Your First 1 Million Streams in 2026 (Ultimate Guide)

In this video, I'm going to show you how you can get your first 1 million streams in 2026. And I'm not just including on Spotify. We're counting all the other streaming platforms and YouTube in this number here.

And I'm not just pulling it out of thin air either. Uh, one of my bands, Ever Breaking Moment, our first year, we got something like a half a million total streams. I think it was 300,000 on Spotify.

And we weren't doing a lot of the things optimally that I'm going to show you in this video. So, I'd like to think that I I my advice will help you out a lot because I've worked with a ton of different artists who have pulled up some big numbers. Again, it's not about just streaming, right?

You streaming is just kind of like a way to get fans. Most fans stream music nowadays. And so, by getting them to go to our streaming, we're just kind of getting them falling in love with our music because you can't tour without fans.

You can't sell merch without fans. You can't have Patreons without fans. Streaming doesn't pay very well.

Everybody knows. It's just that that's how people initially find and discover music and fall in love with an artist. Everything you do after that is another step down the funnel.

This is about getting those fans in the first place. Let's get into it. The first thing I want to talk about is what is the release schedule and just kind of highle budget.

I'm assuming in this video that you're going to release nine songs in 2026 and you're going to spend $5,000. I will talk later in the video if you don't have any budget how you're going to adapt the schedule. All right, so let's start planning the actual template for this first song that you're going to rinse and repeat through all the future songs throughout the year.

Again, we're releasing nine songs throughout the year every 6 weeks. Nine songs every six weeks. We're going to be spending $5,000 throughout the year, which comes down to um I'm assuming well, we're going to get we're going to get into the details later.

$5,000 for the year. What are we doing per song? So, we're going to have per song.

First thing is what are you releasing outside of the song? We're going to be releasing, let's say, 20 social media posts and those are going to go to Tik Tok, IG reels, Facebook reels because you can just automatically cross post from Instagram to Facebook. So it's no extra work.

And then we're going to say YouTube shorts 2 to four. Let's just say two to make an exact number. YouTube videos full length.

Right? So this is going to be like visualizer, music video, lyric video, um performance video, live footage, etc. Or let's say behind the scenes, etc.

Okay. So this is like your your content. Every song.

You don't just have the song, you have all this stuff that comes along with the song. So, I I highly recommend if possible before you start this cadence of releasing every six weeks, you batch create and you make some get some music, maybe get three songs ready and maybe like get the first songs, just social media content and YouTube videos done because doing all of this every six weeks, it's actually a lot of work. It doesn't sound like a lot when you're like, depending on what type of music you make, you might not sound like a lot releasing a song every six weeks.

Some people are like, I can release a song every week. that's no problem. When you consider everything else you have to do, then it becomes a problem for most cases.

Um, so you have 20 social media posts spread across all these platforms. The same content that works for Tik Tok will generally work for all these other platforms. Two, there is nuances like certain content will do better on different platforms.

But don't worry about it for now. You need to just kind of throw your stuff everywhere and see what naturally sticks. And once you see what platform you naturally do better on, then you can lean into that more.

But right now, if assuming you're new, you have no idea what's working. And if you're like, "20 social media posts sounds like a lot. " It doesn't have to be a lot.

These are not like masterful artful music videos or anything. This is like you recording a video of you lip- syncing a song and chopping it up into all this different stuff and putting different text hooks on it. You can make these in like a 4hour period in one day.

You could go out, film a couple videos with a friend, and then edit them all later in a couple hours. It it's not it's a lot of work, but it's this is not like a week of work. This is like an afternoon.

The YouTube full- length videos might be more. Like if you're doing a full music video, that's a lot of work. If you're outsourcing a visualizer lyric video, it's basically no work.

It just costs some money. Um but you can factor that into your budget or not. This is the content.

The better you make it, the better you will do, right? If if the be and I, as I said, the content doesn't have to be crazy fancy or anything. The better your music is, the better your content is, the better your storytelling is, the better your branding is, like the better all of this is going to do.

