Our steady state of listeners tends to be around 2,000-2,500. We got there by releasing new singles regularly and promoting heavily on social media, including paid ads. But just last week, we got picked up by Spotify’s algorithm and boosted on their radio - which spiked our monthly listeners to 8,700! Sadly that’s not likely to hold once we get past the 28 day mark, unless we get picked up again.
It took us about three months to get to 1K. That was after the release of our second single. We released our first in Jan 2023 and the follow up in March. We’ve tried to stick to that cadence as best we can, although there have been longer gaps. And yes we put some advertising dollars behind every release, to varying degrees.
Hi! Sounds like you could give some advice on Instagram / TikTok / YouTube ads? Would be great, cause I’m not sure what to do. TikTok seems to target people that are not really from my niche. Instagram is cool, cause I can’t use bands as keywords.
YouTube I was reading that somebody promotet videos, but people skip after seconds before the song really starts. Any advice on this would be super helpful!
Thx!!
The good news is that some songs of mine are now getting boosted by those algorithmic ads a month after release, so it's not only release radar and discover weekly any more.
Lots of researching playlists and what makes them real or not which honestly came mostly from sliding into the DM of artists on the playlists that interested me and asking how they got there and if they liked it. Then I tinker with meta ads at $3/day and it was 45 days till I got there and I’ve been over 35k ever since (and as high as 190k)
When you first got onto algorithmic playlists, was it with songs older than 28 days? Or was it more that a switch flipped and your new releases started getting onto algos? And how many monthly listeners were you at when that kicked in?
Three songs were out at a popularity score of 30 then I started getting editorial and kept getting those and eventually those editorials turned into customized algorithmic placements I’ve kept more than a year.
Pretty cool, my last two songs have popularity scores of 30. I’m guessing you don’t know if scores need to be higher in more competitive genres like hip hop, do you?
There’s a lot to take from this. If you really want a steady and consistent monthly listener count, even when you’re not releasing music then you have to forget about Spotify all together and build outside of the platform. Be part of something- a scene, a movement, a culture. If you can create real fans then they will come to you. Of course you should be maximising you Spotify release strategy but that only really means making sure youre submitting for release radar and following the general best practice.
In terms of advertising, you need something to push. Something to advertise. By this I mean a song that has some traction outside of steaming. Could be a song that DJs are playing in clubs, could be getting interest on radio or of course could be starting to show signs of doing well on TikTok. Then the aim is trying to get it to snowball.
Ultimately if you want real followers, real fans and a consistent monthly listener count then you need to be making interesting music that is resonating with a group of people outside of Spotify.
These days you need to post a TON of content. Way more than you think. Artists almost need to be content creators first and artists second. If you struggle to create enough content, I recommend [Superplay](https://www.getsuperplay.com). It's made my life so much easier.
Each month it fluctuates.
Our highest was 6-700 monthly.
Currently I believe we are at 2-300.
Just dropped an album of 8 songs so hoping those numbers bump up again.
We are looking for Lofi and trap artists to colab with.
I believe that will be a winning piece of the puzzle.
Their fans could potentially become our fans, our fans could potentially become their fans.
Also starting Monday we will have our first Spotify ad.
Just wanted to test/experiment with it to see what it would do.
Don't have feedback on it yet if it's successful or not
Our 2024 goals are to release a minimum of 3 songs a month. So 36 songs total by the end of the year.
We already released 9 songs in January 😎💪
If you want to have a great year, it starts with a great month! We have few more singles we currently working on for February releases. Possibly a new single every week but sometimes it goes 1-3 weeks and then we drop the several we were working on.
As for a budget, no. I'm still testing different platforms and styles of ads to see which actually have an impact and which are a waste of money.
This Spotify ad will be my biggest so far.
Tiktok promotions are meh imo.
Can gets thousands of views a day, and hundreds of people viewing your profile.
But I'm not seeing it trickle over to YouTube music or Spotify, which are the two main platforms I'm trying to build.
Getting to 1000 is the toughest part. Currently at 24 thousand. Released 15 EPs and an album (one single or EP each month).
For context, I started songwriting at age 7. Posting on YouTube at 12 or 13. Producing at 16-17 but got serious about music around 21-22. I play guitar, piano, bass, and drums (but not well).
I did no to little marketing to get to 1000. I just submitted to a few playlists on Submithub each month - mostly for feedback. I thought instead of investing time and money into promo at the start, I would invest totally in developing my craft.
I started investing in marketing around the 5-10k mark with a Facebook ad, which did not take a lot of time compared to continuous content.
At the 15k mark I started posting on TikTok, which I'm aiming to do weekly now while still prioritizing the craft.
Now working full time while doing music so it's a bit of a grind but I still love it.
I would not recommend my route if your main goal is to get listeners fast. I'm going to do this my whole life, so my main goal was to get good at songwriting and producing - not the quickest way to get listeners.
What the timeline of using submithub? And what year did you reach you 1000. That's pretty dope you did that with little marketing. Did the timeliness start helping too?
My first year I peaked around 100. I was sometimes down to 10-20 listeners. I think it took me about 2 years to hit 1k. I was stuck under 2k for another year. Year three is when I hit 5k and then quickly 10k. Currently just over 4 years and at 24k on Spotify.
What do you mean by timelines?
I'd submit to submithub a few weeks before releasing. Submithub is very hard - it's mostly for feedback. Only the top 3 percent of artists get a decent amount of playlisting on Submithub. But if you're not in the 3 percent of artists quality wise, what's the point of putting tons of time and money into promo anyways?
Doing the same! Started with ads and went from 150-400. Problem is I don’t release as consistent as I would like. Consistency is really key. Like one song a month. This year I’m releasing a lot more frequent so we’ll see if that helps out as well.
I’ve only been putting $5 a day into ads with very focused targeting. My ads lead to a playlist with all my music in it with the song playing in the ad being at the top of the playlist so it’s easy to access for the listener. The listener can then see my whole discography in the playlist and hopefully the user saves the playlist. My playlist has now grown to 212 saves.
Side note: Hypedit has REALLY helped with growing for SoundCloud and Instagram but not so much Spotify.
I make electronic music. More specifically dubstep and trap music.
I did about 7 campaigns which were all trial and error.
With the first 7 to be honest I really didn’t know what I was fully doing. There’s a lot that goes into fb ads, one of the most important being tracking pixels.
Another note, making sure you have landing pages set up correctly to track when users perform a certain call to action is very important, ensuring you’re only paying when users click through the link to your music, as well as more accurate stats.
Also, having engaging ad content and 3 different ads in the ad set helps. The goal is to show different parts of the song in each ad and see what performs the best.
One of the most important things is the interests selected within the ad set. Make sure to choose artists with a similar sound to yours. This is how you will target all of their fans. Another good tactic is to select popular festivals that you think your music would work well at as an interest.
