How To Promote Your Music with Spotify Ad Studio

Ready to level up your music marketing? We often talk about getting your tracks out into the world via social media, playing live or PR and media, but Spotify Ad Studio is still a relatively untapped channel for independent artists. 

Here, we serve up our tips for making the most out of your Spotify ads, including audience targeting, recording and optimising your ads. 

What is Spotify Ad Studio? 

Ad Studio is Spotify's self-serve advertising platform that makes it easy for artists to create and manage audio ads on the music streaming platform directly. The super simple tool lets you create an audio ad in less than 10 minutes, and campaign budget minimum is just $250 USD (paid in your local currency). 

How to sign up for Spotify Ad Studio 

You can sign up to Spotify Ad Studio using your personal Spotify account, but we recommend that you create a separate account with a business email, so everyone from your artist project team can access the ad studio, set up campaigns, and track their performance. 

Recording Your Ad

One cool service offered by Spotify Ad Studio is that they’ll record your ad for you if you send them the script. Make sure your ad immediately calls out your target audience in the first three seconds of the ad (you can’t mention other artist names, but you can call out the genre, eg. “LoFi fans”) and design the artwork with the target audience in mind (does it scream LoFi?).  

Targeting

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, going tight with your audience targeting will help your advertising be far more successful than a wide “spray & pray” strategy. Targeting fewer, more engaged listeners, will get your music heard by the right people, ultimately converting them into long-term, loyal fans. 

You can target fans (eg. Stormzy) or genres (eg. grime), so think about who or what is at the centre of your audience bullseye. Genre targeting will generally open up a wider pool of potential listeners than targeting one artist's fans, so if you want to target fans, add in a few artists with larger listenerships with a similar style to your music.  

When it comes to targeting age and gender, hit up Facebook’s Audience Insights Tool to find out who your target listeners are. For example, synthwave fans are 90% male and between the ages of 25-34. 

Reporting 

Spotify Ad Studio will serve up daily reports throughout your campaign, with metrics including Ads Served (total number of ads served), Clicks (number of clicks your ad received), CTR (the click through rate of how many clicks your ad received compared to how many people heard your ad), Reach of Ads Served (the number of unique people who heard your ad) and Frequency of Ads Served (the number of times each person heard your ad).

While it’s important to track these metrics, don’t forget to also track your New Followers, Song Saves and Playlist Adds. These are what show the long-term brand growth of your artist project. 

Want more tips? Download our free 48-page Digital Career Guide here.