Inside Stories: Andrew Southworth's Comprehensive Walkthrough To Growing Your Spotify Listeners Count Organically
Andrew Southworth offered us one of the most insightful views on how to efficiently spend your promo budget when it comes to promoting your music online.
We cannot stress out more on the importance of growing a loyal fanbase on social media, on the importance of quality content as well as on the huge role of fine targeted ads that could help you reach new listeners. Things should be easy if you’re a lottery winner and have all the time and money in the world to boost your musical career. But we assume you haven’t win the big lottery pot recently. Or if you have, we truly hope you moved in The Bahamas to spend the rest of your life in a never ending holiday :) As for the rest of us, the most cost effective way is to start rabbit holing on the interwebs to find the best methods to promoting your music.
Lucky for us, Andrew Southworth spent thousands of euros on various music promo services and instagram ads to find the most efficient way for growing his listeners and followers count. Andrew started his musical career 18 years ago, playing voice and guitar for various rock / metal bands. Shifting towards the more eclectic side of electronic music brought Andrew the oppportunity of exploring the options of promoting music as an independent artist. From here to a 45K subscribers youtube channel, covering music marketing from A to Z, it was just a natural step.
Andrew was kind enough to chat with us about the strategies of reaching new listeners and potential followers, about Spotify algorithms, paid ads campaigns and soo much more. To sum it up, these could be the best 10 minutes you’ve spent so far this year, reading about music promo strategies.
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Please introduce us into the musical world of Andrew Southworth :)
I’ve had a pretty crazy musical journey. I’ve been making music for about 18 years now and most of that was actually rock / metal music in various bands where I sang and played guitar. My main instrument was guitar and I actually got accepted to Berklee College of Music in 2010 because of my guitar playing, but I didn’t go due to the insanely high cost. Instead I went for mechanical engineering with the goal that when I graduated I'd get a sweet job that would allow me to afford to invest in my music.
Starting around 2017 I started dabbling in electronic music, and it opened up a whole new world to me. It was new and challenging and that made it exciting. In 2018 I finished my masters degree in engineering and was working in the field, but that opened up free time for me to get back into music after a few years of doing it minimally in college. I decided to commit and give this whole music industry thing a try.
Fast forward to now… My music released under Andrew Southworth is somewhat eclectic but it’s all generally alternative-pop / electronic with a hint of alt-rock depending on the song. My 5th studio album Doublethink navigates through these three different styles but also blends them together in several songs. I also release alternative-metal music with my band Every Waking Moment, and I have a dubstep / metal hybrid project called Murder Nite.
When did Andrew the artist meet with Andrew the digital marketing guru and start working together?
This started in 2019. In 2018 I dropped two albums and pretty much nobody listened to them because I was generally under the impression that great music should sell itself - I was wrong. So in 2019 I decided to figure out music marketing.
Naturally a lot of my focus went to Spotify playlisting, and I dropped several thousand dollars on playlist promo that year. The problem was every song I promoted got kicked off the playlists 4-6 weeks after they were added, so I'd shoot up to 15,000 monthly listeners only to go back to less than 1,000 monthly listeners a month later with little to show for it.
That year I released an album called ‘Balance Restored’ with the band Day/Four. They had a solid marketing budget but weren’t sure how to best spend it, and since I spent that year playing around with marketing they put some trust in me to run Facebook ads, pick promo companies etc. I learned a LOT through that and applied what I learned to my solo project, started talking about it on my YouTube channel and the rest is history.
Are your promo campaigns primarily focused on running ads on facebook & instagram?
Facebook & Instagram ads are definitely the majority of my music marketing budget. Roughly 80% of my budget goes to Facebook ads, maybe 10% to YouTube ads and the other 10% to curation (SubmitHub / MusoSoup etc).
That being said, I don’t think an artist should only do paid promotion and nothing else. I think a lot of artists would benefit from spending their first 3-6 months trying to grow their following without spending any money in paid marketing. This will force them to figure out organic social media strategies, branding, how to make better content and how to communicate with people online while improving their music over that time period.
Facebook ads don’t replace making good content, posting online and communicating with your audience, they just amplify it. I’ve seen artists skip everything else but ads - it can work but it's an uphill battle.
Let’s say you’re an artist with good music yet with close to zero fans. In your opinion, what’s the most effective way to reach your potential fans?
