How I saved this failing music ad campaign

From $0.60 to under $0.30 per conversion

Author

Andrew Southworth
August 25, 2025

Hey friends!

Today we’re going to talk about how I turned a failing music marketing ad campaign around, that was originally over $0.60 and brought it down to $0.23 (kind of, you’ll see).

Recently I made a video going over an ad campaign for my band’s latest song, where the cost per conversion was like over $0.60 after a good amount of testing. Here’s that video:

The original campaign for this song in that video has 30 ad sets and over 16 visuals tested now!

But now I have a couple more weeks of testing data and experimentation! First of all, the song is at 46k streams in 1 month which is pretty neat.

As a reminder this is a mix of Meta ads, Showcase and some playlisting. Today i’m focused on the Meta ads specifically…

In terms of the song campaigns itself, through more visual testing I did get the cost down to $0.48 per conversion. Not great but a big improvement from where we started. Another positive sign is that yesterday the cost per conversion was $0.32! Overall it seems like the campaign is trending down so i’m expecting this $0.32 cost to be stable over several days.

In fact take a look at how all of my campaigns for this song performed yesterday specifically.

SO what am I doing here?

  • EWM Cold - Streaming: This is my original campaign with 30+ ad sets and 16+ ad creatives. It’s not going well. Not the dumpster-fire it was at the start, not awful, but not good either.

  • EWM Cold - Streaming - Dynamic: This campaign introduced 2 new things, I tested a new visual approach for the videos, but I also introduced Turkey as a country. A few rock/metal bands i know have been doing great in Turkey so I decided to give them a try, and it’s paying off greatly here.

  • Deftones-core and Nu-Metal are both playlist campaigns i’m running. I’m advertising 2 playlists i’ve created that contain my music. These are Tier 1 only, so they’re doing AMAZING.

As you can see the playlists are very promising. One perk about playlists is you can make new playlists very easily, and you can use multiple songs for the playlist. So in each of those playlist campaigns i’m actually testing 3-4 different songs from my band’s catalog.

There are downsides with this approach. Streams from playlists show up as ‘other listeners playlists’ in Spotify and i’d imagine the algorithm doesn’t like them as much because this does result in less saves, playlist adds and streams per listener. I do get to associate my music with similar artists, but i’m not sure the engagement metric trade-off is worth it yet.

I’m hoping these playlists will be useful for future releases as well, and I have all of our songs in them too so it’s also pushing our catalog.

Sometimes your songs won’t perform well. That’s just a fact. There are things you can try to bring the cost down (as i’ve down here), but also sometimes it makes sense to pivot to something else (also as i’ve done here).

Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:

  1. My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.

  2. My ad agency Southworth Media specializes in running Meta conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify and other streaming platforms.

  3. Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels and FanFunnels are the best all-in-one platforms for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels, build a mailing list and more!

  4. 1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or my team here.

New Content

We figured out how many streams you need to get on Spotify's Discover Weekly, Release Radar and Radio algorithmic playlists. Plus, we calculated the math equation that Spotify uses to determine popularity index and what popularity index you need to hit these playlists.

Is physical media back? Rob Bach, formerly of Virgin Megastores, Amazon and CD Baby, talks about the value of physical media for music artists and how artists can get into it without the hassle of dealing with shipping.

Southworth Media

Southworth Media provides digital music marketing solutions to artists, managers and record labels.

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