Over the last few months, I've been testing one of the most hyped indie music promo strategies that you can find on the internet. And honestly, the results have been pretty good. But I did some digging the other day and there was something that left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth, which I'd like to talk to you about today.
So, hey, my name is Nick from 11 out of 10 and today I'm going to explain exactly what this promo strategy is, this super hyped one. I'm going to go through the results that I got from doing it and then at the end I'm going to go through what left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. So, make sure you stick around for that.
So, first let me get to the strategy and how it actually works because it's fairly simple. So, we're going to dive into uh my computer here. The first step that you do is you create a playlist.
Okay? You add some artists that are just a little bit bigger than you. uh you add some artists that are a lot bigger than you all within your kind of genre, your kind of world.
So mine is like chilled, Sunday indie, dreamy indie, quirky love hierarchy. I've given a little title over there and you add your music in uh every few places. So I put mine in like one, five, and then sometimes it drops down 14, but just every few songs uh you add some of your own music.
Obviously the more songs you have on your catalog, the better. Then what you do after that is pretty simple. You go to Meta Ads Manager and you create an ad campaign uh for Instagram and Facebook and you basically send traffic to Spotify, okay, to this playlist that has your songs in it and you get people listening to your music within this playlist and hopefully saving the playlist too.
Supposedly, uh, what this strategy does is Spotify's algorithm picks up that people are listening to your music with similar artists a bit bigger than you and a lot bigger than you. And then Spotify's algorithmic playlists start to recommend you to those other smaller artists similar to you and those even further than that. It's pretty straightforward.
Uh this is what quite a few YouTubers and people even on Instagram have been talking about uh at the moment. Uh the first person I saw do it was Jen uh Independent. You might be seeing his ads.
I know Andrew Southworth interviewed him. Uh Magic Nothing on Instagram. These people have all been talking about it.
So thought I had to give it a try. So let's get into some of the results that I actually got from this. So just for full clarity uh so that you can see uh exactly when I started running this playlist and when I started running ads to it.
I'm actually a curator on submit hub with this playlist now which is nice because I can earn money from my playlist as well as promote my music. Little hack and you can see um over here. So, I had nine followers from most of June 2024.
And then August 20, this is when I first started running ads to the playlist. And you can see every day it starts to grow. Uh, the number of followers in this playlist grows.
I run out of money and I slow down spending quite a lot. Uh, and then it's kind of just been going for the last six months. I've been spending about €250 a day, about $262, uh, when I last checked.
We can even check that here. Euro to dollar when it comes to 262 per day for about the last 6 months. And I'm mainly focused on one of my songs.
So, let me get to the results within my Spotify for artists over here. So, the main focus of this playlist was this song, Through the Window Sill. Yeah, you can see the track now has 45,93 streams and it was released on July the 12th, 2024.
So, let's put some filters in. So, let's do a custom and we can go right back to when it was released July 12 until it said August 20 uh when I started running ads. All right.
So, before I started this whole playlist campaign kind of thing, you can see the song had 5. 7K streams, about almost 4,000 listeners, couple of playlist ads, couple of saves. That was the data before.
Now, if we go from the date of starting the ad campaign, so let's take a look from the 20th of August until now. compared to that. So from there, 40,000 streams, 21,000 21 a half thousand monthly listeners.
And you can see just how many plays uh this has actually had. Look on last week's Saturday or this past Saturday, 570 plays, which is the most plays this song has had in one day. In fact, you can see the amount of listeners.
It's it's honestly just gone through the roof. So, I've been super super stoked with the results mostly and important to look at these playlist things over here. So, if we go last 12 months, you can see from the last 12 months, the majority of streams have come through Spotify radio, which is an algorithmic playlist, which is essentially the strategy that I was promised by these other YouTubers, Instagram people.
And honestly, I got kind of what I was asking for. At least we're going to get to the end here. My own playlist added 2.
6K streams to this. I did find another dude on the internet, Nathaniel. Shout out Nathaniel if you see this.
Uh, and I just DM'd him. I was like, I really digged his music and we did like a little playlist swap and his playlist has has got me some decent amount of streams. But radio is the real important one that I want to show you over here.
So overall, pretty happy with how this is going. It's definitely boosted my catalog. Now, when I started over there, um, if we go back to my Spotify even, I was sitting on, you know, a few thousand monthly listeners, like 3 or 4 thousand monthly listeners, I'm now up to 20,000 20 almost 21,000 monthly listeners, which is crazy.
I did not expect this at all. That being said, this song, my new release, which I just did with my friend Linda, did get put on a big German editorial playlist. Uh, this one indie, my German is terrible.
But, uh, yeah, so I think that may have inflated the streams or at least the monthly listeners. But between these two things, quite a big boost in monthly listenership for sure. If you've made it this far, I want to get to the thing that actually left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
Now, some of these YouTubers that I've spoken about that say when you run this campaign also go into Spotify discovery mode. Now, Spotify discovery mode, it's basically a mode that your tracks get prioritized for discovery. You basically can set this in your Spotify for artists.
I can't, which I'll get to in a second. And you opt in to Spotify discovery mode. They take 30% off the royalties for that song, but end up pushing it algorithmically a little bit further.
So, I was thinking, damn, I've got so many radio plays without even using this Spotify discovery mode. Imagine I could imagine I could actually use it. How far I could push this on the same day?
Okay, I think about this, which was over this past weekend to be honest. I go into Tune Core and I start doing some digging and at the bottom of my Tune Core account, I see that I am opted in for Spotify Tune Core or just Tunecore Accelerator program, which gives me access to Spotify discovery mode. Did not know that.
Now, Andrew Southworth, uh, one of the YouTubers I've learned most of my music promo stuff from, actually posted a video of this. As far as I remember, I was automatically opted into this. Maybe I did opt into this.
I can't say without reading things properly, you know, as one does. Just click T's and C's accept. Anyways, I've been opted into this.
So, you can see Tounor says, yeah, on average, Tounor artists that have opted into this see an increase of 30% uh on streams, which is pretty good. It's like, yeah, why not? Basically, Tounecore opts you into Spotify discovery mode without you getting the choice if you're a part of their Touncor Accelerator program.
Okay, maybe that seems cool because you don't even have to think about it. They optimize it um because they use their believe um music technology to choose which are the best songs for you to actually opt into this program. So, that seems good.
Okay, I would have probably done it anyway. Spotify can take my 30%. But here's what left a funny taste in my mouth.
Since January 1, 2024, Tune Accelerate program, they end up taking an extra 20% commission on net royalties. So, I'm not only losing the 30% to Spotify, which the bumpin streams may have then uh increased my overall net royalties, but now I'm losing another 20% commission, another 20% commission to Touncor. So yeah, that just put a funny feeling uh in my stomach, left a bad taste in my mouth, every metaphor related to that.
And I don't know how I feel about that. How do you feel about that? Let me know in the comments.
Honestly, when I saw this video from Andrew, I immediately considered getting on another distributor. So, I'm taking recommendations for different distributors. if you have any good ones that do allow me to use Spotify discovery mode but don't take additional royalties on top of that.
And finally, if you want to run this super hyped promo strategy uh that I've just been talking about, uh I've made a little cheat sheet uh which you can get for free uh at the link below this video. And I'll also link some of the other pages that I've learned from for you to check out more. But thanks so much for watching our first video over here.
There'll be lots more coming in the future. Remember to like and subscribe and we'll see from you soon. All right, ciao.
