Earlier this year, I made a video about my strategy to hit 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. At the time of filming this video, it's the end of November, and I haven't quite hit that 100,000, but I'm happy to say that I've in a way failed upwards because I'm very close to 60,000 monthly listeners, which honestly, it's not such a bad failure, and I'd rather set these big goals and fail upwards every time. Now, what I actually did to get close to 60,000 monthly listeners really wasn't very difficult at all, and it's really a two-step very simple basic strategy, which I'm going to break down for you today.
So, I'm going to show you exactly what I did, but at the end, I'm also going to tell you a few things that I didn't do, which maybe would have actually gotten me closer to 100,000, if not over it. But maybe I'll save those for next year. If you're new here, my name is Nick and on this channel, my goal is to make independent musicians and labels more informed with actionable music marketing strategies.
But let's get into that very first thing that I did. This first thing I'd say is 101 for independent musicians and very simply, it is playlisting. Every time I released a new song this year, I submitted it to curators on SubmitHub.
That's my personal favorite. But you can also do this through Groover, Playlist Push, Magic Nothing is a new one that's popped up. And of course, I also submitted my song to editors using Spotify's editorial pitch tool.
The whole point with this strategy, of course, to get playlisted. Super easy. You go into one of these websites, submit your song to these different curators.
There's about a 30% chance that it does take. This is good. And for each release, maybe I submit to five to eight curators, which is not very expensive at all.
And if you do land a couple of playlists, of course, this gets you streams, momentum, and that boost in monthly listeners. Landing on multiple playlists also teaches Spotify's algorithm, which is very, very helpful for independent artists hoping to get their music heard by new fans. Also, if you use SubmitHub, drop your email in the comments.
I'll send five credits to the first five people. I'm a curator on the platform. I love it.
It's my favorite. Not sponsored by them in any way, but I just want to share the love around. So playlisting really the one side of my main marketing strategy.
The second main part of my music strategy was ads. Now I run two different kinds of ads. I have direct to song ads and ads promoting my Spotify playlists.
Direct to song ads are very simple. I send traffic from Instagram onto Spotify. I run something called a meta conversion campaign and these campaigns basically push new potential listeners and fans onto the new single.
For each song, I'll spend between 50 and 300, depending on how well the song is actually going, how well it's taking as an ad to if it's not going so well, I cut the losses. And if it's going very well, I'll obviously scale it up. Getting saves and repeat listeners is probably the main strategy here as these people are going to get all of my future releases and very often listen to my entire catalog.
So, really boosts that overall listenership. The other kind of ad is playlist ads, which is huge at the moment. Same thing.
I put an ad on Instagram that sends people over to my Spotify playlists. My music is placed every five to seven positions in the playlist and then people that listen to the playlist hopefully listen the whole way through and they also listen to my music amongst a whole lot of other artists within my niche. This teaches Spotify's algorithm who to recommend my music to and rarely gives me a lot of algorithmic traction.
Realistically, as an independent artist, most of your streams are going to come from Spotify's algorithmic recommendations, not big editorials, as these big editorials, 80 to 90% of the placements within them are reserved for major labels, unfortunately. Hey, just a reminder that if you ever want to run a Meta or YouTube ads campaign to one of your next releases, I offer full package campaign services so you don't have to spend hours of making bad twerking videos. I also offer one-off consultations if you just have questions and I have course level bonus content on my Patreon.
So, scan the QR code on the screen now to contact me for these services. Otherwise, head to our description below for Patreon and other free downloads. But now, back to the video.
Now, playlists and ads really are the bulk of what I did for promoting my music this year. And of course, it worked out being pretty effective for me this year. But one thing that I always like to throw in my videos, and it's probably the most important marketing tip that I can give anybody, is to try and make the best possible music you can because there is no better marketing hack than a genuinely good song.
And of course, there was some luck in all of this. I ended up landing eight editorial playlists for one of my last releases of the year, which definitely gave me a huge spike. I will say that I was intentional, always pitching every one of my songs to Spotify editors, submitting my songs to playlists, and obviously putting ads out there.
By the way, I've got a free Spotify cheat sheet, which you can get in the description below, and I've also just made a premium Spotify pitch formula ebook that includes the golden pitch that landed me eight editorial playlists, which you also be able to find in the description below. Now, for the fun part, because what held me back from the 100K, and I'm sure you can probably already think of a few things. I probably left out some glaringly obvious things.
The first one being organic social media content. Yes, for each release, I did announce that I was going to be releasing song and on the day the song came out, I said the song is out. That's about all of it.
None of these posts that I made got lots of engagement. You can take a look at my Instagram. Some of them like 50 likes, not many comments either.
And maybe a week or two later, I'd post a thank you in my story. Now, I know I could definitely have done better organically, posting more content, just trying to be a bit more creative in my organic content. I definitely think this could have boosted my reach further as I've discovered a number of very cool artists just going through organic content this year.
So, I definitely want to improve that. The second one is collaborations. Now, I'm not going to say I didn't do collaborations.
I actually released two songs as collaborations this year. But if I did five or six and half of those took off to the extent that one of mine did, I would definitely have extended my reach a lot further. So, anyone want to collaborate?
Leave a comment below. Another thing I definitely could have done better on is live shows. I haven't really done any since July, and nothing really beats winning people over in person.
I still get messages from people that saw me at the show in July. They're one of the few people liking my Instagram posts when I announce a song. So, those people really do matter, and it's definitely something I want to take into 2026.
Lately, there have also been a few different alternative kind of forms of promotion popping up, things like posting in Reddit, finding niche communities, or even fan account content. Yeah, I think it's time I convince my girlfriend to make a fan account for me. These are a few other things that I definitely want to try next year.
Along with that, another thing that I always talk about on this channel is consistency. I think it's such an underrated part of marketing and just success in general. When I started out, I was definitely like, "Oh my god, every time I release a new song, this is the one.
This is the hit. This is going to blow me up. " But now I realize that it's actually consistently releasing and seeing this snowball effect of just the catalog being played more, people listening more, and growing the audience slowly instead of having this one hit wonder overnight sort of success.
But yeah, that sums up how I went from 10K to about 60K this year. And maybe it's more now by the time this video has released. And maybe next year I'm going to set my goal to be 200K so that I fail upwards to 100K.
I kind of like this whole failing upwards concept. Maybe you can tell. Also, if I've left out any important strategies or niche ideas that you think I should try, please leave them in the comments.
I'd love to give them more of a go in 2026. But that's all for the video today. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you at the next one.
