Should I promote a song, artist page, playlist, or album?

0:01 Decision paralysis and finding your why

Should I promote a song, my artist page, a playlist, or an album? There are so many options, decision paralysis: what are you going to do when you're promoting the music? There are trade-offs, and the thing you have to consider is what is your why. What are you trying to accomplish, why are you doing it in the first place? If you answer this question, it can help you figure out where to send people. Let's talk about some of the trade-offs.

0:38 Sending people to a single song

Number one, sending people to a song. This is a single, just one song, that's it. If I send people here from my landing page, an ad on Instagram, Facebook, whatever, goes to my landing page, they click on the link, and it takes them to this single. What options do they have? They can download, save it, add it to a playlist, or listen to it, that's it. What do you think they're going to do? They're going to play it, they're going to save it, and they're going to add it to a playlist. Those are the three things they're going to do.

That means you are going to get lots of saves and playlist adds, very specific focus on that one song, high intentionality. Spotify measures intent, and the way they measure it is saves and playlist adds per listener, I believe, that's my best guess, but that's essentially what's going on. So you're going to get a lot of intentionality, and you're probably going to get repeat listens from people who like it. You're going to get less overall streams per listener because there's just one song, so they're less likely to listen to your other stuff.

1:45 What non-subscribers see instead

Also, non-subscribers on mobile will be sent to a radio based on the song, not the single, that's important. That means if somebody isn't subscribed to Spotify but uses it, they're going to have a different experience that you don't have control over, they're no longer just going to have that song and those buttons to press, play, save, add to playlist, they're going to be in a completely different radio experience that you don't have much control over. So this is something to consider if you're advertising in countries where subscription rates are low, places like India, the Philippines, newer markets, where subscription rates are somewhere between 10% and 20%, which is very low, so 80% to 90% of users aren't subscribed and are going to have that radio experience. On the flip side, if you're advertising in tier one and tier two countries, like the US, much of Europe, Canada, or the UK, your subscription rates are really high, as high as 80% sometimes, I believe it's something like 50% to 80% in a lot of these countries. In that case, especially if you're hyper-targeting Spotify users, you're probably going to have control over the experience they get, and they're going to end up in that song experience. I know this because of the data I see, the saves skyrocket.

3:20 Sending people to an album

What about sending people to an album? Now we're in an album experience, looks a lot like the single experience, except there's 10 songs here. What happens if somebody clicks the plus button? It adds every single song, though it looks like it didn't a couple, probably because I've actually custom saved them, that's interesting. But typically, if somebody saves the album, it's going to save every song on it, so what happens is you get a s**t ton of saves.

4:02 Reading your saves data to evaluate a campaign

What does that actually look like? Let's look at the data. Here in my Spotify for Artists, you can see my saves skyrocket when I'm running a campaign, this is actual data from when I'm running them, you can see very clearly when I'm running them. In fact, this is the way I recommend evaluating whether or not your campaigns are working, especially if you're doing album campaigns or single campaigns. You're going to see the saves specifically skyrocket, because people are saving the whole album or collection of songs, so those numbers are drastically higher than the background average. This is around 700 saves a day, well, 600, because every time somebody saves it, I'm getting 10 saves, so that means 60 or 70 people are saving it a day. At $30, that means I'm spending about 20 cents a save, amazing, or is that 2 cents, I don't know, I can't do the fast math right now, doesn't even matter, it's a s**t ton of saves. 700 a day is crazy.

5:03 Saves versus playlist adds for the algorithm

So if you're trying to build a lot of intentionality, that's the way to do it in terms of saves. I don't really know the actual impact of saves on your algorithm in Spotify, it's not going to impact your popularity score, which is actually the thing that pushes you onto algorithmic playlists as much as streams and listeners do. But saves are the likelihood that somebody's going to come back and listen to the song, how many people actually listen to songs they've saved, that's a question worth considering, but it is higher than if people don't save it, so that's good. I actually kind of feel like playlist adds are more valuable than saves, I know some other people feel differently, but playlists are something people consistently return to, and I think it leads to more streams. So if you want a s**t ton of saves, promote an album, because they're clicking that button and saving all the songs on your album.

6:09 Sending people to your artist page

Now let's talk about your artist page. If you send people to your artist page, a lot of people are going to lean into your top songs and follow you as an artist. Because it looks like this: the first thing you see is the follow button and then their top songs, so that's what people are going to do, they're going to click follow and start listening to your top songs. So if you want Spotify followers, send them to your artist page and let them stream your top songs and hit follow.

6:46 How much Spotify followers actually matter

How much do Spotify followers matter? They kind of don't. The only thing I know of that they currently do for you is that when you release a new song, followers are the first people who get the recommendation about it, and it comes from Release Radar. What percentage of your followers actually get that? Almost none, it's pathetic actually, I don't understand why it is the way it is, I'm sure Spotify has its internal reasons, but I know historically for me it's around 3% or 4%. So how much do I care about Spotify followers right now? Barely, I don't think it matters, though it's totally possible this changes. I think there's a new push happening internal to Spotify to figure out how to integrate more social elements onto the platform, I know this because, for example, they've started including comments on podcasts. So who knows, if they start having comments on people's songs and integrating more social elements, this following thing could become more important. But in general the follower has been a dying trend across all platforms the past couple of years, not just Spotify, TikTok too, where followers don't seem to matter much at all. So whether or not you care how many Spotify followers you have might determine whether you want to push your artist page, but you do know if you send them there, you're going to get streams on your top songs, so that's cool if that's what you want.

7:23 Why playlists are his favorite destination

Now I want to talk about my favorite place to send people: playlists. Why do I like sending people to playlists? There are so many auxiliary benefits. There's kind of two types of playlists to think about. There's playlists where it's just your songs, you've curated your playlist of your own music, best of, greatest hits type stuff, and you send people there and they're just going to stream them, you curate the experience, and it works for non-subscribers too, it sends them a playlist, I think sometimes it might change the order of it, I'm not exactly sure how that works. But they're going to be dropped into your playlist, and you're going to get a ton of playlist saves, so you'll get less saves on the song but saves on the playlist, and now you've got this curated experience where they're going to listen to a bunch of your songs. The other type of playlist is where you've got your songs and songs of other artists similar to you. This is an extremely powerful move, and I'm going to talk about it a little bit more.