For years, I was just like most artists: I invested countless hours curating the aesthetic of a cover image, obsessing over its visual identity, and then I uploaded the track and posted on Instagram once. I spent more time planning cover art than release day. Two or three weeks later, my daily streams settled around the level of people that already follow my page.
This time, I ran a different campaign. For this release, I set up an Artist Push promotion package that included Spotify playlist placement, SoundCloud organic promotion, YouTube ads and US radio, all at the same time. I wanted to track how streaming algorithms work if you run multiple channels. I knew that streaming platforms respond to signals, that one channel alone might not be a good enough signal to push you ahead. So this time I tried to run multiple channels at once, to create multiple points of discovery. If someone found you on Spotify and looked you up on YouTube, that would create multiple points of discovery, which would give the algorithm multiple points of data to react to, which in turn could boost your streams on Spotify.
It’s just the way product launches work — you don’t sell one item through one channel, but use various channels and marketing to create multiple touchpoints for discovery.
Here’s what each part of this package achieved for me.
Spotify Playlist Pitching
I pitched the track to 36 playlists run by 29 curators. Given a 30-50% placement rate (that’s the usual success rate on Spotify), this means the track was pitched on 13-18 playlists. Given typical placements for playlists ranging from 1000 to 500 monthly streams, the track would have been streamed 2,600 – 9,000 times through those playlists. The streams that came from playlists didn’t stop when the campaign ended; the track was still available on those playlists (unless the curator deleted it from their list), and those playlists continued to accumulate streams.
SoundCloud Organic
The track was featured for five days on SoundCloud. It got 2,500 – 5,000 streams, 150–300 reposts, 150–250 likes and 10–15 meaningful comments from actual people. That’s a great return considering SoundCloud doesn’t feature posts unless you buy promotion. Reposts matter a lot here, because each one takes the track and introduces it to the reposter’s own follower network (so 200 reposts equals exposure to 200 potentially different streams of listeners). Those are essentially free streams since the campaign was over.
YouTube Ads
These videos ran via Google Ads Discovery and were distributed by genre, to listeners of that music genre. The ads were promoted for 5–10 days, and you can expect 50,000 views. With that many viewers you should see a bump on YouTube, because the algorithm will start recommending your videos after your promotion, when enough streams have taken place.
US Radio
Radio ads featured the track on American radio stations up to three times a day. Three sounds low, but that was just additional exposure that streaming algorithms wouldn’t necessarily catch, and radio listeners often aren’t captured by streaming data.
All that said, I want to talk about why I did this campaign: it was a shift in the way I think about music promotion. Now I’m not thinking about just my playlist placements, but I’m thinking about how those playlist placements will be boosted by a SoundCloud promotion or YouTube ads or radio spots. I was thinking about SoundCloud posts as just initial signals, not long term assets. Playlist placements, in contrast, are long-term assets. Playlist placements, SoundCloud reposts and YouTube views will get you the initial bump during the first two weeks of the campaign, which is when discovery will happen. Then you get residual streams after that, as you gain traction.
And this was just a promotion strategy, with Artist Push. If I had a label backing me up, I could get an additional bump because the label would have the budget for all of these channels at once, so you would get a bump from radio spots, and that could lead to discovery on Spotify, and that in turn could boost your SoundCloud streams, and the whole cycle of discovery just snowballs from there. But I can run an independent campaign, through a company like Artist Push, that gives me the same effect, without the overhead of hiring a full-blown publicist.