But through the act of just doing it more, you will get better, right? Making 20 posts per song, by the time you're done through the year, you're going to have a lot of posts, right? You're going to have 180 different posts you've done and you're going to be way better at it than the beginning of the year.

And also, you're going to be better at making songs. If you're newer to making music, the music at the end of the year is going to be much better. If you've been making music your whole life, then you won't have that.

But all this marketing stuff you will improve at throughout the year dramatically. Now, additionally, every song is going to have a $500 ad budget, and we're going to be spending that mostly or all on meta, specifically running streaming conversion ads. So, streaming conversion ads, and we'll be walking you through what what that actually looks like.

In this video, I'm going to show you how to run a simple campaign, and then I'll link you to another video that shows more intricate step by step of how to do that. But we're going to be running a stream of conversion ad and that's basically like the big chunk of your budget. Now, additionally, for each song though, I think you should do like $30ish on SubmitHub.

Uh Submit Hub is a platform you can pitch your music to playlist curators and blogs and other things like that. Just a little like 30 bucks a song, right? This is $270 a year.

You're going on Submit Hub. And depending on what genre you're in, this might be a bad idea or a great idea. Um I've had people do this.

If you're getting like 0% acceptance rates after $30 of spend, you might just be the wrong type of artist for this, but if you're getting like a 10 to 30% acceptance rate, you're actually doing pretty good. And that'll just give you a little bit of playlist or whatever. I pro probably do Spotify playlists on it in particular just to kind of kickstart the momentum and and in addition to all the social media content you're doing and all the ad content you're doing, it's just a little bit of an extra push you can have in another angle you'd never be able to get through another means, right?

there's no other way to get on the playlist that are on there. And SubmitHub does a great job of vetting their playlist. So, all in all, like this $500 ad budget and the $30 per SubHub is is roughly that $5,000 per year.

Technically, there's like another $230 somewhere. But just imagine that's like money you use for various things that come up. I don't know, you need to buy something like a light or something for your content or whatever.

you need to outsource something on Fiverr real cheap, make a logo, edit a picture, that's another $230 you can use for discretionary things that come along the way. I just want to take like a minute and show you what I mean by content just so I have some of visual to show you. Um, this is a band Magnolia Park I I never heard until I saw their Tik Tok video.

I actually don't usually scroll Tik Tok that much to consume, but they got served to me and I fell in love with their song. So, there's the algorithm doing its magic. And then I picked another random band.

I literally searched for band and this band came up. I don't know them. If you guys are watching this, shout out to you guys.

Drp some in the comments. I wanted to show you some examples. I have the audio muted for copyright purposes.

But they found a cool location and they're just performing. And if I go down, um, they're just playing an acoustic version of their song. What's a baddie crash song?

Like this is not a music video. Like it kind of is, but you can tell it's filmed a little bit casually. What's a breakout breakup crash out song?

This is all content for the same song, by the way. Right. This is a big track and they've done a lot of content for it.

And of course, Tik Tok's not working because Tik Tok sucks. Uh there we go. What's breakup cash out song?

They're just in a parking lot and then they have this footage that they did. So they they could film this footage a couple times and then all the intro hooks they they're either filming on the spot or they're filming in other places around like right they're you don't have to film it all together. You can cut things together along the way.

And I go down to another random one. just put in my Crash Out song and this came out first, right? They have another clip of them performing the song and they just cut it with another clip.

Going to this band. I haven't seen any of those videos. I literally just typed in band.

Another song is about Eric X. They just seems like they just set up their their setup in front of like a tour bus. They're probably on tour gardens.

Oh, this is this is a cool video. Uh it's also probably illegal, but it's awesome. It's awesome.

Like this is creative, right? Um, this is a very eye-catching video. And also, this is an eye-catching video.

It's just And again, you could do this for free in your house. And if you're not in a band, you could do this as a solo artist, too. So, this is, I would say, higher effort content, but it's still not super high effort.