Step 1: Start with a social media strategy, pick a social media platform to dominate (nowadays either IG and / or TikTok) and start batch creating content in 4 different buckets that tie your music in some way. Make enough content ahead of time so that you can post 3-5 times per week and have a buffer where you don’t need to be making content every day. Use relevant hashtags, reply to everyone that leaves a comment / DM’s you, and immerse yourself in the community of your genre.
Step 2: Run small & cheap FB ads. Step 1 should have taught you a lot about what content works best, what types of people engage with your stuff and hopefully you’ve gotten to talk to some people that like your music to figure out what other music they like. Use this knowledge to selectively start running some Video View / Engagement campaigns on your posts in top tier countries to build retargeting audiences and start giving the Facebook machine learning algorithm some data to help you out in Step 3…
Step 3: Run conversion campaigns driving people to a landing page to go to Spotify (and Apple probably). Hard to describe the details of this in text, look me up on YouTube to see my tutorials on the topic.
Which is easier: reach 10K monthly listeners or grow from 10K to 100K?
It's definitely easier to get to 10K monthly listeners than to go from 10K to 100K. In fact I'll also say it's easier to get to 30K monthly listeners than it is to go from 30K to 50K monthly listeners. I'm talking about stable monthly listeners, not random spikes that go down the month after.
This is true for a lot of things in life but it also seems to be true for music marketing as well: the steps you take to get from B to C likely will not be the same as the steps you take to get from A to B. This is why recently I've been focusing a lot on deepening the relationship with my audience, more so than the size of it. I believe that for me this is the missing link that will help me push to the next level. Time will tell if I'm right!
Pitching your music to independent playlist curators: is it worth the time and effort?
It depends. If someone has lots of free time but no money, researching Spotify playlists online and manually emailing them does work but it takes a LOT of time. If someone has a little bit less time and a little bit of money this is where SubmitHub makes a lot of sense since it’s so cheap and it saves you a lot of time. If you have very little free time and plenty of money then SubmitHub still makes sense but you’ll probably blindly pitch to many playlists instead of spending the time to make sure they’re really good fits. These same rules apply for Groover and MusoSoup as well. PlaylistPush is different because they’re quite expensive but they don’t let you choose who you’re pitching to.
Earlier in this interview I mentioned I might spend 10% of my budget in paid submission platforms like SubmitHub, which for a $1,000 campaign means i’m spending $100 roughly in this category. I have very little free time so I pretty much just set some parameters on SubmitHub for genre, category and approval rates and then I choose every single curator in the list and pitch to them.
With any of these paid services a 10% approval rate is actually great, with cold emailing manually a 3% approval rate would be great. Certain genres do better or worse than others, and if you frequently blend genres you’ll have a harder time. I’ve had songs do horrible on SubmitHub but fantastic with Facebook ads and vice versa.
Did your ads campaigns for your music eventually paid off to at least breaking even?
When it comes to streaming revenue alone, some songs of mine have profited quite a bit, others have broken even, others pay off a significant portion of the ad spend and others flop and never pay themselves back. The songs that profit or break even don’t do so immediately, they might take a year to get to that point as people continue to listen over time and the algorithmic playlists do their thing.
I think people need to realize that these types of campaigns are very much ‘top of funnel’, and you shouldn’t expect to profit from them alone. I know people making a living from Spotify and Apple Music alone but in most cases artists monetize these audiences with merch, touring, Patreon and more. It's kind of like how you hear about people making a living from being an Instagram influencer - they make nothing from Instagram itself, but they’ve found ways to monetize their audience.
Without getting into a deep discussion about the fairness of streaming royalty payments, this is the world we live in.
Yes, we know, Spotify algorithms are secret, yet, from your experience, what things did trigger your music to be added to Radio or Discover Weekly on Spotify?
There are a lot of metrics we can’t see on Spotify, such as skip rates and how often people that listen to your song go to stream other songs on your profile or follow your profile - Spotify tracks essentially everything. It seems like engagement metrics such as saves, playlist adds and followers matter. There is also the concept of ‘lean in’ (active listening) vs ‘lean back’ (passive listening) listening that seems to matter to a degree as well.
Would you grow your followers on social media rather than the streams on Spotify / Apple Music?
To me social media growth has always been something that's a side effect of doing something else. So I run my ad campaigns focused around growing Spotify numbers, building my mailing list or selling products and the social media accounts grow as a side effect. I don’t typically run campaigns with the focus of growing my social media presence because I don’t trust these companies long-term.