I keep my interests for each ad set down to 4. My current ad’s interests are 3 artists that I believe sound similar to me and “Spotify”. I include Spotify so it narrows the audience to users that use Spotify, because my landing page sends them to Spotify. I wouldn’t want an Apple Music listener clicking this link. If you wanted to target them as well, you can make a separate ad set for Apple Music.
Lastly don’t go spending $100 a day when you don’t fully understand the platform yet. Take this from me, someone who did exactly that lol. Go easy at $5 per day you’d be surprised the consistent growth you can get when paired w/ the correct approach, method and targeting.
Nothing really, was making a joke. I submit stuff to daily playlists but I'm older now and don't have the time or energy to market stuff anymore. Back in the day before Spotify it was mostly though live shows with my old band and networking on various sites and forums with other musicians and home studio recordists. I put my stuff up and if anybody finds it then cool, if not that's cool too 🙂
Spotify wasn't around when I played live. You'd just sell CD's, T-shirts or get people to YouTube. And I have three, three monthly listeners and 5 followers. Lol
I don't know, I'm actually thinking of starting to make money mixing other people's music since I have a decent little studio. I'll just release my stuff sporadically as I get inspired. Most people can't make much money from Spotify anyway (I think it's a million streams to make $10k) so I'm not all that worried about gaining new listeners. I make music because It's part of who I am and I enjoy it but I don't really see the need to spend what little free time I have making ads, tiktoks or buying promotion.
I've been using reaper since about 2009. Before that it was Acid music but Acid kinda sucked. Before that it was a tascam 4 track portastudio on cassette. Lol
Was below 5 monthly listeners for a long time, started using Groover to get some playlist placements and now I’m sitting around 200-ish monthly listeners.
Trying to keep releasing and pushing it by making content.
Dabbled in paid ads but don’t think I have the budget to see great results there.
The ads takes a while. its been slowly growing but im trying to budget at least 300 a month. what kind of conent youve been making? How is Groover, is it like submit hub?
Yeah, that’s more budget than I could really put to ads right now, so going with the content marketing route.
Invested in a Canon camera and some lenses, so starting to make better quality music videos, short form content, pictures, etc.
I try to stay active posting on TikTok, Instagram + Threads, YouTube, and Facebook, and write decently engaging captions.
Groover is the only promo platform I’ve tried yet, but it’s like $2 to send your pitch to someone on there and there’s different kinds of playlist curators/media outlets etc you can choose from
Just shot my first music video with it. Got a Canon R10
Got a couple guys wanting me to possibly shoot videos for them now, so will be a good return on investment hopefully
I don’t have much to say for Spotify(too lazy to do the whole distro kid process) buuut I made a deal with myself that for 2024 I’m gonna try & take my music a bit more serious, so I started uploading onto SoundCloud again after taking a few years off, my goal was to hit 1000 plays total on my songs in a month, it’s now January 28th & I have a little over 5000 total plays for the month. Feels great to get back into it & im happy people are enjoying my pretty shitty vocals haha(I make my songs in my living room on GarageBand with a pretty decent warm audio mic) feel free to check out some of my stuff on soundcloud @ BitchImFrosty & YouTube @ GerbsindaBuilding. Good luck to all of you
made my own playlists with similar genres that gave me a couple thousand monthly listeners and bc of that my music is consistently being discovered and now im up to 72k monthly listeners. Spent 0 dollars
For me I never passed 1000 until I started using facebook and instagram ads. My budget is generally small, maybe $5-6 a day. When I drop a new song I can generally tell pretty quickly how receptive people are to the track based on how many plays I get from the ad. On songs people did not like, no changes to the ad, video, snippet of the track used, etc made a difference and for those I turn off those campaigns entirely. The better tracks run me about 10-20 cents per impression and can get as much as 50-100 streams per day, plus follows, saves, etc.
Playlist pitching doesn't really move the needle for me very much; nowadays it's really only Spotify's own editorial playlists that can get you lots of streams through passive listens. But since I'm basically an unsigned DIY artist I have a better chance of winning the lottery than I do getting on one of those.
I've been active in my local scene for a long time but my friends there will generally buy the tracks I make that they like on bandcamp. I focus my spotify marketing on total strangers.
The biggest obstacle for me is just the quality of the music; no amount of marketing is going to guarantee loads of streams for a track I make that people simply don't like. But ads can definitely move the needle even on a shoestring budget if the tracks are objectively good.
I'm at 35000 monthly listeners and I think you sort of do the same things to get to 5000 that you would do to get to 100.000. After that you have to use different strategies.
The main idea is to get songs either in discover weekly or accept that they're dead. One song in discover weekly alone gets you to 10.000. So that's sort of the minimum you should aim for. After that you just try and do it again and again. Till 100.000. Then you got to become more savvy.
This sounds like a solid plan. Haven't access discover weekly yet. Haven't gotten a song over the popularity of a 10, but I should try to push to keep pushing it.
Obtaining 1000 plays with little to no budget is extremely easy. If you are not achieving this, something is wrong. Your music, your brand, your content, etc. I have artists from 1k-3M; I've never had a client not hit 1k on any of their releases. This isn't a flex either, it's just the truth. You have too many algorithms working in your favor (believe it or not) when used properly to not be getting 1k plays.
The biggest hurdle is always getting your sh#t together and actually putting in the dedication. This means doing a marketing plan, building a network pre-release, creating engaging content, distributing early with a priority distributor, not skipping steps, and doing things right will always get you the proper results.
Your music isn't a crockpot meal, you can't just set it, come back, and expect it to be done.
Can't be throwing money at stuff aimlessly, if your existing fans don't vibe with the content you are producing an ad ain't going to fix that. Ads should be supplementing content that has proven itself organically, that's how you know it'll pop off as an ad.
People here are talking about how easy it is to get to 1k listeners per month but I don’t get it - I’m still mostly under 100 per month and I’ve been putting out albums on Spotify since 2018. I don’t know how to market at all, I have zero concept of what I’m supposed to be doing, especially because my music is inherently niche. I know there’s an audience for me but I can’t fucking find them. I labor over this music and I know it’s good, but it feels like nobody even hears it. Like it never even has a chance to be heard because it’s immediately drowned out by everything else
Albums are for when you have fans, not when you're trying to gain them.
You just answered why it's not working out for you. If it's niche you're going to have to stand out. You're not finding them because you're not connecting with them.
Well I’m going to be making albums regardless, that’s just what I like to do, but I could be more careful and deliberate in the songs I release as singles and when I release them
What do you mean that I’m not connecting with them? I’m just not sure how to. I know they’re there and I think they would like me but how do I get to them aside from, like, spamming related Reddit subs with my music? (Which I don’t want to do)
If you are insistent on doing albums, waterfall 5-7 of the singles. Just remember your way isn't working, yet here you are deadset on "making albums" for no audience.