You could also get like stock footage and cut stuff together. You can get live footage. But, I want to give you some examples of of content that's that's doing well, right?

These guys are pulling big numbers. These guys are also pulling big numbers. Uh, and there's just look up artists that are doing well that aren't super huge.

You don't want like the Taylor Swifts. You want artists that are up and coming and growing because they're an example of what works for like an upandcoming artist. All right.

Now, let me show you real quick how to make an ad campaign promoting your music. So, we are inside Meta Ads Manager. If you don't know how to get here, I think it's just ads manager.

fas. com. Once you're inside your ad account, uh, we're going to click this green create button.

All right. And we want to run an engagement campaign because engagement campaign allows you to run something called conversions. The way it works is someone sees an ad that we're running some type of video.

When they click the ad, they're going to go to a page like this and then they're going to click this button and jump to Spotify, Apple Music, or whatever. When they click that secondary time, they are going to track a conversion on our ad campaign. So that's why we want to use this engagement conversions objective.

We want to do a manual engagement campaign. Now, if you're going through this and you're like, "Oh my god, this is a lot. " I will link you to another video or play probably playlist here um that goes through this in more detail.

I just want to have kind of like a quick workout kind of thing, get started in in this video. But also, I do have uh course links, consulting links. I have an ad agency down below if you want to check just outsource this entire thing.

My team can do it for you if you have a larger budget like like a thousand plus, we can do it for you. and uh or if you'd rather just do a one-on-one with me or my team or just buy a course and see the whole thing from start to finish in there. But again, back to here.

Let's do this. So, I'm just going to call this test campaign. I would normally do like song name-Streaming.

We're going to turn on this advantage campaign budget and your first campaign ever. I recommend just doing 10 bucks a day because the most likely time for things to go wrong is going to be your first time. So, I'm going to click next.

We're choosing our only pixel here. If you don't have a pixel, check out this video to learn more about the pixel. In this case, I don't want to harpen this.

Check out that video I just linked for more details because this is a deep topic. I'm using SubmitHub links which is what I'm going to recommend you start off with. This is your first time.

They use an event called view content. But the pixel stuff is kind of a deep topic. So check out that other video if you want the nerdy behind the scenes data on it.

Audience controls. We want to switch to original audience options. If you don't have this button, click the button that's over here that says further limit the reach of your ads.

Everyone's on a different version of Facebook. So, if your interface looks different, it could just be because you're watching this further in the future, but it could just be you're watching it now. It's just that Facebook's always beta testing different versions.

It's infuriating. Trust me, I teach this stuff. It's It annoys the heck out of me, too.

No one ever has the same exact interface. So, we're going to switch to original audience options. Use original audience.

And now we get the old-fashioned I can actually target what I want to target. For locations, I'm going to use I have a saved list. Browse saved uh tier 1 2 October 2025.

I call this my tier one, tier two list. I will scroll through here so you can you can see what what it is. But it's basically like US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, a lot of the big European countries mixed in with like Mexico, Brazil, and some other countries that are cheaper to target like those.

This is the entire country list. Ages, this is going to depend on your music. I'm going to do 18 to 50.

That's a pretty good starting point for most people. Meta will test every age group and if if if like 18 to 24 does best, it'll spend most of the money there. So if you're like, whoa, my audience isn't isn't 40, why would I even include up to 40?

It's Meta will kind of figure it out. Um, so but I do 1850. Just just don't do 65 plus.

I found including 65 plus can cause a lot of problems. Now, the first thing we're going to target here is we're going to go in here and type in Spotify. And lately what I've been doing, but you don't you don't have to is is I've been throwing in a couple streaming services.

So Spotify, Apple, let's do just like Amazon. And that's fine because because what's what Facebook does essentially is they see whatever you put in here and they expand it. So they're they're kind of automatically including like YouTube music and stuff just because they're basically just looking for people that stream music when you type this stuff in.

Now, define further is going to allow us to say we want to target people that like this who also like whatever we put down here. So, if I'm in a metal band, I might do things like metal core. There's a lot of different things you can do here.