At any time the social media algorithms can be changed and all of a sudden followers don’t matter anymore. This happened to Facebook pages years ago when all of a sudden it didn’t matter if you had 100k followers, because every time you posted you’d only reach less than 5% of them. It's been slowly happening to Instagram over time as well.
On the other hand I don’t necessarily trust Spotify or any other streaming service. At the end of the day unless you have a direct email or phone number to contact your fans you’re at the mercy of another company that can pull the rug whenever they choose, and I don’t like that.
You clearly put a lot of effort into the content gathered on your Youtube channel. How did you come up with the idea?
Thanks! Well, my original YouTube content style was actually teaching screaming vocal lessons, that's how I gained my first 5,000 subscribers. Eventually I got bored teaching vocal lessons and stopped uploading as much, then I switched to music production content when my interests shifted and started taking YouTube more seriously.
When my interests naturally shifted to music marketing I noticed people were loving the content so I doubled down on it and pretty much stopped the music production content. Unfortunately the YouTube algorithm doesn’t play nice with multi-topic channels otherwise I'd probably have a blend of content going out, I tried that for a bit and every other video would do awful and people were getting confused as to which type of channel I actually was.
As you may know, most of the artists get intimidated when they need to run a promo campaign on their own: from ideas to create content on instagram, to running ads. Even with the sheer amount of tutorials on the internet, they still find this a difficult task. What options do they have? Signing with a label?
Signing with a label is definitely an option if an artist doesn’t want to get into the marketing side themselves. That's pretty much the main purpose of a label: they handle the majority of the business / marketing aspects of the music in exchange for a cut of the royalties. The downside to this is that often the cut is very large with a lot of caveats and built-in ways to exploit the artist. I highly recommend anyone that gets offered a label deal to consult with a music lawyer before signing.
Aside from that artists can hire marketing agencies on their own. The downside to this is that it costs a lot of money. You might spend $500-$1,000 to hire someone to run your Spotify Facebook ad campaigns, in addition to the ad spend itself. PR campaigns can cost several thousand dollars, and radio campaigns even more. The trick with this is knowing what you need and what you don’t need.
For independent artists just getting started I'd probably skip the PR and radio stuff and stick with hiring a Facebook ad person, specifically try and find another artist that's just doing it as a side gig instead of a business (you’ll save a lot of cash most of the time). To replace PR I'd use platforms like SubmitHub and MusoSoup since $100 can go quite far.
I always recommend artists learn how to do Facebook ads themselves rather than hiring it out, or at least learning how to do it first prior to hiring it out. It will save you a lot of money long term if you can do it yourself, but if you know how to do it and still hire it out you can evaluate how the person you hired is doing instead of just taking their word for it.
You’re an artist with a couple of thousand followers on ig and 1k monthly listeners on Spotify. You have a 500 USD promo budget and an upcoming release. How would you split this budget to maximize the results?
I’d spend $50 on SubmitHub credits pitched to a mix of playlists and blogs, $50 on YouTube ads to promote a music video on YouTube, $50 on a Facebook video view campaign to promote the music video on your Facebook page, and the other $350 on Facebook ads for a Spotify conversion campaign.
The SubmitHub credits might be controversial but you can’t run ads to get playlist placements or blog write-ups and I think SubmitHub is the best place to get those. YouTube ads are the cheapest way to get views on your YouTube video, and you should get some crossover onto YouTube from your Facebook ads as well. The purpose of the $50 Facebook video view campaign is to run some ads for your video on Facebook with fairly specific targeting ideally in only ‘Tier 1’ countries or just the USA (or your home country) - this will get you some data and start building some video view duration retargeting audiences for use later.
The Spotify conversion campaign is focused around getting streams to Spotify and/or Apple Music, but I've also found this crosses over to YouTube and social media growth. In terms of overall results per dollar this is what I consider the best use of your money and thus why it's the highest budget item on this list.
If you want to learn more about how you can market your music from someone who’s actually a music artist, check out my YouTube channel for hundreds of videos on the topic. If you prefer an organized course or 1-on-1 consultations I also offer those 👇
⚡️YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/andrewsouthworth
⚡️Spotify Growth Machine: https://learn.generastudios.com/spotify-growth-machine
⚡️YouTube Growth Machine: https://learn.generastudios.com/youtube-google-growth-machine/
⚡️Consulting: https://andrewsouthworth.youcanbook.me/