One year ago, I released the first song on a three-song EP.
My goal, plucked from thin air as a marketing exercise and vanity project, was to drive one million streams of the EP within the first year of its release.
Well, one year later, the final results are in.
The project is sitting at 428,649 streams.
So yep – I failed.
In percentage terms, I made it almost 43% of the way to the target. If this had been a marathon, the finish line would’ve been a distant pipe dream. If it had been a test, I would’ve flunked harder than SpongeBob at Boating School.
Thankfully, this was not a test. And while my results were a failure when viewed through the stark, objective lens of quantitative measurement, it’s also true that, subjectively, I had a pretty good time.
I’ve written about all of this before – if you’d like full context, I’ll put links to my previous progress updates in the P.S. section below – so I’m not going to rehash my full methodology today.
But I figured I owed you a final numbers update. And I also thought it’d be useful to share, one final time, a few of the lessons I’ve learned from marketing my own music.
Here’s what I wish I’d done differently.
1. I wish I’d focused more promo on my best-performing song.
You never know which song will be your best performer prior to release; I’ll often have a hunch that a specific one will do well, but I’m wrong as often as I’m right.
So perfect prediction is impossible – but hindsight is 20/20. In other words, when you look back at data, you can tell pretty quickly what has done well.
I wish I’d trusted the data more quickly.
One year in, it’s clear that my best-performing song was a tune called “Everything.” Out of the three songs I released, converted most efficiently via ads and had the highest engagement metrics on Spotify.
The data was clear pretty quickly, but I spent too long testing the other two songs. When I finally switched my ads budget back last month, here’s what happened:
I was too slow on the draw. If I’d been paying closer attention, I think I could’ve allocated about 80% of my budget toward this song; as it was, I put less than half of my spend toward it.
Switching more quickly probably wouldn’t have gotten me all the way to 1,000,000 streams, but it surely would’ve left me much closer.
My lesson: Be quicker to double down on what’s working.
2. I wish I’d set a broader audience from the start.
I foolishly didn’t include a Tier 2 audience in my ad campaigns for the first 10 months of promotion. Instead, I targeted only Tier 1 countries: the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, etc.
My rationale was that I wanted to train my ad account on my ideal audience before incorporating a broader audience. It worked – from the get-go, clicks on my ads led directly to streams.
But I should’ve incorporated Tier 2 countries (Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, etc.) much more quickly. When I finally added a Tier 2 target two months ago, I immediately dropped my cost per result by about $0.15, and my Spotify results sharply improved.
I knew this would happen; in fact, I’d intended to expand my target for about six months before I actually did so. It was only the matter of a few minutes, but I just never got around to making the change.
My lesson: If you want more streams, go broad.
3. I wish I’d spent more time on promotion.
My original marketing plans read like a politician’s pie-in-the-sky campaign promises. I’d track everything in a spreadsheet; I’d systematically test and analyze different tactics; I’d easily find an hour or so per week to post on social media.
I was so idealistic. I was so young and naive.
Real life took a pragmatic steamroller to my plans. Forget carrying out some well-planned system or meticulously tracking things in a spreadsheet; at best, I haphazardly worked on my own marketing in the small spaces smushed between other tasks. Most often, I didn’t work on it at all.
I wish I’d been more intentional in carving out time. But, more than that, I wish I’d planned for the reality of not having much time in the first place.
Between social media, email marketing, playlisting campaigns, ad management, and my own website, I just tried to do too much. If I’d planned to do less, I think I could’ve done it better.
My lesson: Do fewer things better. (And have some grace for yourself, too.)
So, one year later, those are the lessons I’ve learned.
Take the above for what it’s worth, but please know that my overall feeling isn’t one of regret; mostly, I’m just grateful. I’m incredibly fortunate to have had the means to market my music, and I’ve been deeply encouraged by the way people have responded to it. All of this is a gift.
Sure, I wish I’d done some of these things differently. But I’m so glad I had the chance to do these things at all.
Let me know if you’ve got any questions on anything above. And again, if you want to review the full journey (including more of the what and the how of my marketing), I’ll include links below to the previous installments in this series.
Hopefully this stuff helps as you market your own music. As always, here’s wishing you good luck.
– Jon