I I want to again I'm keeping it simple for this video. If you're a country artist, you might do country music, country rock, alternative country. If if you're a punk rock artist, you might do pop punk, blink 2, Green Day.

There are some artists in here. If you're doing pop, there's a ton of artists, but if you're doing something else, there's not that that many. like they have K and Avenge Sevenfold, but they they used to have like Lincoln Park and stuff, but they don't anymore.

They removed a ton of artists just a couple months ago. Next, we get to the placements. This ad down here, Advantage Plus placements.

We don't want Advantage Plus. We want to do manual. So, make sure in general, make sure you're not using any Advantage Plus stuff if you can.

You don't want Advantage Plus Placements. You don't want Advantage Plus audiences. You don't want Advantage Plus creative.

You want to be able to control your stuff. In this case, we're going to be doing Instagram only. So, turn off everything but Instagram.

And specifically, I I like to do Instagram feed explorer, stories, and reels is kind of my go-to. At that point, we can click next. Now, we're into the ad.

This is the actual video that you're going to run. Um, the first thing it's going to ask you is, aside from your social media pages, is your destination. So, that's essentially just going to be this landing page.

If you're wondering how you make this landing page, if I go back to SubmitHub links, I'm going to make a new link. I can paste a Spotify URL. And then I can just come to Spotify, click on the song, share, copy, link to song.

And then um oh, not playlist. I want track. I can paste.

And so this is our link, but we have to add a pixel to it. Remember we said that SubmitHub links fires a pixel. I'm not kind of glossing over the pixel stuff because it'd be it can be complicated for a lot of people.

I really recommend you check that video I linked earlier up there. Um, but if you come into edit here, if I scroll down, there's going to be this section pixel. So, you want to include a metapixel and then you're going to in your ad all the way down the bottom there'll be a thing that says website advance, the name of your pixel and a number.

All you have to do is copy that number and paste it in that box. There's more to it as I said, so I recommend you learn more. But if you do that, that will start tracking the page.

If you can't get your pixel on the page, it's not worth publishing the campaign. If you don't use a landing page, it's not worth running the campaign. A lot of people struggle with the pixel and they say, "Oh, whatever.

It must not be important. I'm just going to throw a Spotify link in here. " If you do that, the whole thing will fail.

So, just just make sure you get that part right. I don't want you to burn money and have this not work. And that's another reason why we're doing 10 a day because the penalty for failure is not as bad as if you're doing 50 a day.

Now, keep in mind, I said you should doing 500 a song. I think the first time you do this, like do some testing before you get in, right? Because $500 per song, you're probably going to be launching at $20 a day because that'll be about it'll be about a month-long campaign.

I think you should do a test prior. You know, your first song might end up going a little slower than the rest. So, you know, keep that in mind.

There's a learning curve with this stuff. You're probably going to be bad at it at first. You will get better at running these ads as you do more of them.

Then we need to add our videos. So, I'm going to do setup ad creative video ad, and then media. And this is where we upload our videos.

So, I can click upload here. I already have some in here, but you could upload them from your computer. This is me singing in front of a microphone.

I don't need to trim it. I don't need to crop it. I uploaded it in this vertical format that works everywhere.

And I I'm turning off all of their advantage plus creative enhancements because I don't trust meta to edit my videos without my permission. So I turn that stuff off. Now the last thing you got to do is your call to action down here should be listen.

Now this is the button that shows up on your ad. And everything else is a rinse and repeat. So this is ad one.

I can come up here to this other ad and do quickly duplicate and then do add two. And I highly re I'm just going to pick a random other video here. It's not important.

I recommend doing at least three videos. And then once that's done, you can publish. And this will be your first campaign ever.

Last minute words of advice for this campaign. Uh take it slow. Like let it go for two to three days without touching it before you panic.

