Playlisting vs Ads for Spotify Promotion

How does promoting your music on Spotify with playlists compare with running ads?

Author

Andrew Southworth
December 08, 2025

Hey friends!

Today we’re going to talk about the differences between 3rd party playlist promotion on Spotify, and using ads to promote your music on Spotify. First let’s go over some terms:

  • 3rd party playlisting (aka playlisting): paying to get your music added to other listeners playlists owned by individuals (not algorithmic, not editorial)

  • Ads: running conversion ads on platforms like Meta (Facebook / Instagram)

Both of these are options you can use to promote your music, but there are some very distinct pro’s and con’s of each method. The one I want to point out today is the difference in engagement between the two.

Playlisting vs Ads Engagement

First, let’s look at a song that is mostly promoted with playlists:

You can see it has a 90% ‘other listener’s playlists’, meaning 90% of the streams in the past 28 days is coming from 3rd party playlists. If you look at the listeners compared to the saves, you’ll see that less than 1% of people saved the song.

Additionally each person listened to the song 1.3 times on average. These are super low engagement metrics!

Now let’s look at a song that is mostly promoted with Meta ads:

Here the song is basically entirely promoted with ads aside from the artist’s organic following. The song is in some algorithmic playlists as well, which does change the numbers, but this was ‘triggered’ by the ad campaign.

The save rate (saves divided by listeners, or the percentage of people that saved the song) is about 27%. The streams per listener is 2.4, meaning each person listens to the song 2.4 times on average.

This is a HUGE improvement from the 3rd party playlisting stats.

Why the difference?

Well, when people go to listen to a playlist they’re seeking out a passive listening experience. They’re working, driving, at the gym or on a date, and just want to put on some music in a certain category. They aren’t looking at their phone.

Compare this to targeting someone with an ad.

They see your video, they like the song, click on the ad, land on a landing page and then convert to a streaming platform. By the time they’re on Spotify they’ve clicked twice and intentionally went to listen to the song - so they engage with the song.

What does this mean?

This isn’t to imply that somehow playlisting is always bad. As long as it’s real listeners and not bots, playlisting can make sense in certain situations.

But in my opinion if you’re a smaller artist trying to grow your fanbase from scratch, skip the playlisting at first. Being added to playlists doesn’t get you long term fans, it gives you short term gains.

While when your ad campaigns end you’ll have a drop in streams, the drop is much more gradual and sometimes you can see the ripples from the campaign for literal years. With playlisting the drop off is almost immediate, since most people don’t save your song to listen to again later.

At my agency Southworth Media our main focus is on running ads for artists, but we do also do playlisting too. If you’re looking for help with this stuff we can help you.

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 streaming platforms, email list growth, tour promotion and more.

  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.

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Southworth Media

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

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