How to grow to 1,000 Spotify monthly listeners for free

Author

Andrew Southworth
January 23, 2024

Hey friends!

Today we’re going to talk about how to grow to 1,000 monthly listeners on Spotify for free.

First things first… free marketing methods generally take a long time and some hard work. However even if you have a budget doing these tips will still be very beneficial. Alright, lets dive into it…

Release schedule

The first thing we need to talk about is your release schedule. If you’re new and trying to promote your music without a budget, releasing as often as possible is generally the direction you want to go.

However, you don’t want to release crap. Often this translates to releasing a new song every 4-6 weeks. This is fast enough where you constantly have something new going on but slow enough where you should be able to still make good music.

You can only post about the same song on social media for so long.

If you can produce quality music faster than this, consider releasing every 2 or 3 weeks. Just keep in mind releasing every 2 weeks is not twice as good as releasing every 4 weeks, and there are some downsides to releasing faster than every 4 weeks.

Social media

There are a few aspects of social media we have to talk about: content, direct messages and the $1.80 strategy.

The first thing I want to mention is that social media can 100% grow organically and free, and translate to Spotify and other platforms. One of my clients started posting on TikTok 2 months ago and they went from zero to 80,000 followers. This translated to about 35,000 Spotify streams for free.

Another client of mine over the past several years grew from zero to 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify just from posting on social media.

Content

For social media content, I recommend creating 30-50 social media posts per song release. If you’re following a 4-6 week release schedule this translates to a new piece of social media content every day or so.

  • Stalk 10-20 artists in your genre at different sizes and see what they’re posting

  • Make engaging content that you would want to watch

  • Be careful that videos aren’t too long

  • Cross-post videos across multiple platforms

If you can’t post this much, pick a schedule that you can stick to for 6 months. Its better to do 3 times per week for 6 months than do every day for 1 month and quit for 5 months.

Direct Messages

Every time someone interacts with you, especially if they DM you, consider starting a conversation with them. Imagine if you had 1,000 conversations with people that liked your music every month… how many monthly listeners do you think you’d have?

Spamming people is not cool, but DMing people you’ve actually had full conversations with that your new song is out is NOT spam. It’s not much different than sending your new song to your friends.

$1.80 Strategy

The $1.80 strategy comes from Gary Vee (or at least thats where I first heard it). Basically every day you’re going to leave your ‘two cents’ on 10 posts in 9 different hashtags or pages each day.

This equates to consuming content in your niche (videos and posts by relevant bands) and interacting with it as a normal human. You’re not spamming, you’re leaving comments and liking posts you actually enjoy, interacting with other commenters.

The purpose of this is to become a known face in your niche. A certain percentage of the people you interact with will check out your profile and follow you. But people will also start to recognize you over time (this includes the artists you’re interacting with, not just the fans).

Be careful not to ask anything from these people.

Collaboration

Releasing music with other artists is a great way to increase your audience. If you have 500 monthly listeners and so does the other artist, you will both likely grow.

Aside from swapping fans, you get to double up on promotion efforts. This means twice as much social media content, twice as much fan engagement or twice the budget (if you have a paid marketing budget).

It can be hard to find people in your niche around your same size that you can collaborate with. However, if you’re doing everything you can be doing on social media you should naturally come across some people pretty quickly.

Collabs are also a great time.

More Stuff

There are a ton more things you can do, but this newsletter is getting pretty long.

For example making playlists, using playlist communities, SubmitHub, Daily Playlists, going to live shows and more.

Check out my new video for the week to learn more!

New Content

Let's talk about how you can get your first 1,000 monthly listeners on Spotify for free!

Did you know you can listen to my music industry interviews on podcast platforms? Click here to listen to the Modern Music Marketing podcast.

News

Here are some music industry news highlights from the past week.

  • TikTok is testing a new AI song creation tool

  • The MLC issues a letter of intent to audit Spotify’s royalty accuracy

  • Taylor Swift’s music in the USA is streamed more than the entirety of all jazz and classical music genres

  • Blinding Lights by The Weeknd is the first Spotify song to cross 4 Billion streams

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. Forbid Media specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.

  3. Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.

  4. 1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or Alex Bochel here.

My Links:

Discount / Affiliate Links:

If you’d rather just purchase the e-book, or physical book or audiobook you can do so here.

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