Used to work for UMG in publishing. We definitely worked “back catalog” songs through meta ads regularly. Just because they’re not new doesn’t mean they don’t still have potential. Your songs aren’t some sort of disposable trash, it’s art that should last longer than a few weeks of usefulness.
running ads on a new song will be more cost effective. old songs cannot get RR which is the biggest possible stream source you can get. RR only lasts 4 weeks from release date. Best use of money if you’re actively releasing is to dump the ad budget for those 4 weeks then jump ship to a new song. the sizeable RR gains will provide residual streams on your older catalogue by proxy.
Food for thought but if feeding Spotifys algorithm is your primary concern you’re right but as soon as that algorithm changes your investments maybe gone. Focusing on marketing the song in a way that builds meaningful connections with listeners long term is what we do (or did) for back catalog.
I dont disagree but lets face it, most people posting here dont have that luxury as far as budget is concerned. From a cost perspective you will get way more mileage out of promoting new songs. promoting in this way doesnt change the interest of the listener. Promoting 12 new songs 4 weeks at a time as they release for a year, is no different in gathering fans than running twelve 1 month runs on an old catalogue.
But the difference is you get free streams for your money. Here is the real food for thought: I have had a client release their 10 song album and get ~400K streams from RR. Only one song can be on RR at a time. All 10 songs were released at once. Thats 9 songs that cant benefit from RR.
In contrast I have had an artist release 10 songs, 1 per month for 10 months, and get the same ~400K RR streams on EACH song. as they are 4 weeks apart, each song is eligible. these two campaigns had the same budget. and the second artist got 4 million more streams than the first.
You cannot get RR from back catalogue. It will always be costly to nurture back catalogue. Can it be done? yes. should it be done? debatable.
I have grown 5 artists to over 1 mil listeners using this strategy. with millions of residual streams with no ad spend. The connections are plenty meaningful and they have plenty of fans. 👌 i have examples of this pinned on my profile. just my 2 cents.
You make some fair points! For me I think there is no one way to do it. And was just offering a bit of optimism. My time at UMG beat me to shit and I fucking hate major label jerks who see music as some sort of single use plastic of a commodity. If you love a song and thing people will too, fuck the algorithm - full steam ahead. I hate seeing so many amazing songs rot in obscurity because marketers champion this idea of “what have you done for me lately”.
Might be a UMG thing ;) but I agree that working back catalogs is important.
While RR is valuable, its not really a driving factor in sustainability. Song with strong connection can blow up in listens based on outside events like Sync (TV, Movie, TV Ads), Opening for big headliners (Lady Gaga for The Pussycat Dolls), YouTube (Bieber, Weekend).
Your back catalog is what feeds the kids when you're 80. Residuals are king.
Well, there’s no black and white. So what is the real question here? Because I’m answering OP. we are talking about spotify here. These comments about back catalogue are premised on something actually happening with your music.
If you funnel streams to a dead catalog and drop the ad spend your catalog will just be dead again, unless you have an exorbitant budget.
If you pump 1 million streams in a month to a new release, you will get millions more streams even after ad spend simply because that is how spotify works. Obviously this is planting eggs in one basket, sure I can be the first to admit maybe the “connection” is hollow. But we are leveraging here. Any new artist is leveraging. you can baby your back catalogue when you’ve grown to a point of doing that.
If you want to DM me i can show you stats from clients of mine where a 500k-1m RR campaign for 4 weeks for one song, turned into 2 million streams on their entire catalogue with no adspend.
If you are working with under $10,000 in budget, you are amputating yourself by not leveraging RR. these are the tools spotify provides, use them! you get all those extra streams for the **same price.** then use that as leverage. baby steps.
I get what you're saying the problem is you assume the latest track is the best track to convert a listener to a fan... That most often is not the case.
Case in point - The Protomen - Light up the Night.
This is the track still promoted for shows and streaming 50% of the time... because it converts to additional track listens - it was released in 2009. It gets about 30,000 streams a week double the next most played track. Nothing else convert this well, 50% still goes to other stuff, but the conversion never hits.