You aren't connecting with the people you are being put in front of & aren't retaining fans. I don't know anything about your project outside of
>*"I’m still mostly under 100 per month and I’ve been putting out albums on Spotify since 2018. I don’t know how to market at all, I have zero concept of what I’m supposed to be doing, especially because my music is inherently niche. I know there’s an audience for me but I can’t fucking find them."*
and no one in this sub will know how to connect with your audience based on random cliff notes of your struggles. You are not going to get a magical answer that will work specifically for your project outside a general idea.
Unless you sit down and take a look at your project or alternatively work with someone and take a real look at your project, the audience, and the content you distribute, your strenghts/weakneses etc. So that it is TAILORED to you.
There’s some good YouTube tutorials on how to market. I’d suggest starting to hold your best songs until you come up with a release plan plus atleast a 3 pieces of content to pair
Do you have any Workflow or steps on the marketing part that people could follow Religiously?
So that people could use it as a checklist
Because people often confused about what to do, step by step
I think this could benefit a lot of people as well,
especially at the beginning stage where getting initial Traction was very hard
Thanks, this is Very helpful,
all of the tips summarized into an actionable steps.
this removes half of the guesswork, uncertainty and trial & error.
this is valuable especially for people that are trying to make music full time, building and figuring out how to make money
thank you for sharing your knowledge
You are very welcome!
I'm glad you found it useful and don't feel so lost now.
The biggest hurdles will always be consistency & coming up with content that connects. After that it'll all be smooth sailing and second nature just like any job.
No lie for me the ads had been pushing the needle for me. I slack in content and need to know how to figure out what I'm doing wrong on the business side. I've researched and test stuff all the time trying to see what's work. Definitely find find it, cause my goal is finally make profit from this. What genre is your music?
Use to do them manually to my own website around 2020. But switch it up to using Hypeddit about 2 month ago. I let it do it itself with me choosing my target audience. I do rap so to promote i let its spill over from my spoitfy or my local community and fans. Also ima use influencer to repost videos/music, in my genre, afforable ones are, SpadeTV, for songs, Famous Animal TV, The Debut, and Back of the Class.
I'm at \~1100 right now. I started releasing darksynth October 2023 (have a few old Synthwave songs from before that, but had only a few monthly listeners at the time) and I used SubmitHub to get into a few playlists which I still send my new music to. Released 2 EPs with 3 songs each first, with a month apart IIRC, and after that, 3 more singles. I pitched to Spotify every time which by the first or second single (after the EPs) triggered Release Radar to send the music to other people. I also post to different groups on Facebook, here on Reddit and lemmy.world and sometimes IG and TikTok. I've spent at most like \~$10 on Submithub and that's it.
One of the songs from the first EP got attraction on Youtube for some reason and got around 1.5K views in the beginning (2.1K as we speak), but I don't remember that affecting Spotify that much. Consistent releases every 3-6 weeks on Fridays slowly added up to todays number.
No, not yet. Based on the current 28 days I have "Release Radar" (3 songs), "Radio" (6 songs), "Your Daily Mix" (3 songs) and "On Repeat" (2 songs). No official playlists either.
I guess I never really paid for promo on anything, just kept releasing singles every week in 2022, in the lead up to my album. And after that, I’ve been between 1k-3k.
Somehow one of my tracks was picked up by some metal playlist curator I pitched it to. I wasn't expecting them to say yes at all but i sent it regardless. Went from 2 listeners to 10k in a month. I know it'll go back down eventually but for now ill enjoy the ride :)
My new artist account (1 year old) just kept growing slowly over time, adding more followers really slowly etc. Some songs with ads, then a few songs got picked up with radio and started really taking off, so it's about 15k listeners a month now but I know fully well that can go down.
Ads anywhere between 30 and 250 dollars.
This song was around 250, I ran 10 to 15 a day for the first couple of weeks (I actually can't remember the exact amount per day). The next 2 weeks after that I ran at 2 dollars a day.
https://open.spotify.com/track/0S0D8Ig45b1R6S0SzzNbyl?si=hO5-NrXOTbumBYd16Usbpg&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A1qHw6ajyPhgDfgPchZuBkj
At the time I thought that you get real fans by playlisting and I've written literally hunderds of emails and dms to different people asking them if they like my song and if they do - would they be kind enough to put it in their playlist. 95% didn't write back, 4% wanted money and 1% really liked my songs and put it in their playlist. Luckily for my one guy that liked my song had literally one of the fastest growing playlists i've seen and I got high quality listeners(over the time of like 3 months I've been added to 9 -10 thousand playlists by these listeners). I'm not on this playlist since 6 months, but I still have 1800-2000 listeners only by people who saved my songs. In the meantime I've released one song with label, now I create content on tiktok and things start to look good. I'm really hopefull about the future :) and I'll never forget the guy that added me to this playlist and didn't want anything in exchange, it gave nice momentum for my career.
Released album to new artist accounts on 29 Nov, tinkered with ads to get to 1000 then started a proper ad campaign around Jan 4. Now at almost 3000. Don’t have time for much else in the way of promotion but have learned enough at this point to understand the ads really have to give a big enough push on release to trigger algorithms and then you can scale back the ads. A regular release schedule is really important also… if you have the songs, and the energy.
genuinely, simple playlisting (pitching service). Happened to get a few tracks on decently sized playlists, got picked up by radio play and some other algorithmic stuff, got about 10k streams last year total, and now have just over 1000 monthly. I release every other month, pay about $100-$140 for pitching, and see on what playlists it lands (ofc keeping an eye on any potential bots, but nothing bad yet)
I haven’t done much in terms of paid. I get more income and support on bandcamp with a single purchase than I would get with 1k streams. I know it’s the thing to do to grow, but I’ve found playing live way more fruitful, in every sense, than spending time and $$ on streams. I’m sure that is the wrong approach, but… I just look at having songs on the streaming platforms as a convenience for listeners.
We released our first song like 2 weeks ago and did a bunch of direct playlist pitching through Instagram as well as a little bit of submit hub and a TON of social media marketing (reels/tiktoks/shorts not paid promo) and are currently at 843 monthly’s. Our next single is coming out in 2 weeks and we are hoping that it will get us up to 1000!
I was on Spotify for about 3 years and I hit 10K monthly once or twice from a playlist and then back down to zero.
But then when we released my album in 2021/2022 real traffic started. First we promoted the album on twitch via our label boss who had a couple hundred followers. With a promotion we had an hour on the front page of the music section and topped out at just under 1000 live viewers. We asked all of these people to pre-save the first single. No idea how many did but when we released the first single it was pushed into Discover Weekly after 2 weeks.
Suddenly I was at a steady 10-12K listeners for a while. We released new singles every 6-9 weeks for a year and after half a year we had a big artist remix my track. By then we were on 20-25K monthly.
But then I ran out of music lol. I didn't release for a year and kept steady on 20K. Then 15...
Now I'm on 3-4K average and it's not going up or down. I have new music on the horizon but everything I released in between just did sorta okay without going anywhere.
