Cost Effective Audiences for Algorithmic Boost
Understanding Spotify's Algorithm
We all want to get exposure where it matters to us the most. For most artists, that's their home country, their city, or even just locations they'd one day like to perform in. While that's completely understandable, we've often found it to be the wrong approach when optimizing for Spotify and overall streaming platform growth.
When it comes to growing our streaming platforms, Spotify’s Algorithm plays the most important role. This algorithm is the essential ingredient to any artist seeing significant growth on the platform. It helps you grow by pushing you out on it’s official playlists like Release Radar, Discover Weekly, and Radio. But before Spotify is willing to engage it for you, you have to provide value to them. We can achieve that by driving high quality and targeted traffic to Spotify via our ad campaigns. By design, the odds of somebody making it from Instagram over to Spotify and then saving the song is about 80% regardless of where that listener is coming from location wise. So that means we can leverage global markets, as well as other cost effective markets to help train Spotifys algorithm about the types of people who are true fans of your music. When you do this enough, eventually they’ll start to push your songs out through their algorithm. If they perform well, they’ll push them more. Which is why ensuring that we’re only driving real fans to your music is absolutely key. Hence, our strong recommendation of steering clear of any 3rd party playlisting.
Understanding Popularity Scores
Now that we've talked a bit about how everything works, we can dig into the strategies we use to actually spark the algorithm. One of the key indicators of breaking into the algorithm is something called "popularity score". Popularity score is a rank that every single song on Spotify has ranked 0-100. If Drakes new song is the most streamed song on Spotify today, that song would be ranked 100 and every other song is ranked based on that. A great rule of thumb, although not set in stone, is if a song hits a 20% popularity score within the first 3-4 weeks of release, there's a high chance it gets a "Release Radar" push from the algo. Although this is helpful, Release Radar only lasts for a song’s first month, so it is not our main objective.
"Discovery Weekly" on the other hand can last forever and the rule of thumb is, when a song breaks a 30% popularity score, it has a very high likelihood of breaking in. Once you're in, your song now has a chance of getting a free algo push every Monday from Spotify to 100% brand new listeners. It usually doesn't happen every Monday, but getting a decent push once a month is pretty normal. So getting a song into Discovery Weekly for a new artist is a big, BIG deal. So for most of our clients, as long as the campaign is doing well, we aim to promote the song until we're able to break it into Discovery Weekly. It's a great goal for us to have, and once you're in, you're in, and the song can grow organically forever from there.
Pro Tip - use a website like Musicstax.com to track your songs popularity score. It does lag by 1-3 days, but is accurate.
Strategies we use to increase popularity
Now that we understand how popularity scores work, we can finally talk about how we can actually increase your score and break your song into the algorithm once and for all. Hopefully, this happens naturally over the course of our campaign while utilizing our typical global audiences and a decent ad spend budget of at least $250/song. But most of the time, unless we really have a hit on our hands, $250 spend in one month just isn't enough to quite get to that 30% score while using global and especially tier 1 audiences. That's where what we call "Power Audiences" come into play.
A “Power Audience” is a super cost effective audience build that leverages countries where reaching 1,000 people on Instagram is vastly cheaper than it would be in a country like the United States or Canada. It's often countries in the South Asian Region, South American Region, and the holy grail of cost effectiveness, India. Now I know what you're thinking. I don't want fans in India. We hear you 100% but investing $1 in India is just about equivalent to investing $10-20 in the United States. And like we mentioned earlier, by design, regardless of what country we drive to your Spotify, you can rest assured every single person is real and made it to your Spotify because they are a real fan of your music.
So let’s say we’re sitting at around a 23% popularity score after the first month of our campaign where we pushed mostly in global markets. We’re happy with our costs, and we saw really good growth over the previous month. Instead of just calling the campaign here, we decide it’s absolutely worth it to continue to push the song and try and get that 30% score to break into Discover Weekly, which we STRONGLY recommend. Well in order to do that, we basically have 2 options. #1 is, we can increase our total budget from last month, so say if we started at $250, we could go with $500 and basically get double the results. This would almost certainly break us in. But obviously, that’s just more money out of your pocket. The 2nd option we have, is to keep our budget level the same, but use 10-30% of it on targeting some power countries. This is still not even half of our ad spend for the month, but now we have the potential to more than DOUBLE our overall volume of clicks to Spotify.
So effectively, we are able to push the living crap out of your song without raising our budget at all, as well as give it an excellent shot to break into Discover Weekly. Which by the way, is most likely to push you out in the countries you care about the most anyways. We just did this for one of our clients “Carmen Diane” on her song “Sober”, check it out below!
Conclusion
As you can see in the picture above, after a couple months of pushing the song with the same ad spend budget each month, we were able to break it into Discovery Weekly and get a pretty meaty push out of it too! We did this by putting about 20% of her budget on an Indian Audience. 80% still went to our well working global audience, but that small allocation change made all the difference in the world and helped her song go from the 25% score it was stuck at, to that coveted 30% score and break into the algorithm. Now her song has a chance to get a similar push every single Monday forever and we can move on to her next song and repeat this process over again. That's how you blow up on Spotify.