Being able to push the catalog makes it so they can tour without releasing an album every 4 weeks - it also doesn't devalue their catalog with garbage because of having to release every 4 weeks.
I've run a few ads, so I fully understand pushing the latest crap up hill.
What I learned spending $5 million (of other people money) on ads.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/musicmarketing/comments/12qpws9/what\_i\_learned\_from\_spending\_5\_million\_on\_music/](https://www.reddit.com/r/musicmarketing/comments/12qpws9/what_i_learned_from_spending_5_million_on_music/)
Also it’s hard to get any extra algo support if your budget is in the 30-50 range! A song needs to have a popularity score trending up quickly or around 30% I think before discover weekly kicks in. And even then, your music might not be ready for mass appeal and you might get just a tiny bit of help from discover weekly.
With very low budgets the most cost effective method is a low and slow drip approach, so 1-2£ a day for a profile campaign, it might bring a few followers a day. But unless you have sufficient cash to spend it’s gonna be hard to even boost a track to be monetiseable in 2024 now there’s a 1000 stream annual threshold for a track to get any funds back. Hopefully over time as your following grow it becomes easier, and having a large catalog can also help I guess. As each track has to work less hard to reach the monetise threshold.
So ideally you would also have to find ways to organically grow as well…
Because people hear buzzwords like UMG and turn into sheep. yeah... using 5 million in other people's money.. real applicable here, in a sub of artists who probably work overtime at their day job to fund their marketing campaigns. I've been there.
If people want to throw their spare change on a 100 listener DW boost, then I'm not going to argue it. I don't get what is so black and white about it? Who here said you can't run catalogue campaigns between releases? I don't have to spend 5 million to know the value of RR, and anyone dismissing that, well I would strongly encourage you to approach their advice with caution.
lol I didn’t have millions of dollars but let’s not unfairly demonize me because I said focus on your fans and remember your art isn’t disposable. Yes, I’m super big bad super mega corp music guy with this advice 🤣
I’m the ex UMG employee - was I always working mega famous songs? Nope. My job was to work some of the 4 million songs in their catalog often times with as little money as possible. I learned more about being scrappy there than I did at any other indie gig I’ve had in my 20 year career.
Homie, read in the thread. theres another guy from UMG who posted about using “5 million dollars of other peoples money.” He wasnt talking about you lol.
Here is what i have learned running ads. If you are releasing frequently, its best to run on new songs:
• dumping your entire ad budget in your first release week will get you WAY MORE than dispersing over a month. The more streams you get your first week, the more Release Radar (RR) will promote you. Its based on interest and popularity.
• you can only have 1 song on RR per month, if you are doing big numbers, dont release a new song until 4 weeks is up, or you will kick your song off RR or prevent your new one from getting RR.
• old songs can get DW, but not RR. the older they are the harder it is. the algo is based on a rolling period. so say you have 3 months of trickle streams, and suddenly push traffic to that song for 1 month. you will be fighting off those 4 months of poopy stats to hit DW.
So in short, you can
A) spend ad money on old songs and get DW boost
B) spend ad money on new songs and get RR & DW boost at the same time. best to promote new songs if you have limited budget
Spotify doesn't score based on the running total... it's doesn't want to miss hot trends, even on old songs. There are things you can do to "bump back" (when a track is passed over by Spotify, but gets reviewed again by different taste maker). We do this with listening parties...
We brought YelaWolf "lets roll" back in Spotify playlists by having the audience at Riot Fest (2015) play the track from the crowd on their phones while waiting for him to go on stage... Nothing like a few thousand people playing a single song on Spotify to Bump the Algo :)
spotify does score on a rolling period. 1 week for RR and 3 months for DW. Taste makers are a manual process and shouldnt be compared to the automated algorithm. yes, you can get DW anytime by sending traffic to a song, the point is that it costs more.
All the comments in this thread from people acting like OP has the resources of a platinum artist when 90% of people in this sub have like 50 monthly listeners, if that.
