I ran across a recent thread in Reddit that I found to be enlightening. It’s one man’s account of his experience spending ad dollars, and the results he found over time. I think you will find the outcomes surprising. While many of us may not have the amounts of money to spend that he put forth, I’d urge you to pay attention to the proportions in order to put things into perspective. At the end of the piece will be a Youtube link where he explains his findings further. I hope this helps some of our musicians in their quest to boost streams.
Bjornar Kibsgaard dropped an album in June. In his own words, here’s what he has gathered so far:
YouTube Ads to boost my music videos: Spent $500 on one music video, and $750 on a second in google ads. Got over 20,000 views on both videos but engagement was quite low. On both ads, I ended up gaining a total of 103 new subscribers. Each video only had like 100 likes and less than 20 comments which was very confusing. I expected engagement to be a lot better for the amount spent. Trying to now figure out how to boost that the next time around.
Spotify pay for play listing: I paid 3 separate people to playlist me. One cost $46, one cost $90, and one cost $100. The guy who cost $46 got me like 15 streams literally. The guy who cost $90 got me on like 8 playlists but all were quite weak. I ended up getting only about 1,200 streams. The third guy for $100 was insane. Got me on huge legit playlists and somehow triggered Spotify to get me on more. I ended up on 58 different playlists and went from 100 monthly listeners to 15,000 and growing every single day. Super effective.
Instagram boosting reels that link to Spotify or my YouTube channel: Terrible method that i tried twice with $100 each. Reels got lots of views but super low engagement and barely any clicks. Not sure what I did wrong there or if this was just not an effective method.
Final thing I’ve tried is Spotify Ads directly. It is currently running and I spent $350 over 2 weeks. I’m not 100% sure what the results are just yet but I will leave an update here soon.
Wanted to know what your methods are and what is most effective for your music? This is my first time ever budgeting for ads and I wish I had done it sooner so I could have learned more earlier in my music career. I am trying to explore every avenue so I can eventually teach people what is most effective. You can see a video he made about it by following this link: https://youtu.be/0YXpBahRea4
Author: David Trahan