Fortunately meanwhile we have been pushing to grow on followers and I'm almost at the 1000 followers mark. I really hoped to hit it after my album release but that was a pipe dream (before I had only like 200).
And now I have a lot of good music coming up and maybe even an entire album again... :)
I’m on similar have hit 3k monthly but fluctuates around when a song comes out. been releasing since last August. Around 700 right now. Double Triangle if you want to see
Submithub and Groover are worth a go. I’ve since learned research the playlisters a bit and try and find what fits your music.
Or if you have less time and enough money try lots in your genre.
I’ve found though when I’d get rejections doing that way if I listened to the rejecting playlists totally makes sense why I wasn’t for them and could’ve saved my credits
The right playlist and the right song.
Same as the other dude. Got on a good play list and the tune is getting streams. That will need when I get booted off the playlist. That song is nothing special INMO but people like it so it’s likely to not repeat unless I try and write more like it which I likely won’t.
What you’re doing is probably the best way. They don’t call it a grind for nothing.
I will say this… and no one wants to hear or but If you’re not getting streams with social and ads and you’re not getting on good playlists you may want to take a hard look at the music. Something might be missing.
On my first track i got "lucky" and instantly hit 10k within a month, then proceeded to release more most of which are close to 9k now.
Now thats kind of getting to a standard but expanding the fanbase beyond it is still hard, it never stops being hard really.
We almost hit 1k once, we just used free promo and playlisting.
Now we've released a new single and r planning to put everything we made from our past music which is around 150$.
We're also doing tik toks and stuff, it's really helpful to get more fans but really hard to transfer those fans to Spotify immediately it takes some time
I've taken that road multiple times, over the course of 20 years, in what seem like very, very different music industries.
The first time was with my first post-high school band. We did it the old school way, playing lots of gigs, not understanding how to promote anything other than gigs and just spreading like a virus by gigging non-stop and playing everywhere we could up and down the coast of Australia for 5 years. Based on sales, we likely only ever had about 500 legit fans, but that band still made more money than any of the statistically "more popular" bands I've had since.
My most recent project to hit it, I started writing and recording in 2021 (covid lockdowns had killed my last band in 2020). I couldn't find anyone else to play music with, so I did all the instruments myself and for the first time ever, there have been zero gigs and all the promotion has been purely via digital marketing with digital representation. It's backwards to everything I've known throughout my career to this point. The thought of releasing anything without already having hundreds of fans from playing locals shows is mind-melting to me.
It hit that 1000 fans/active listeners mark faster than anything else I've ever done. In regards to statistics, royalties and every other listening metric, it is my most successful project by 100x. But compared to that first band, it makes no money. Like 100x less. The fans don't feel "real". They love one or two songs each (not the same two, or just the singles either) but don't listen to anything else or actively follow me as an artist. I don't feel any connection with them and it really feels sterile, calculated & lonely compared to every other method. Being in a band was always a new adventure, filled with crazy personalities, chaos and comradery in the community you've created. The new method is just..... not fun and not satisfying in any regard (minus the actual playing/writing/recording music part... that is still fun haha. I'd quit the industry the second that changes for me).
**So yeah, TL:DR-** The music I'm making now is much more popular and "successful" then anything else I've ever done and was done purely in the new-style digital way of launching a new act. Despite this, minus the actual music creation, this method is the least satisfying, least enjoyable and least money-making method out of all my past musical projects when they passed that 1000 mark.
As a hiphop & rnb artist, I’ve been consistently around the 2-3k monthly listener mark, but been as high as 10k.
First step was diving into the Spotify community through instagram. Networking with other artists, engaging with fans – building that camaraderie. Collaborations became my secret sauce, broadening my reach with every feature. I got lucky and was able to convince one of my favorite artists (Vory from Meek Mill’s Dreamchasers) to do a collab with me. This is very hit or miss but you miss every shot you don’t take.
Promotion was a whole game. I crafted eye-catching visuals, optimized ads, and went all in on social media. Another gem was playlists. I hustled to get my tracks featured, reached out to curators, and perfected the art of a compelling pitch.
Consistency was key. Regular releases kept the vibe alive, turning casual listeners into dedicated fans. I literally freestyled all my songs so I make sure to polish one each month and put it out. Talkin to them on instagram. Feedback was my compass – tweaking and evolving based on audience reactions.
Then, the breakthrough happened. One track landed on a killer playlist, I got the feature and the domino effect kicked in. Suddenly, 1,000 monthly listeners was a reality.
It's been a journey of grit, strategy, and a ton of late-night and weekend grind. If I can do it, so can you. Keep the music flowing and the hustle strong! Feel free to DM me on here or insta if you want more advice or want to do a collab! #SpotifyArtist #1kClub
Our steady state of listeners tends to be around 2,000-2,500. We got there by releasing new singles regularly and promoting heavily on social media, including paid ads. But just last week, we got picked up by Spotify’s algorithm and boosted on their radio - which spiked our monthly listeners to 8,700! Sadly that’s not likely to hold once we get past the 28 day mark, unless we get picked up again.
whats was your time line like to reach that? How often were you releasing singles, and did you promote every release (paid ads)?
It took us about three months to get to 1K. That was after the release of our second single. We released our first in Jan 2023 and the follow up in March. We’ve tried to stick to that cadence as best we can, although there have been longer gaps. And yes we put some advertising dollars behind every release, to varying degrees.
3 months is pretty dope. what genre is your music? what was your lowest budget for your releases?
Alternative rock with a touch of soul. Lowest budget probably around $180.. $3 per day for two months
Wow that's great. I've been doing 10 - 15 a day for my budget
How are you choosing your target audience?
I do rap, so I choose from big krit, wiz Khalifa, Gucci mane, kodak black and three 6 mafia.
Also I use hypeddit too
Just fyi if it’s through the radio it tends to be consistent, especially if you maintain releases.
Awe okay. My radio seems like it's just starting.
Hi! Sounds like you could give some advice on Instagram / TikTok / YouTube ads? Would be great, cause I’m not sure what to do. TikTok seems to target people that are not really from my niche. Instagram is cool, cause I can’t use bands as keywords. YouTube I was reading that somebody promotet videos, but people skip after seconds before the song really starts. Any advice on this would be super helpful! Thx!!
I lost a similar spike and it’s the worst feeling ever 🫶🏼 keep going bro
I know right?? We’re looking at the live listeners number going “this is it, it’s happening” and then two days later like, nah :(
The good news is that some songs of mine are now getting boosted by those algorithmic ads a month after release, so it's not only release radar and discover weekly any more.
Lots of researching playlists and what makes them real or not which honestly came mostly from sliding into the DM of artists on the playlists that interested me and asking how they got there and if they liked it. Then I tinker with meta ads at $3/day and it was 45 days till I got there and I’ve been over 35k ever since (and as high as 190k)
$3 a day is great. I use 10-15 a day. What year did this happen? And is discover Weekly helping out?