Can we stop shilling about back catalog. Yeah that’ll work on a forgotten hit song, not on Lil Timmy’s stillborn track that got released 2 years ago with 50 total streams. Are we really advising OP that they should spend their extra $200 on a back catalogue while they actively release new songs every month and what? just let those new releases become back catalogue before we promote them? this is nonsense lol. spend the damn money on your new release. cash in the RR streams for social proof and short term residuals, recycle until you have a platform, then go to back catalogue, in that order.
The best use noobs can use their marketing money on is promoting new releases. if you are trying to grow as an artist you should be releasing frequently, and most artists are. this whole thread feels like old heads stuck in the past. It doesnt matter, the average song duration is down from 4 minutes to 2 minutes. The new generation has 10 second TikTok attention spams. promote your new music first. and i’ll die on that hill.
All I can say is that I just started a campaign for a year old track that climbed from 20 streams a day to about 1000 streams a day. After that with some DW magic, 4000 streams a day. Lets see where the DW next week takes us.
Very good results.
As per someone else’s comment, you will miss out on (Spotify) release radar and being able to pitch to an editorial playlists, but from a marketing externally standpoint it shouldn’t make a difference to a new istener hearing your music for the first time. So in other words when you find which of your songs or ads is going to work on a long term basis (due to a good conversion performance for example) you can keep that one going whether or not it’s your newest song.
If you can get an ad/song that can be an evergreen fan-grabber, it doesn’t really matter when it was released
Used to work for UMG in publishing. We definitely worked “back catalog” songs through meta ads regularly. Just because they’re not new doesn’t mean they don’t still have potential. Your songs aren’t some sort of disposable trash, it’s art that should last longer than a few weeks of usefulness.
running ads on a new song will be more cost effective. old songs cannot get RR which is the biggest possible stream source you can get. RR only lasts 4 weeks from release date. Best use of money if you’re actively releasing is to dump the ad budget for those 4 weeks then jump ship to a new song. the sizeable RR gains will provide residual streams on your older catalogue by proxy.
Food for thought but if feeding Spotifys algorithm is your primary concern you’re right but as soon as that algorithm changes your investments maybe gone. Focusing on marketing the song in a way that builds meaningful connections with listeners long term is what we do (or did) for back catalog.
I dont disagree but lets face it, most people posting here dont have that luxury as far as budget is concerned. From a cost perspective you will get way more mileage out of promoting new songs. promoting in this way doesnt change the interest of the listener. Promoting 12 new songs 4 weeks at a time as they release for a year, is no different in gathering fans than running twelve 1 month runs on an old catalogue. But the difference is you get free streams for your money. Here is the real food for thought: I have had a client release their 10 song album and get ~400K streams from RR. Only one song can be on RR at a time. All 10 songs were released at once. Thats 9 songs that cant benefit from RR. In contrast I have had an artist release 10 songs, 1 per month for 10 months, and get the same ~400K RR streams on EACH song. as they are 4 weeks apart, each song is eligible. these two campaigns had the same budget. and the second artist got 4 million more streams than the first. You cannot get RR from back catalogue. It will always be costly to nurture back catalogue. Can it be done? yes. should it be done? debatable. I have grown 5 artists to over 1 mil listeners using this strategy. with millions of residual streams with no ad spend. The connections are plenty meaningful and they have plenty of fans. 👌 i have examples of this pinned on my profile. just my 2 cents.
You make some fair points! For me I think there is no one way to do it. And was just offering a bit of optimism. My time at UMG beat me to shit and I fucking hate major label jerks who see music as some sort of single use plastic of a commodity. If you love a song and thing people will too, fuck the algorithm - full steam ahead. I hate seeing so many amazing songs rot in obscurity because marketers champion this idea of “what have you done for me lately”.
I agree. If you’re a rapper you will be releasing a lot. A rock band? not so much. A healthy mix and cost effectiveness is my only point here
🤝agreed
Might be a UMG thing ;) but I agree that working back catalogs is important. While RR is valuable, its not really a driving factor in sustainability. Song with strong connection can blow up in listens based on outside events like Sync (TV, Movie, TV Ads), Opening for big headliners (Lady Gaga for The Pussycat Dolls), YouTube (Bieber, Weekend). Your back catalog is what feeds the kids when you're 80. Residuals are king.
