The 4 Keys to Blow Up Music Ad Campaigns
I think about Meta ads more often than is healthy. To be honest, I’m not sure thinking about Meta ads at all is healthy. I’m a grumpy old man; if I could wave a magic wand and make every sort of social media disappear, I’d do it quicker than you could say, “Go to your room, Mark […]
Is Spotify Promotion Even Worth It?
“$5,000 seems like a lot of investment for 260k streams. What makes this worth it?” ⬆️ That’s one of like 10 reader responses I got to last week’s email about my marketing results, all of which circled similar themes: How much did I make from streaming? How’d I get so handsome? Was the music marketing […]
My Two Biggest Regrets After 8 Months of Music Promotion
My most recent release, a three-song EP, is sitting at 268,328 streams as of this morning. That’s so big a number that my puny mind can’t process what it even means, but certainly one takeaway from the six digits is that a crowd of people have heard my music. That’s great. But in another light […]
How to Grow a Popular Spotify Playlist Using Meta Ads (Step-by-Step)
Ever wondered how to build a playlist that actually gets streams and saves? I realized I’ve talked a lot around this topic — sharing wins, failures, and even launching a service that does it for artists — but I hadn’t yet walked you through an actual step-by-step, start-to-finish campaign setup. So let’s fix that today. […]
Spotify’s Discovery Mode Explained (2025)
Here’s the pitch: If you turn on Spotify’s Discovery Mode for a song, that song will be placed more frequently in personalized playlists (like Radio, Autoplay, and Mixes). Hypothetically, this means more people will hear it. Of course, there’s a catch. First, your song has to qualify for the program (you can read the criteria here). More importantly, […]
Spotify Is the Devil: A Review of Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine
Spotify is the devil. This is, more or less, the premise of Liz Pelly’s recent book Mood Machine. The book made a few waves in advance of its January publication, thanks to a pre-released excerpt in Harper’s Magazine that disclosed Spotify’s “Perfect Fit Content” program: a scheme to seed Spotify playlists with “fake” artists and cheap content that, because […]
I Spent $6,000 Building Playlists on Spotify. Here’s What I Learned.
I’ve run ads for 36 playlists over the past couple of months. You may remember that I launched this as a service around the end of January. The premise is that artists send me a playlist they’ve created, and I run Meta ads to it to drive streams and saves. Ideally, the artist is left with a […]
12-Step Song Release Checklist (2025)
Let’s be real: releasing a song in 2025 can feel like throwing it into the digital void and hoping the algorithm gods take mercy. You’ve put your heart and soul into this track — only for it to rack up 37 streams, most of which came from your mom and that one SoundCloud bot that […]
Spotify’s $5 Billion Question: Is Streaming Helping or Hurting Artists?
The people have spoken. Last week, on the heels of promoting my email-list-building challenge, I asked this list a simple question: What should I write about? Well, you guys came through, as you so often do. You sent in a solid volume of responses, and your two most common answers were: 1. Write about Spotify […]
You Pick the Topic, I Bring the Words – Deal?
I wrote a bunch of words about email marketing last week. Some people might say I wrote too many words about email marketing last week. To that I’d reply: You’re probably right. Honestly, I always feel a little burned out after sending a week’s worth of promotional emails; I think it’s a worthwhile thing to […]