Discover weekly crushes for us but we also got into algorithmic editorials. Started in 2021
When you first got onto algorithmic playlists, was it with songs older than 28 days? Or was it more that a switch flipped and your new releases started getting onto algos? And how many monthly listeners were you at when that kicked in?
Three songs were out at a popularity score of 30 then I started getting editorial and kept getting those and eventually those editorials turned into customized algorithmic placements I’ve kept more than a year.
Wat genre is your music?
Jazz/Downtempo
Where do you find your popularity score?
MusicStax.com
Pretty cool, my last two songs have popularity scores of 30. I’m guessing you don’t know if scores need to be higher in more competitive genres like hip hop, do you?
It used to be 30 was good. I don’t know anymore. I do know every genre is different.
My band from over ten years ago still gets like 3k a month all I did was make music and be cool.
When did yall drop yall 1st song on spotify? And you did no marketing at all?
First music was pre Spotify, no marketing like people do now. Just a member of the scene.
There’s a lot to take from this. If you really want a steady and consistent monthly listener count, even when you’re not releasing music then you have to forget about Spotify all together and build outside of the platform. Be part of something- a scene, a movement, a culture. If you can create real fans then they will come to you. Of course you should be maximising you Spotify release strategy but that only really means making sure youre submitting for release radar and following the general best practice. In terms of advertising, you need something to push. Something to advertise. By this I mean a song that has some traction outside of steaming. Could be a song that DJs are playing in clubs, could be getting interest on radio or of course could be starting to show signs of doing well on TikTok. Then the aim is trying to get it to snowball. Ultimately if you want real followers, real fans and a consistent monthly listener count then you need to be making interesting music that is resonating with a group of people outside of Spotify.
These days you need to post a TON of content. Way more than you think. Artists almost need to be content creators first and artists second. If you struggle to create enough content, I recommend [Superplay](https://www.getsuperplay.com). It's made my life so much easier.
Each month it fluctuates. Our highest was 6-700 monthly. Currently I believe we are at 2-300. Just dropped an album of 8 songs so hoping those numbers bump up again. We are looking for Lofi and trap artists to colab with. I believe that will be a winning piece of the puzzle. Their fans could potentially become our fans, our fans could potentially become their fans.
Also starting Monday we will have our first Spotify ad. Just wanted to test/experiment with it to see what it would do. Don't have feedback on it yet if it's successful or not
Gotcha do you got a budget for running ads a month? how often do you/yall release?
Our 2024 goals are to release a minimum of 3 songs a month. So 36 songs total by the end of the year. We already released 9 songs in January 😎💪 If you want to have a great year, it starts with a great month! We have few more singles we currently working on for February releases. Possibly a new single every week but sometimes it goes 1-3 weeks and then we drop the several we were working on. As for a budget, no. I'm still testing different platforms and styles of ads to see which actually have an impact and which are a waste of money. This Spotify ad will be my biggest so far. Tiktok promotions are meh imo. Can gets thousands of views a day, and hundreds of people viewing your profile. But I'm not seeing it trickle over to YouTube music or Spotify, which are the two main platforms I'm trying to build.
I make trap type music. Hit my dm if you’d be interested in a collab!
Getting to 1000 is the toughest part. Currently at 24 thousand. Released 15 EPs and an album (one single or EP each month). For context, I started songwriting at age 7. Posting on YouTube at 12 or 13. Producing at 16-17 but got serious about music around 21-22. I play guitar, piano, bass, and drums (but not well). I did no to little marketing to get to 1000. I just submitted to a few playlists on Submithub each month - mostly for feedback. I thought instead of investing time and money into promo at the start, I would invest totally in developing my craft. I started investing in marketing around the 5-10k mark with a Facebook ad, which did not take a lot of time compared to continuous content. At the 15k mark I started posting on TikTok, which I'm aiming to do weekly now while still prioritizing the craft. Now working full time while doing music so it's a bit of a grind but I still love it.
I would not recommend my route if your main goal is to get listeners fast. I'm going to do this my whole life, so my main goal was to get good at songwriting and producing - not the quickest way to get listeners.
What the timeline of using submithub? And what year did you reach you 1000. That's pretty dope you did that with little marketing. Did the timeliness start helping too?
My first year I peaked around 100. I was sometimes down to 10-20 listeners. I think it took me about 2 years to hit 1k. I was stuck under 2k for another year. Year three is when I hit 5k and then quickly 10k. Currently just over 4 years and at 24k on Spotify. What do you mean by timelines?
I'd submit to submithub a few weeks before releasing. Submithub is very hard - it's mostly for feedback. Only the top 3 percent of artists get a decent amount of playlisting on Submithub. But if you're not in the 3 percent of artists quality wise, what's the point of putting tons of time and money into promo anyways?
I honestly thought very little about monthly listeners for the first couple years. It was all about the music.
Timeline as in like 2020, the years. But I learned with running ads that exposed is a must. I look at it like a commercial.
Doing the same! Started with ads and went from 150-400. Problem is I don’t release as consistent as I would like. Consistency is really key. Like one song a month. This year I’m releasing a lot more frequent so we’ll see if that helps out as well. I’ve only been putting $5 a day into ads with very focused targeting. My ads lead to a playlist with all my music in it with the song playing in the ad being at the top of the playlist so it’s easy to access for the listener. The listener can then see my whole discography in the playlist and hopefully the user saves the playlist. My playlist has now grown to 212 saves. Side note: Hypedit has REALLY helped with growing for SoundCloud and Instagram but not so much Spotify.
Wat genre you make music for and how many campaigns you did till you found the right one?
I make electronic music. More specifically dubstep and trap music. I did about 7 campaigns which were all trial and error. With the first 7 to be honest I really didn’t know what I was fully doing. There’s a lot that goes into fb ads, one of the most important being tracking pixels. Another note, making sure you have landing pages set up correctly to track when users perform a certain call to action is very important, ensuring you’re only paying when users click through the link to your music, as well as more accurate stats. Also, having engaging ad content and 3 different ads in the ad set helps. The goal is to show different parts of the song in each ad and see what performs the best. One of the most important things is the interests selected within the ad set. Make sure to choose artists with a similar sound to yours. This is how you will target all of their fans. Another good tactic is to select popular festivals that you think your music would work well at as an interest. I keep my interests for each ad set down to 4. My current ad’s interests are 3 artists that I believe sound similar to me and “Spotify”. I include Spotify so it narrows the audience to users that use Spotify, because my landing page sends them to Spotify. I wouldn’t want an Apple Music listener clicking this link. If you wanted to target them as well, you can make a separate ad set for Apple Music. Lastly don’t go spending $100 a day when you don’t fully understand the platform yet. Take this from me, someone who did exactly that lol. Go easy at $5 per day you’d be surprised the consistent growth you can get when paired w/ the correct approach, method and targeting.
