Promoting on DSPs other than Spotify

Author

Andrew Southworth
May 27, 2024

Hey music marketers!

Today we’re going to talk about promoting on DSPs other than Spotify.

Everyone talks about Spotify because it’s the largest streaming platform, but Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music have nearly 300 million paying subscribers combined (for context, Spotify has 239 million premium subscribers by itself).

So today we’re going to talk about how you can promote the other platforms, and a type of campaigns you can run to automate your growth on them.

Get Access

The first thing you need to do is get access to your ‘for artists’ platforms. Apple Music and Amazon Music both have websites you can submit to, and within a couple weeks you’ll have access. Then you can see your stats and customize your profiles on their platforms.

YouTube is a bit weirder because you need an official artist channel. Sometimes your distributor can help you out with this but otherwise you’d have to go through YouTube directly which can be hard to do.

Once you’re in update your profile so it looks the way you want, take part in any features the platform has to offer for customization and promotion. Amazon Music actually lets you pitch to editorial before and after a song has released.

Adjusting Ad Campaigns

If you’re already running Meta conversion campaigns for Spotify, you don’t have to make much of a change to emphasize these other platforms. If you aren’t running these ads yet, here’s my latest YouTube video where I walk you through it and here’s my Spotify Growth Machine course that goes into even more detail.

Sometimes people just put Spotify on their landing pages, or just Spotify and Apple Music. When you’re a smaller artist I actually recommend this. This is because it’s better to get a big push on one platform and trigger algorithmic activity than get very little on many platforms and end up with nothing.

So make sure you consider this, optimizing for growth on many platforms can hurt your success on any given singular platform. The smaller your budget is the more particular you should be about this as well.

However if you have an establishes base on Spotify and want to even things out on other platforms, or if you have a larger budget and want to diversify your growth, these tweaks are for you.

  1. In your targeting where you put Spotify, also include other DSPs you want

  2. On your landing page include the other DSPs you want, but don’t include fluff if you don’t care about certain ones

Adding other DSPs to the targeting

Adding other DSPs to the landing page

Note in the image above for the landing page I have even more platforms such as iTunes, Pandora, Deezer, Tidal etc. You can pick and choose the ones you want because it depends on your plan. Often nowadays i’ll do Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon Music, YouTube Music and Tidal - skipping the rest.

It’s worth noting that the market share of Deezer, Tidal and Pandora is practically nothing. All 3 of those combined don’t even compete with Amazon Music, and Amazon Music is 1/3rd the size of Spotify in paying users.

If you really want to emphasize other platforms you can use Spotify as a ‘negative’ target or an exclusion, and then move Spotify to the bottom of your landing page. This can increase cost though so tread with caution. I’d be hesitant to take Spotify off the landing page entirely.

Measuring Results

The reason why I wanted you to get access to your ‘for artists’ accounts before running ads to these platforms, is I want you to be able to see analytics. Promoting something without any type of feedback on if its working or not is scary because you could just be wasting money.

Compare the number of clickthrough you have on your landing page to each DSPs to the analytics you see on the DSPs.

Also, pay attention to the differences of each platform. Each DSP has it’s own demographic and personality traits i’ve found. For example Apple Music is huge in Japan, and when running ads you get a lot of Shazams. Also on Amazon Music I tend to get a lot of USA listeners, and voice requests to Alexa devices are actually decent.

There are algorithmic and editorial playlists on most DSPs nowadays so you might see some signs of them in your stats over time.

New Content

Are you playing the Industry game or the Indie game? One approach results in much more fans, but a longer path to profitability. The other focuses on super fans and making money, but the audience size is much less.

Should you release music every 1-2 weeks like Russ and Nic D? Or is 4-8 weeks better? Let's talk about!

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.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Music Marketing Monday! Please give your feedback using the poll below.

How did you like today's newsletter?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

In case you’re curious what platform i’m using to run this newsletter, it’s called beehiiv.

Reply

or to participate.