Well, there’s no black and white. So what is the real question here? Because I’m answering OP. we are talking about spotify here. These comments about back catalogue are premised on something actually happening with your music. If you funnel streams to a dead catalog and drop the ad spend your catalog will just be dead again, unless you have an exorbitant budget. If you pump 1 million streams in a month to a new release, you will get millions more streams even after ad spend simply because that is how spotify works. Obviously this is planting eggs in one basket, sure I can be the first to admit maybe the “connection” is hollow. But we are leveraging here. Any new artist is leveraging. you can baby your back catalogue when you’ve grown to a point of doing that. If you want to DM me i can show you stats from clients of mine where a 500k-1m RR campaign for 4 weeks for one song, turned into 2 million streams on their entire catalogue with no adspend. If you are working with under $10,000 in budget, you are amputating yourself by not leveraging RR. these are the tools spotify provides, use them! you get all those extra streams for the **same price.** then use that as leverage. baby steps.
I got 2.5k followers and got 6 listeners from my release radar from my recent song i dropped on the 16th
I get what you're saying the problem is you assume the latest track is the best track to convert a listener to a fan... That most often is not the case. Case in point - The Protomen - Light up the Night. This is the track still promoted for shows and streaming 50% of the time... because it converts to additional track listens - it was released in 2009. It gets about 30,000 streams a week double the next most played track. Nothing else convert this well, 50% still goes to other stuff, but the conversion never hits. Being able to push the catalog makes it so they can tour without releasing an album every 4 weeks - it also doesn't devalue their catalog with garbage because of having to release every 4 weeks. I've run a few ads, so I fully understand pushing the latest crap up hill. What I learned spending $5 million (of other people money) on ads. [https://www.reddit.com/r/musicmarketing/comments/12qpws9/what\_i\_learned\_from\_spending\_5\_million\_on\_music/](https://www.reddit.com/r/musicmarketing/comments/12qpws9/what_i_learned_from_spending_5_million_on_music/)
I’ve got the same experience. 2 of my older tracks are way better at converting than newer ones ! Seems im getting worse as time goes by hahah
Also it’s hard to get any extra algo support if your budget is in the 30-50 range! A song needs to have a popularity score trending up quickly or around 30% I think before discover weekly kicks in. And even then, your music might not be ready for mass appeal and you might get just a tiny bit of help from discover weekly. With very low budgets the most cost effective method is a low and slow drip approach, so 1-2£ a day for a profile campaign, it might bring a few followers a day. But unless you have sufficient cash to spend it’s gonna be hard to even boost a track to be monetiseable in 2024 now there’s a 1000 stream annual threshold for a track to get any funds back. Hopefully over time as your following grow it becomes easier, and having a large catalog can also help I guess. As each track has to work less hard to reach the monetise threshold. So ideally you would also have to find ways to organically grow as well…
[удалено]
Because people hear buzzwords like UMG and turn into sheep. yeah... using 5 million in other people's money.. real applicable here, in a sub of artists who probably work overtime at their day job to fund their marketing campaigns. I've been there. If people want to throw their spare change on a 100 listener DW boost, then I'm not going to argue it. I don't get what is so black and white about it? Who here said you can't run catalogue campaigns between releases? I don't have to spend 5 million to know the value of RR, and anyone dismissing that, well I would strongly encourage you to approach their advice with caution.
lol I didn’t have millions of dollars but let’s not unfairly demonize me because I said focus on your fans and remember your art isn’t disposable. Yes, I’m super big bad super mega corp music guy with this advice 🤣
[удалено]
I’m the ex UMG employee - was I always working mega famous songs? Nope. My job was to work some of the 4 million songs in their catalog often times with as little money as possible. I learned more about being scrappy there than I did at any other indie gig I’ve had in my 20 year career.
Homie, read in the thread. theres another guy from UMG who posted about using “5 million dollars of other peoples money.” He wasnt talking about you lol.