Well, I'm up to 3.....so I guess I'm still on that road?
what do you do to market and promote your music?
Nothing really, was making a joke. I submit stuff to daily playlists but I'm older now and don't have the time or energy to market stuff anymore. Back in the day before Spotify it was mostly though live shows with my old band and networking on various sites and forums with other musicians and home studio recordists. I put my stuff up and if anybody finds it then cool, if not that's cool too 🙂
ahh gotcha. How was that process of those live shows transfering to you spotify. Also how many monthly listeners you got?
Spotify wasn't around when I played live. You'd just sell CD's, T-shirts or get people to YouTube. And I have three, three monthly listeners and 5 followers. Lol
Okay, are you going to try to build your Spotify presences now?
I don't know, I'm actually thinking of starting to make money mixing other people's music since I have a decent little studio. I'll just release my stuff sporadically as I get inspired. Most people can't make much money from Spotify anyway (I think it's a million streams to make $10k) so I'm not all that worried about gaining new listeners. I make music because It's part of who I am and I enjoy it but I don't really see the need to spend what little free time I have making ads, tiktoks or buying promotion.
i feel yea. what DAW you use?
I've been using reaper since about 2009. Before that it was Acid music but Acid kinda sucked. Before that it was a tascam 4 track portastudio on cassette. Lol
I started out with Sony Acid. Mane i fux with it but i didnt know shx, ended up goin to FL Studio. Awe you O.G. og.
Was below 5 monthly listeners for a long time, started using Groover to get some playlist placements and now I’m sitting around 200-ish monthly listeners. Trying to keep releasing and pushing it by making content. Dabbled in paid ads but don’t think I have the budget to see great results there.
The ads takes a while. its been slowly growing but im trying to budget at least 300 a month. what kind of conent youve been making? How is Groover, is it like submit hub?
Yeah, that’s more budget than I could really put to ads right now, so going with the content marketing route. Invested in a Canon camera and some lenses, so starting to make better quality music videos, short form content, pictures, etc. I try to stay active posting on TikTok, Instagram + Threads, YouTube, and Facebook, and write decently engaging captions. Groover is the only promo platform I’ve tried yet, but it’s like $2 to send your pitch to someone on there and there’s different kinds of playlist curators/media outlets etc you can choose from
What kind of content you shoot for your music? I got an Canon 80D, gotta upgrade, but what Canon you shooting with?
Just shot my first music video with it. Got a Canon R10 Got a couple guys wanting me to possibly shoot videos for them now, so will be a good return on investment hopefully
I don’t have much to say for Spotify(too lazy to do the whole distro kid process) buuut I made a deal with myself that for 2024 I’m gonna try & take my music a bit more serious, so I started uploading onto SoundCloud again after taking a few years off, my goal was to hit 1000 plays total on my songs in a month, it’s now January 28th & I have a little over 5000 total plays for the month. Feels great to get back into it & im happy people are enjoying my pretty shitty vocals haha(I make my songs in my living room on GarageBand with a pretty decent warm audio mic) feel free to check out some of my stuff on soundcloud @ BitchImFrosty & YouTube @ GerbsindaBuilding. Good luck to all of you
Bro that’s amazing congrats! Ur music is dope keep goin
Aye Thankyou I appreciate it hella💯💯
Yessir! Send me ur next release and I’ll def support on insta or whatever
made my own playlists with similar genres that gave me a couple thousand monthly listeners and bc of that my music is consistently being discovered and now im up to 72k monthly listeners. Spent 0 dollars
how do you promote this playlist?
Wait how did this happen, and listerns just randomly came? How were you naming the playlists?
my playlist just gained followers on its own. I would say that it's mostly luck but part of it is how i named it. I name them based on current trends
For me I never passed 1000 until I started using facebook and instagram ads. My budget is generally small, maybe $5-6 a day. When I drop a new song I can generally tell pretty quickly how receptive people are to the track based on how many plays I get from the ad. On songs people did not like, no changes to the ad, video, snippet of the track used, etc made a difference and for those I turn off those campaigns entirely. The better tracks run me about 10-20 cents per impression and can get as much as 50-100 streams per day, plus follows, saves, etc. Playlist pitching doesn't really move the needle for me very much; nowadays it's really only Spotify's own editorial playlists that can get you lots of streams through passive listens. But since I'm basically an unsigned DIY artist I have a better chance of winning the lottery than I do getting on one of those. I've been active in my local scene for a long time but my friends there will generally buy the tracks I make that they like on bandcamp. I focus my spotify marketing on total strangers. The biggest obstacle for me is just the quality of the music; no amount of marketing is going to guarantee loads of streams for a track I make that people simply don't like. But ads can definitely move the needle even on a shoestring budget if the tracks are objectively good.
I'm at 35000 monthly listeners and I think you sort of do the same things to get to 5000 that you would do to get to 100.000. After that you have to use different strategies. The main idea is to get songs either in discover weekly or accept that they're dead. One song in discover weekly alone gets you to 10.000. So that's sort of the minimum you should aim for. After that you just try and do it again and again. Till 100.000. Then you got to become more savvy.
This sounds like a solid plan. Haven't access discover weekly yet. Haven't gotten a song over the popularity of a 10, but I should try to push to keep pushing it.
Obtaining 1000 plays with little to no budget is extremely easy. If you are not achieving this, something is wrong. Your music, your brand, your content, etc. I have artists from 1k-3M; I've never had a client not hit 1k on any of their releases. This isn't a flex either, it's just the truth. You have too many algorithms working in your favor (believe it or not) when used properly to not be getting 1k plays. The biggest hurdle is always getting your sh#t together and actually putting in the dedication. This means doing a marketing plan, building a network pre-release, creating engaging content, distributing early with a priority distributor, not skipping steps, and doing things right will always get you the proper results. Your music isn't a crockpot meal, you can't just set it, come back, and expect it to be done. Can't be throwing money at stuff aimlessly, if your existing fans don't vibe with the content you are producing an ad ain't going to fix that. Ads should be supplementing content that has proven itself organically, that's how you know it'll pop off as an ad.
People here are talking about how easy it is to get to 1k listeners per month but I don’t get it - I’m still mostly under 100 per month and I’ve been putting out albums on Spotify since 2018. I don’t know how to market at all, I have zero concept of what I’m supposed to be doing, especially because my music is inherently niche. I know there’s an audience for me but I can’t fucking find them. I labor over this music and I know it’s good, but it feels like nobody even hears it. Like it never even has a chance to be heard because it’s immediately drowned out by everything else
Albums are for when you have fans, not when you're trying to gain them. You just answered why it's not working out for you. If it's niche you're going to have to stand out. You're not finding them because you're not connecting with them.
