A month and a half ago, I told you that I wanted to get 1 million streams on three singles over the next year.
You can read the email where I detailed the thought process behind my goal and my plan to hit it, but on the likely chance that you have better things to do with your time, here’s the short version.
I planned to:
- Release three songs over a three-month period
- Promote them mainly with Meta ads
- Promote them a little bit with playlists and Spotify Marquee
- Try some stuff on social media
…All with the goal of getting those three new songs cumulatively to 1,000,000 streams by September of 2025.
Well, as of today, two of the songs are out and we’re about a month and a half into promotion, so I wanted to give you an update on how things are going so far.
Unsurprisingly, I’m a little behind.
First, here’s the stream count to this point:
We’re sitting at 16,280 streams since the first song was released on August 30th. That initial track accounts for 15,013 of those streams, and the second song is really just getting started.
Altogether, that’s… not bad. Honestly, my 16-year-old self probably would’ve been pumped: “That’s a big-sounding number!” 16-year-old Jon might have exclaimed excitedly over an after-school snack of Bagel Bites, flashing a big thumbs up from the too-large sleeves of an Aeropostale t-shirt. “I’m famous!”
But boring adult Jon (who never eats Bagel Bites anymore) knows that the number is not big enough and that fame is a curse.
The math is pretty simple: If I were to progress linearly toward my million-stream goal over the course of a year, I’d need to rack up 83,333 streams each month. So I’m already more than 67,000 streams behind.
The good news, though, is that I never expected my progress to be linear. It probably won’t be exponential, either, but as time goes on, I’ll have more songs out, and hopefully I’ll gain more algorithmic traction. In other words, if all goes to plan, I should have months with more than 83,333 streams to make up for my slow start.
The bad news is that all is not going according to plan.
Surprise!
Here’s my main issue: I’m struggling to make time for the things I said I’d do.
I meant to make a Meta ad campaign when I released my second song; that was two weeks ago and the ad campaign still hasn’t happened. Relatedly, I haven’t yet run any playlisting for the second track, and I only barely got around to pressing the four or five buttons required to launch a Spotify Marquee campaign.
In other words, I’m behind on the actions, which is certainly part of the reason I’m behind on the results.
And please, don’t even ask me about social media.
(Okay, fine, you can ask. I'd planned to spend "a couple of hours a week" creating and posting social content, but so far I've spent maybe one hour in five weeks, and that one hour felt like ten hours of swimming through cheese whiz.)Sure, I’ve got excuses. I’m legitimately busy.
I run this business full-time. I run campaigns for a bunch of other artists. On top of that, I also happen to have a life outside of marketing, in which I do tons of super cool and impressive things, like grocery shopping and getting oil changes.
It’s hard to fit everything in.
But the reality is that if you don’t do the things, you don’t get the results. So if I really do want to reach my goal, I really do need to make more time for it.
Now, on the more positive side of things…
I’m optimistic that the first song I released is going to hit a significant Discover Weekly bump in the near future.
Two weeks ago, we notched the playlist for the first time. And the pattern is often that 1) a song cracks Discover Weekly one week with a couple of streams, 2) nothing happens the following week, but then 3) on the third week you see a big spike.
I’m actually crossing my fingers that the big spike will happen today. If it does, I’ll be much closer to being on track.
Also, although I haven’t gotten around to spinning up a Meta ads campaign for my second track, I’m reasonably satisfied with the results from my first song’s campaign.
Here’s what things look like on the Ads Manager side:
This is running only to Tier 1 countries, and I started it from within a brand-new ad account. It’s been a little pricier than I’d like, but it’s getting down to a CPR that’s consistently in the $0.40s, which, for Tier 1, is decent. And it’s still trending downward, which is good.
I’ll turn this campaign off as soon as I get around to launching my second campaign. But even so, it’s proof of concept, and depending on how promotion goes for the next two songs, I may come back to it.
My goal is to put most of my budget toward the song that performs the best. I’m not sure whether it’ll be this one or not, but this one’s at least given me a good starting point.
Okay, I’m running out of time and caffeine, so I’m going to wrap this newsletter up.
Here are my main takeaways so far:
- The things I’m doing are, in a general sense, working.
Again, 16,000 streams in a month and a half is respectable, especially for an artist who started without too much of an established base. I do wish that I had a few more streams, but 16-year-old Jon would be happy with my results, so I can’t be too upset.
- Man, it’s so hard to prioritize marketing your own music.
It’s funny (or maybe sad) – music marketing is my full-time job, and it’s still such a struggle for me to carve out time to do it for myself.
If you’re struggling to find the time to do your own promo, please, have some grace for yourself.
Don’t give up. I’ll try not to, either.