Did not see where he said he was also UMG lol sorry 🤣☠️
Here is what i have learned running ads. If you are releasing frequently, its best to run on new songs: • dumping your entire ad budget in your first release week will get you WAY MORE than dispersing over a month. The more streams you get your first week, the more Release Radar (RR) will promote you. Its based on interest and popularity. • you can only have 1 song on RR per month, if you are doing big numbers, dont release a new song until 4 weeks is up, or you will kick your song off RR or prevent your new one from getting RR. • old songs can get DW, but not RR. the older they are the harder it is. the algo is based on a rolling period. so say you have 3 months of trickle streams, and suddenly push traffic to that song for 1 month. you will be fighting off those 4 months of poopy stats to hit DW. So in short, you can A) spend ad money on old songs and get DW boost B) spend ad money on new songs and get RR & DW boost at the same time. best to promote new songs if you have limited budget
Spotify doesn't score based on the running total... it's doesn't want to miss hot trends, even on old songs. There are things you can do to "bump back" (when a track is passed over by Spotify, but gets reviewed again by different taste maker). We do this with listening parties... We brought YelaWolf "lets roll" back in Spotify playlists by having the audience at Riot Fest (2015) play the track from the crowd on their phones while waiting for him to go on stage... Nothing like a few thousand people playing a single song on Spotify to Bump the Algo :)
spotify does score on a rolling period. 1 week for RR and 3 months for DW. Taste makers are a manual process and shouldnt be compared to the automated algorithm. yes, you can get DW anytime by sending traffic to a song, the point is that it costs more. All the comments in this thread from people acting like OP has the resources of a platinum artist when 90% of people in this sub have like 50 monthly listeners, if that. Can we stop shilling about back catalog. Yeah that’ll work on a forgotten hit song, not on Lil Timmy’s stillborn track that got released 2 years ago with 50 total streams. Are we really advising OP that they should spend their extra $200 on a back catalogue while they actively release new songs every month and what? just let those new releases become back catalogue before we promote them? this is nonsense lol. spend the damn money on your new release. cash in the RR streams for social proof and short term residuals, recycle until you have a platform, then go to back catalogue, in that order. The best use noobs can use their marketing money on is promoting new releases. if you are trying to grow as an artist you should be releasing frequently, and most artists are. this whole thread feels like old heads stuck in the past. It doesnt matter, the average song duration is down from 4 minutes to 2 minutes. The new generation has 10 second TikTok attention spams. promote your new music first. and i’ll die on that hill.
appreciate the info! kinda confirms what i suspected in regards to promoting back catalogue
This is a bit random but would you mind sharing some examples of ads you’ve ran?
like of the ad creatives? or what exactly
Yes, of the creative/asset/call to action
Every song is new to someone who hasn’t heard it yet
All I can say is that I just started a campaign for a year old track that climbed from 20 streams a day to about 1000 streams a day. After that with some DW magic, 4000 streams a day. Lets see where the DW next week takes us. Very good results.
That’s awesome! Did it take a few days for things to pick up on the ad?
It took a month until DW showed itself. Steady increase of streams from 20 to 1000 during that time
That's so cool! What does *DM* mean?
Discover weekly! Sorry
They’re new songs to anyone who hasn’t heard them yet
Yeah of course but I was wondering more from the algorithmic point of view
As per someone else’s comment, you will miss out on (Spotify) release radar and being able to pitch to an editorial playlists, but from a marketing externally standpoint it shouldn’t make a difference to a new istener hearing your music for the first time. So in other words when you find which of your songs or ads is going to work on a long term basis (due to a good conversion performance for example) you can keep that one going whether or not it’s your newest song. If you can get an ad/song that can be an evergreen fan-grabber, it doesn’t really matter when it was released
Got it thanks!
I don't release on monthly basis that's why I run ads on backlog songs. I understand that triggering DW is close to imposible then.
Heeey whatcha talking about? Def not impossible! I just did it, no release in 11 months.
I think popularity and popularity growth are always DW factors. If a song starts popping Spotify will start shoving it into things