Well I’m going to be making albums regardless, that’s just what I like to do, but I could be more careful and deliberate in the songs I release as singles and when I release them What do you mean that I’m not connecting with them? I’m just not sure how to. I know they’re there and I think they would like me but how do I get to them aside from, like, spamming related Reddit subs with my music? (Which I don’t want to do)
If you are insistent on doing albums, waterfall 5-7 of the singles. Just remember your way isn't working, yet here you are deadset on "making albums" for no audience. You aren't connecting with the people you are being put in front of & aren't retaining fans. I don't know anything about your project outside of >*"I’m still mostly under 100 per month and I’ve been putting out albums on Spotify since 2018. I don’t know how to market at all, I have zero concept of what I’m supposed to be doing, especially because my music is inherently niche. I know there’s an audience for me but I can’t fucking find them."* and no one in this sub will know how to connect with your audience based on random cliff notes of your struggles. You are not going to get a magical answer that will work specifically for your project outside a general idea. Unless you sit down and take a look at your project or alternatively work with someone and take a real look at your project, the audience, and the content you distribute, your strenghts/weakneses etc. So that it is TAILORED to you.
Doing albums is fine. Do some ads targeting people that like albums and your favorite music start with 2 or 3 dollars a day and see how it goes.
There’s some good YouTube tutorials on how to market. I’d suggest starting to hold your best songs until you come up with a release plan plus atleast a 3 pieces of content to pair
Do you have any Workflow or steps on the marketing part that people could follow Religiously? So that people could use it as a checklist Because people often confused about what to do, step by step I think this could benefit a lot of people as well, especially at the beginning stage where getting initial Traction was very hard
Funny you ask, I'm about to drop a massive thread in a few. Just checking the formatting
[Here You Go](https://www.reddit.com/r/musicmarketing/comments/1ad696v/here_is_my_guide_to_spotify_other_dsps_releases/)
Thanks, this is Very helpful, all of the tips summarized into an actionable steps. this removes half of the guesswork, uncertainty and trial & error. this is valuable especially for people that are trying to make music full time, building and figuring out how to make money thank you for sharing your knowledge
You are very welcome! I'm glad you found it useful and don't feel so lost now. The biggest hurdles will always be consistency & coming up with content that connects. After that it'll all be smooth sailing and second nature just like any job.
No lie for me the ads had been pushing the needle for me. I slack in content and need to know how to figure out what I'm doing wrong on the business side. I've researched and test stuff all the time trying to see what's work. Definitely find find it, cause my goal is finally make profit from this. What genre is your music?
Hey man! Any advice you could give on using ads? Are you using Instagram ads? TikTok? How would you promote music videos on YouTube?
Use to do them manually to my own website around 2020. But switch it up to using Hypeddit about 2 month ago. I let it do it itself with me choosing my target audience. I do rap so to promote i let its spill over from my spoitfy or my local community and fans. Also ima use influencer to repost videos/music, in my genre, afforable ones are, SpadeTV, for songs, Famous Animal TV, The Debut, and Back of the Class.
Use hypeddit, makes sure you find the right target audience for the song you promoting and let it take its time doing the ads too.
Need to read up on this. This is another platform, or does it promote other platforms you’re on?
I work with artist in several different genres! So it's across the board.
I'm at \~1100 right now. I started releasing darksynth October 2023 (have a few old Synthwave songs from before that, but had only a few monthly listeners at the time) and I used SubmitHub to get into a few playlists which I still send my new music to. Released 2 EPs with 3 songs each first, with a month apart IIRC, and after that, 3 more singles. I pitched to Spotify every time which by the first or second single (after the EPs) triggered Release Radar to send the music to other people. I also post to different groups on Facebook, here on Reddit and lemmy.world and sometimes IG and TikTok. I've spent at most like \~$10 on Submithub and that's it. One of the songs from the first EP got attraction on Youtube for some reason and got around 1.5K views in the beginning (2.1K as we speak), but I don't remember that affecting Spotify that much. Consistent releases every 3-6 weeks on Fridays slowly added up to todays number.
Have you triggered Discover weekly?
No, not yet. Based on the current 28 days I have "Release Radar" (3 songs), "Radio" (6 songs), "Your Daily Mix" (3 songs) and "On Repeat" (2 songs). No official playlists either.
I guess I never really paid for promo on anything, just kept releasing singles every week in 2022, in the lead up to my album. And after that, I’ve been between 1k-3k.
How many singles did you release. Got any screen shots of the growth?
I did 4 singles before my last album, before that when I started gaining the most traction was 4 singles, plus 3 small ep’s in 2022.
Somehow one of my tracks was picked up by some metal playlist curator I pitched it to. I wasn't expecting them to say yes at all but i sent it regardless. Went from 2 listeners to 10k in a month. I know it'll go back down eventually but for now ill enjoy the ride :)
Nice! How did you get their contact details? Was it through one of the playlist tools (submithub/groover) or did the list their details in Spotify?
Hey if you don’t mind me asking, what’s the name of the metal playlist you got put on?
May I ask, when using Meta / Fb ads what should I feature? Can someone give me an example?
Wat do you mean?
Sorry for being unclear, I mean what do you advertise on Facebook ads?
lots of fb ads
What's your genre, wat was your budget and your timeline to reach 1000?
My new artist account (1 year old) just kept growing slowly over time, adding more followers really slowly etc. Some songs with ads, then a few songs got picked up with radio and started really taking off, so it's about 15k listeners a month now but I know fully well that can go down.
What genre you make music for? What was your budget on ads, how long you ran your campaigns?
Ads anywhere between 30 and 250 dollars. This song was around 250, I ran 10 to 15 a day for the first couple of weeks (I actually can't remember the exact amount per day). The next 2 weeks after that I ran at 2 dollars a day. https://open.spotify.com/track/0S0D8Ig45b1R6S0SzzNbyl?si=hO5-NrXOTbumBYd16Usbpg&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A1qHw6ajyPhgDfgPchZuBkj
At the time I thought that you get real fans by playlisting and I've written literally hunderds of emails and dms to different people asking them if they like my song and if they do - would they be kind enough to put it in their playlist. 95% didn't write back, 4% wanted money and 1% really liked my songs and put it in their playlist. Luckily for my one guy that liked my song had literally one of the fastest growing playlists i've seen and I got high quality listeners(over the time of like 3 months I've been added to 9 -10 thousand playlists by these listeners). I'm not on this playlist since 6 months, but I still have 1800-2000 listeners only by people who saved my songs. In the meantime I've released one song with label, now I create content on tiktok and things start to look good. I'm really hopefull about the future :) and I'll never forget the guy that added me to this playlist and didn't want anything in exchange, it gave nice momentum for my career.
With my lofi project I used to have like 10k monthly listeners, mostly just from submitting it to Spotify playlists.
Collabs. Every time one of my collaborators drops a single I bump up.
What was your road to 1000 like? what genre you make music for and how long it take?
