertising on Spotify is necessarily the best way to do that.
Now, everybody’s situation is different. So let me explain some of the benefits and some of the drawbacks to advertising on Spotify. So You can decide if you think it’s a good fit for you.
Let’s start with the positives. First of all, Spotify has some great data on what their users are streaming and listening to. You can target your audience based on what music they listen to regularly. So you can Target your fans and let them know about upcoming tour dates, new releases, new merch that you have available.
Then you can target fans of similar artists to create awareness and introduce your music to people that are likely to enjoy it.
Geo-targeting options are available. So you can run ads in specific locations. This can be particularly useful when you’re promoting live shows. If for example, you’re playing a show in Los Angeles, you can target just your fans in Los Angeles.
Spotify Now has around a quarter of a billion users. More than half of which is the free version of the platform and receives ads. The platform offers advertisers a pretty big reach.
One of the drawbacks, however, is that Spotify ad Studio requires a minimum budget of $250 per promotion. So, when you compare that to running ads on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where there are no minimum budget requirements, You can see why Spotify ads might not be a good fit for everyone.
The fact that Spotify requires a minimum budget of $250 per promotion means that you essentially have to invest $250, cross your fingers, and hope the promotion does well. Whereas when you run an ad on Instagram or YouTube, you can have multiple promotions running simultaneously on a $ 5-day budget, and after a few days, it simply determines which promotions you want to keep running and which ones you want to shut off. If none of them are performing as well as you like, you can shut them all off. So there’s a lot less risk on those platforms.
For Spotify where you’re to be out $250 if your promotion lands flat. What this tells me is that Spotify’s ad platform is really tailored more for labels and big companies and not so much for small Independent Artists that are on a tight budget. That said if you do have the budget for it Spotify ads, can help you reach fans that you might not reach otherwise.
Now Spotify ads are a little different from Facebook and YouTube and they’re a lot more like radio ads. So you can run a clip of your music with a voiceover. Giving a call to action or announcing a new release or tour dates. and the actual cost per impression isn’t that much on average, you’ll probably spend about two cents each time someone hears the ad. This is reasonably comparable to Instagram and YouTube ads, but you do have to commit $250 to each promotion, which is one of the big drawbacks.
So if you’re trying to stretch your ad budget, get the best bang for your buck, you’re probably going to do a lot better sticking with ads on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, just like Spotify. Those platforms also allow you to Target users based on the music. They listen to, they all offer Geo-targeting options. So you can run location-based promotions as well. the more detailed data and targeting options than Spotify.
And those platforms have a much larger reach, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube ads. Also, they tend to be less expensive than Spotify. and There’s no minimum budget required. And even if your goal is to grow your following on Spotify, well, you can promote your Spotify profile or specific tracks with any of the platforms I mentioned.
So to add it all up. Unfortunately, Spotify added the studio. Just isn’t where it needs to be the best option for Independent Artists on a small budget. In most cases, you’ll get much better results for a much smaller investment with less risk.
And you advertise on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, I would only recommend using Spotify ads studio if you’re already on the platform as I mentioned, you want to expand your reach. If you’re already very familiar with paid advertising and if you had some success, how to get results, I wouldn’t recommend Spotify ads studio to complete beginners, and I would only recommend trying it out if you can afford a $250 promotion to test it out. So, that’s my take on Spotify ads Studio.
I think it can be a tremendously powerful resource for labels and promoters that have a larger budget to work with. But it’s unfortunately probably not the best option for most Independent Artists, do-it-yourself musicians, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube ads are still much better Alternatives.
Whether it’s a restaurant business, electronic brand or a music label, word of mouth brings in the most revenue. Knowing how to advertise and how to target the vast majority will surely bring you an upper hand. About Spotify, It’s one of those things that not many people even know exist. I will run you guys through the platform, walk you through it, show you how to get set up and talk you through the process of setting up your own Spotify Ad so that you guys can start to use it. So that being said, let’s hop right into it.
All right, guys, so First we go inside the Spotify ad studio. Now, the first thing that you’ll want to do is go to
adStudio.Spotify.com and go ahead and sign up to be a part of that ad platform. If you are lucky enough you might catch it in its beta form. So you will get accepted in about a week or two. If you are seeing any delay then don’t worry it would take no more than two weeks to get approved, if it does take you a little longer than that, email Spotify and And they’re pretty good about responding to people promptly.
Now, once you’re a part of the platform or if you already have it, all you will need to do is go to manage your ads and it will bring you to the home screen for your ad creations. So, as you can see, when you’re setting up your ad, you pretty much have two objectives :
Raising awareness for a brand is pretty much something that a corporation will want to do like a Coke or a Pepsi or somebody who wants to Target listeners for their brands within Spotify. What you want to do is promote a concert or music-related content. I’m assuming that most of you guys will be using this to promote a song, or a project, or something like that, and then you would just need to name it. and next, it’ll bring you up to your audience and budget screen.
Now, this is what a fan profile comes to Handy guys. So pretty much just going to ask you for your Target demographic. So you have your location, your age, your gender stuff like that. So I’m going to assume that for this to say you’re a rapper or singer based in Atlanta so you will want to target other people who are also based in Atlanta. Select ages, 16 to 25, and all genders of course.
And next, brings To the section of Target based on listening behavior. So, with this section, you can either just throw spaghetti at the wall and Target all music listeners. Or you can Target people who are listening to specific genres, you can Target people who are listening in different areas. Categories, like party playlist or study playlist for a long drive, home playlist, and things like that, or you can Target the fans of a specific artist.