You don't really want to turn it off if it's looking bad until it's at least 2 to three days because your first campaign is going to be pretty rough as Facebook collects data and learns. Now, while that is the core of the strategy, I want to go over some other opportunities you can do and also some things to avoid wasting your time and money on for the year. Let's do the opportunities first.

One big one is collaborations. Working with other artists can be kind of an instant cheat code to fasttrack your success and growth. I know people who have collaborated with an artist and gone from zero to 50,000 monthly listeners in their first song and getting a million streams in their first song because they collaborated with the right person.

So, keep that in mind. uh chances are you're not going to get a big collaboration till you have some numbers just because that's the way things work a lot of the times. But if you have some close friends who are in music and you make similar styles of music, it might be a great way to fasttrack things.

The next one is touring or and or playing shows. Every time you play a show, the people who see you, assuming you do a good job and you're playing for the right crowd, they are going to feel fairly connected to you, right? If you've ever gone to show and you seen an opener that you never heard of, chances are you, as long as you did a good job and you liked them, you went and followed them on whatever music platform you use on the car ride there and the car ride home, you checked out their music.

So, keep that in mind, right? If you're the person opening, if you're the person playing that show and there's there's even just 50 people in the room, if you have 30 people going streaming your music and they each listen to three songs on average, that's 100 streams you just got from those crowd. Again, if you do a good job, you can get a touring and playing shows are great places to get super fans because there's something about the magic of being there live, seeing someone, meeting someone, buying merch from them, shaking the artist's hand that that can really deepen the connection with that fan.

And on a similar note, live streaming is kind of a lot of the same benefits. You can live stream performances, and you can do this not only on like Twitch and YouTube and stuff, you can also do it on TikTok. Now, I want to give you some things I think you should avoid.

One is PR at this stage. If you're trying to go from zero to something, PR is not really for you. PR is really about once you have certain thing that's already cool happening, then that's the place when you can actually get like meaningful writeups or interviews or whatever.

And PR typically doesn't get you new fans. It gives you like more storytelling content for your existing fans. It can help you with industry stuff.

It's typically not going to move the needle on actual like album sales or streaming numbers or social media metrics. So, I would skip that. Next big thing to avoid at first too since you're new is thirdparty playlisting.

Third party playlisting like paying to get on Spotify playlists. We are kind of doing it with Submit Hub, but it's not like paying to get a ton. It's paying for consideration for some small tightly curated ones.

I also wouldn't waste my time with pre-saves either. Uh trying to like run ads to get pre-saves or trying to convince fans to pre-save where you're at. It doesn't make sense.

Once you're a bigger artist, it can make sense. And there's cool things you can do with like contesting, whatever, like pre-save this and enter this contest or or give me your email and pre-save it and you can get this thing. There's there's ways to make that work and especially with lifetime pre-saves and all these other cool technology things that have come out in the last few years.

Uh but in terms of like your new artist spending with this relatively small amount of money per song, you're just going to waste a lot of stuff trying to pursue pre-saves on that. And this should go without saying, but don't do bots in any way. Like don't purposefully hire some type of artificial streaming thing because Spotify and other platforms are going to figure it out and they're either going to just find you for it or take down your song or even worse take down your whole profile.

So don't one, don't purposefully hire bots, but also two be on the lookout for any companies that look shady. Don't go on Fiverr and hire a music marketing person. Fiverr is like is well known for people ripping people off with fake marketing things.

In fact, there there's people on Fiverr occasionally that pop up that are cloning me. They use my face and my thumbnails to try to sell marketing services for super cheap and then they rip off artists. So, be on the lookout for that, too.

And not just me, but also all the other music marketing people. So, Fiverr is just a bad place to look for marketing and anyone that's selling services on there should probably just stop because like there's more scam services on there than they're not. Um, just make sure you're hiring someone that you trust.

It can be it can be tricky. Now, we ran some ads in this video, but if you want to take them to the next level, check out this video right here to see my entire process for using ads to promote your music from start to finish. And if you want to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch, check out this video right here.

Anyways, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the next upload. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next video. Bye.