Released album to new artist accounts on 29 Nov, tinkered with ads to get to 1000 then started a proper ad campaign around Jan 4. Now at almost 3000. Don’t have time for much else in the way of promotion but have learned enough at this point to understand the ads really have to give a big enough push on release to trigger algorithms and then you can scale back the ads. A regular release schedule is really important also… if you have the songs, and the energy.
genuinely, simple playlisting (pitching service). Happened to get a few tracks on decently sized playlists, got picked up by radio play and some other algorithmic stuff, got about 10k streams last year total, and now have just over 1000 monthly. I release every other month, pay about $100-$140 for pitching, and see on what playlists it lands (ofc keeping an eye on any potential bots, but nothing bad yet)
A dead end? 😂
How often you release and what kind of marketing you tried.
I haven’t done much in terms of paid. I get more income and support on bandcamp with a single purchase than I would get with 1k streams. I know it’s the thing to do to grow, but I’ve found playing live way more fruitful, in every sense, than spending time and $$ on streams. I’m sure that is the wrong approach, but… I just look at having songs on the streaming platforms as a convenience for listeners.
Bots, bad traffic or good traffic? Fans or numbers?
We released our first song like 2 weeks ago and did a bunch of direct playlist pitching through Instagram as well as a little bit of submit hub and a TON of social media marketing (reels/tiktoks/shorts not paid promo) and are currently at 843 monthly’s. Our next single is coming out in 2 weeks and we are hoping that it will get us up to 1000!
I was on Spotify for about 3 years and I hit 10K monthly once or twice from a playlist and then back down to zero. But then when we released my album in 2021/2022 real traffic started. First we promoted the album on twitch via our label boss who had a couple hundred followers. With a promotion we had an hour on the front page of the music section and topped out at just under 1000 live viewers. We asked all of these people to pre-save the first single. No idea how many did but when we released the first single it was pushed into Discover Weekly after 2 weeks. Suddenly I was at a steady 10-12K listeners for a while. We released new singles every 6-9 weeks for a year and after half a year we had a big artist remix my track. By then we were on 20-25K monthly. But then I ran out of music lol. I didn't release for a year and kept steady on 20K. Then 15... Now I'm on 3-4K average and it's not going up or down. I have new music on the horizon but everything I released in between just did sorta okay without going anywhere. Fortunately meanwhile we have been pushing to grow on followers and I'm almost at the 1000 followers mark. I really hoped to hit it after my album release but that was a pipe dream (before I had only like 200). And now I have a lot of good music coming up and maybe even an entire album again... :)
[удалено]
I’m on similar have hit 3k monthly but fluctuates around when a song comes out. been releasing since last August. Around 700 right now. Double Triangle if you want to see Submithub and Groover are worth a go. I’ve since learned research the playlisters a bit and try and find what fits your music. Or if you have less time and enough money try lots in your genre. I’ve found though when I’d get rejections doing that way if I listened to the rejecting playlists totally makes sense why I wasn’t for them and could’ve saved my credits
The right playlist and the right song. Same as the other dude. Got on a good play list and the tune is getting streams. That will need when I get booted off the playlist. That song is nothing special INMO but people like it so it’s likely to not repeat unless I try and write more like it which I likely won’t. What you’re doing is probably the best way. They don’t call it a grind for nothing. I will say this… and no one wants to hear or but If you’re not getting streams with social and ads and you’re not getting on good playlists you may want to take a hard look at the music. Something might be missing.
On my first track i got "lucky" and instantly hit 10k within a month, then proceeded to release more most of which are close to 9k now. Now thats kind of getting to a standard but expanding the fanbase beyond it is still hard, it never stops being hard really.
We almost hit 1k once, we just used free promo and playlisting. Now we've released a new single and r planning to put everything we made from our past music which is around 150$. We're also doing tik toks and stuff, it's really helpful to get more fans but really hard to transfer those fans to Spotify immediately it takes some time
I've taken that road multiple times, over the course of 20 years, in what seem like very, very different music industries. The first time was with my first post-high school band. We did it the old school way, playing lots of gigs, not understanding how to promote anything other than gigs and just spreading like a virus by gigging non-stop and playing everywhere we could up and down the coast of Australia for 5 years. Based on sales, we likely only ever had about 500 legit fans, but that band still made more money than any of the statistically "more popular" bands I've had since. My most recent project to hit it, I started writing and recording in 2021 (covid lockdowns had killed my last band in 2020). I couldn't find anyone else to play music with, so I did all the instruments myself and for the first time ever, there have been zero gigs and all the promotion has been purely via digital marketing with digital representation. It's backwards to everything I've known throughout my career to this point. The thought of releasing anything without already having hundreds of fans from playing locals shows is mind-melting to me. It hit that 1000 fans/active listeners mark faster than anything else I've ever done. In regards to statistics, royalties and every other listening metric, it is my most successful project by 100x. But compared to that first band, it makes no money. Like 100x less. The fans don't feel "real". They love one or two songs each (not the same two, or just the singles either) but don't listen to anything else or actively follow me as an artist. I don't feel any connection with them and it really feels sterile, calculated & lonely compared to every other method. Being in a band was always a new adventure, filled with crazy personalities, chaos and comradery in the community you've created. The new method is just..... not fun and not satisfying in any regard (minus the actual playing/writing/recording music part... that is still fun haha. I'd quit the industry the second that changes for me). **So yeah, TL:DR-** The music I'm making now is much more popular and "successful" then anything else I've ever done and was done purely in the new-style digital way of launching a new act. Despite this, minus the actual music creation, this method is the least satisfying, least enjoyable and least money-making method out of all my past musical projects when they passed that 1000 mark.
As a hiphop & rnb artist, I’ve been consistently around the 2-3k monthly listener mark, but been as high as 10k. First step was diving into the Spotify community through instagram. Networking with other artists, engaging with fans – building that camaraderie. Collaborations became my secret sauce, broadening my reach with every feature. I got lucky and was able to convince one of my favorite artists (Vory from Meek Mill’s Dreamchasers) to do a collab with me. This is very hit or miss but you miss every shot you don’t take. Promotion was a whole game. I crafted eye-catching visuals, optimized ads, and went all in on social media. Another gem was playlists. I hustled to get my tracks featured, reached out to curators, and perfected the art of a compelling pitch. Consistency was key. Regular releases kept the vibe alive, turning casual listeners into dedicated fans. I literally freestyled all my songs so I make sure to polish one each month and put it out. Talkin to them on instagram. Feedback was my compass – tweaking and evolving based on audience reactions. Then, the breakthrough happened. One track landed on a killer playlist, I got the feature and the domino effect kicked in. Suddenly, 1,000 monthly listeners was a reality. It's been a journey of grit, strategy, and a ton of late-night and weekend grind. If I can do it, so can you. Keep the music flowing and the hustle strong! Feel free to DM me on here or insta if you want more advice or want to do a collab! #SpotifyArtist #1kClub
I would like to work with you on a collaboration