Now, there is a section, you’re not allowed to use it Unless the artist is involved with you in some way, shape, or form. So they have to either be a part of the event or be on the song or something like that. So you will win the most likely Target based on the genre that you’re in. So let’s go ahead and put in hip-hop. And as you can see, on the right-hand side, keeping tabs on all the metrics that you’re using to make your ad.
Once you get to the budget session here to break everything down a little bit more, and you also have your platform section. You always want to Target every single platform unless you’re doing some kind of specific campaign. Well, let’s say you created an Android app that allows people to access your songs ahead of time and you wanted to target people who are only using Android unless it’s something like that. Always Target every single platform.
Now with the budget session, as you can see, Spotify has pre-plan thousand dollars($1000), twenty-five hundred ($2500), and five thousand dollars ($5000) budgets. I know this sounds like a lot of money guys, but luckily, the least amount of money that you can use to run a Spotify ad with is two hundred and fifty dollars($250). Now, I know it’s not cheap but it’s a long cry from five thousand dollars and now as you can see, on the right side is kind of broken down a little bit more. So these two hundred and fifty dollars ($250) with our current matric.
Exclude placing your ad in front of about 14,000 people. It’s not pretty bad. 250 dollars to reach 14,000 people is not bad at all. Especially, if you’re coupling this with your Spotify playlist that you should already be doing, and after that, it would just take you to the section of actually creating your ad.
Now you can hire someone as Spotify to pretty much read a script and record a voiceover for you. As I said, I’m assuming that for this tutorial we’re just promoting a song or a project. So all you would need is 30 Second wave clips of your song and the cover art, which is already in a 640 by 640 configuration. So then you would just want to go ahead and get everything set up. And this little screen right here on the right pretty much shows you your ad as it’s being created. So for this, I’m going to use a random fan, the art of Childish Gambino, just something I found on the internet and you will want to come down and create the ad headline and stuff like that. So, let’s just make something up. And as you can see right here on the right,
That is creating the ad right In front of you pretty much showing you how it would look on the mobile version and also on a desktop version for the desktop users of the platform. And the companion link will pretty much be the link to the song or the link for the landing pages. We want this tool and to once again, like I said, assuming you’re promoting a song or project, you will want this to link directly back to your Spotify profile to the song, you want to drive people and the platform directly back to your page.
That’s the best way to use these ads. And once you get that all situated, It’ll pretty much just ask you a couple of questions at the end unless you look over your order, make sure that everything looks good to you, and then you can get your ad situated and on the way. So yeah guys, it’s pretty much a basic overview of Spotify.
Let me just go over some tips and tricks on how you can reach a million views on Spotify. A lot of people want to know how much money you can make on Spotify because money’s just a cool topic to talk about but what you should really want to be interested in is the steps that will get you there because most independent artists are just regular humans. They aren’t signed to any labels or anything. They are looking for the chance to go viral.
So you don’t just start off by streaming and go viral. You will have to start off by building your own brand. So that’s the biggest thing. You need to know that you need to have a good Brand. A lot of people on Spotify with millions and lots of listeners, but they don’t really have a big brand, they are just kind of Lo-Fi artists. You don’t even know what they are, so their scope to grow is pretty low.
Getting recognition on Spotify is hard, a lot of that is based on what people are listing. So it’s not easy to just get into playlists right away. So the best bet that you can do is to start building your brand, building a presence on social media, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube.
Start a YouTube channel if you want. It’s not a guarantee that your stuff would just blow up. If you make something good enough and you’re on all these different platforms it makes it more possible for these things to happen rather than just uploading music and submitting it into place.
The way you can build a brand pretty easily is just to start posting on Instagram every day & build up the following day by day and then start a YouTube channel.
You start doing remix stuff like that and Can start repurposing those remixes for Tik-Tok and then your music may blow up and turn into some crazy viral sensation. Most of the time quality music will bring you recognition although a lot of that is luck at the same time.
If the song is good and you spent a lot of time practicing to get as good as it can be in order to make that in the first place, people wouldn’t listen to it over and over again if it isn’t good.
And if you already had your brand built up, not only did people find your viral song, they would also find all of the old music and other stuff that you had. Grow your monthly listeners on Spotify, grow streams for all your songs.
Another good strategy If you are doing remixes or creating new music and let’s say something pops off, get a download link. For instance, if your song is taken off on YouTube, put the download link in the description. Pretty much what they will have to do in order to download the song they would have to follow you on Spotify.
Add the song to their library on Spotify and add it on Apple music or something like that. So a few thousand people out of those Millions will click the link, download it, and follow you on Spotify. So building a brand and reaching to people is definitely a huge aspect of that.
Another tip will be to consistently release quality music for your listeners. You can post a song every week, just make sure it’s good.
And the way Spotify works out. If you upload a song in a few weeks, you can actually submit it to Spotify to get into their editorial playlist. once you’ve been uploading consistently and it’s good quality stuff and you’re starting to get somewhat of a brand going by the next advice, which is something that is collaboration.
Start looking for people that are similar to you or you like their vibe, maybe they have like a similar amount of monthly listeners, or maybe they have more. Just start reaching out, sending loops, and talking about collaborations, and then once you start collaborating with other artists, you can share each other’s audiences. Which in return will help you grow even more.
So, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how much you can make for about 2 million streams on Spotify you will be paid 4345 dollars. So that’s all the revenue. Spotify pays zero point zero zero three one eight($0.00318) per stream.
I would only recommend using Spotify ads as a studio if you’re already on the platform and want to expand your reach. I think it can Be a tremendously powerful resource for labels and promoters that have a larger budget to work with. For most Independent Artists, do-it-yourself musicians, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube ads are still much better Alternatives.
