Horses. How'd I do? Spotify Success?

Back in April I did a quick blog talking to you about a music marketing site called MusoSoup. I’d decided to give it a go to promote my single ‘Horses’, and promised (loosely) to come back to you and let you know how I’d got on? So….

Listen to 'Horses' here...

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As a quick recap, MusoSoup is a platform where you pay for three weeks of promotion. Your submission is reviewed by a global network of bloggers, instagrammers, and website types, and they make you promotional offers. Anything from full scale reviews, permanent website links and radio play, to a social media post to their followers. I paid £30 for a three week campaign, and chose about another £15 or £20 of promotional offers. They’ve all run their course now so, as I launch my latest single ‘Grace’ this would probably be a good time to have a look back, as promised, as to what I actually got.

Well, I got the reviews and mentions in various media I signed up for. These made for some great content for my social media accounts, and provided a few good review quotes for my website. Positive reviews and mentions are always useful tools. The thing that surprised me the most, was the boost I got from the ‘free options’ I was offered. 

Now, they’re not really ‘free’ because I paid £30 to be there, but basically if you don’t fancy, or can’t afford one of the promotional offers you receive, 9/10 you get a free option to go on a spotify playlist curated by that influencer. I had around sixty offers in total, which in itself I found quite surprising, and I only accepted a few, so I opted for maybe fifty of these ‘free’ options. 

Now, with Spotify, those of you who’ve used it may or may not have noticed two bits of info that are available for all to see, the number of monthly listeners an artist has, and the number of listens that song has received. To add insult to injury, or possibly not, if your song has had under 1000 plays, the number doesn’t register at all, you just get a <1000 score.

A recent survey revealed that around 80% of artists with work on Spotify have no music with over 1000 plays, and fewer than 50 monthly listeners. Before I released ‘Horses’ - that was me. My first two single and a ‘b’ side didn’t register many plays, and my monthly listeners could be counted on one hand….and probably named as my immediate family.

So, during and after the campaign, I’ve been  watching the numbers. Here are two screen grabs off of my phone, the first at the end of the three week campaign late last month, and one this morning.

Spotify Numbers

I went from about 5 monthly listeners, to a peak of 639. After the campaign ended and ‘Horses’ was replaced in all the ‘recent release’ playlists I’d been added to, that number has steadily fallen to today’s figure, 96. Even after my monthly listener tally started to fall, my play count still continued to creep upwards and over the magic thousand plays to 1210. Practically speaking this is only the Spotify count we’re talking about, my music is actually distributed to thirty or so platforms, including Apple and YouTube, but those numbers are not so readily available to me. Soundcloud however, what I would consider my ‘home platform’, has actually registered 3329 plays, so my total to date for that one song could be around 5000.

'Horses' On Soundcloud, 3329 plays

For all it’s faults, Spotify does give you access to a reasonable quantity of information, such as where your plays come from in terms of format and geographical location. This doesn’t really bother me as such, but it is interesting to have a quick look as the info is so readily available. As you can see, I’m big in Sweden ;-)

Big in Sweden. Well.... bigger than Australia

So.... What does this all really mean for me?

Well the answer is, probably not a lot. There’s no immediate financial return to this kind of exercise, but it does help to establish me as an artist. If at some point in the future I wish to wrangle with promoters or venues, reviews, hard numbers and plays are like currency. They shouldn’t be, and in fact in the past I’ve avoided festivals for example, who’s application forms are clearly more oriented towards our number of twitter followers, rather than what music we play, or how good we are. It is a fact of the business though. Regardless I will still earn more money through live gigs and the Performing Rights Society than I ever will from streaming platforms. I think that is true for virtually any scale of artist.

I’ll be running a similar campaign for my new single ‘Grace’ (you can listen to it below). It’s already had over 1200 plays on Soundcloud in it’s first week, and the demo that I released previous to that has had 2400 or so. Fingers crossed for more of the same.

Listen to 'Grace' here on Soundcloud

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Or check out the video...