Ever heard of Spin Promo?
I had not… Until I started getting near-daily emails from them last fall.
I don’t think I’d ever signed up to their email list, although I could definitely be wrong. Past Jon has done all sorts of things I don’t remember, some of which, frankly I find pretty shocking.
Spin’s emails were genuinely good though, so I never unsubscribed.
Slowly, over the course of about 60 emails and the span of two months, I became increasingly convinced: I desperately wanted to pay Spin Promo money.
I wasn’t the only one, either. I got a few notes from folks on this email list, asking me if I’d ever heard of Spin Promo and confiding that they, like me, had found the company’s marketing to be convincing.
The key differentiator with Spin – and the thing that made them more interesting to me than your “typical” playlisting service – is that the company promises to run native Spotify ads in tandem with their playlisting campaigns, to “retarget and engage your biggest fans.”
In other words, some of the users who stream your music on a playlist will likely be shown your music again in a Spotify ad, hopefully leading to more active engagement.
I found the idea interesting and the emails about it well-written and relatable.
…So I tried it.
I went with the company’s $299 Spin Core package. On November 26th of last year, I got an email from their system notifying me that my campaign had been approved.
The campaign (as far as I can tell) is over now. Here’s how it went.
Let’s start with the raw data, first.
At first glance, the chart above seems to show that the Spin campaign, introduced about a month after the song’s release, had virtually no effect on its streaming numbers. If anything, the song’s numbers seem to dip a little bit during Spin’s promotion.
But that’s fairly misleading.
I was actually promoting the song heavily myself before I pulled the trigger on Spin. In fact, up until November 26th, I’d spent $678 on Meta ads for the song ($400 of that over the first week as part of a front-loaded strategy that probably deserves its own write-up at some point).
When the Spin campaign started running, I paused my own ads. You can see that reflected clearly in the Saves over time.
In other words, the Spin campaign had to make up a bunch of ground that had previously been covered by my own promotion.
And with that considered, I’d say that they actually did pretty well, at least in terms of the raw streams.
Functionally, my Spin streams came from two playlists:
Those were the only playlists Spin notched for me, but as you can see, they’ve driven a respectable flow of traffic.
Taken together, they’ve accounted for exactly 4,000 streams so far – so, nearly a third of the song’s total number. And my track is still live on both playlists, so the count will almost certainly keep rising.
In terms of fit, I’m fine with both.
As is probably obvious, I am not James Arthur. But I can see how the song I submitted sounds vaguely like something he’d make if he were an indie Christian artist who also happened to be a far worse singer.
And while I did not write my song with the intention that it would soundtrack someone crying themselves to sleep, I can see that, yes, it does sound a little melancholy.
In other words, I don’t think my song would be an immediate skip for a user listening to either playlist, and I think it sounds decently similar to the context in which it’s been placed.
If these two playlists were the entire outcome, I’d be relatively happy.
But, as I mentioned above, Spin promises more than just playlisting – they also promise to run native Spotify ads.
And that’s the major part of why I’m just slightly disappointed in the Spin campaign. I can’t see any results from their promised ads in my data.
The chart above shows the Source of Streams for the song over the past 28 days. Unsurprisingly, Other listeners’ playlists account for the majority of my traffic – par for the course when playlisting.
I’d expect traffic from the ads to show up under Your profile and catalog. But that source has only accounted for 3% of my streams. If that’s all the traffic those retargeted Spotify ads are driving, it’s hard to think that they’ve had any sort of real impact.
All of this brings me to…
My conclusion (the good and the bad)
Again, the summative feeling I’ve taken from this campaign has been one of slight disappointment. I think that’s more due to my high expectations going in than it is to the objective reality of the results. Fairly or not, I was expecting this to be much more different from “normal” playlisting than it seems to be.
(Another way of saying this: Spin’s email marketing is really good. I mean, shoot, I’ve read about 78 emails selling me their service and I’m still subscribed.)
There’s really nothing wrong with normal playlisting, at least when it’s done well. It’s a cost-efficient way to drive a high volume of streams.
But as I’ve written many times before, even good playlisting results in lower engagement metrics – fewer saves, fewer streams per listeners, and so on – because playlists, by their nature, are a passive listening experience. I mean, just look at the drop in Saves in that image above when I switched from Meta ads to playlists.
Spin seems to do good playlisting.
But I was hoping that, in Spin’s case, the low engagement from their playlists would be offset by high engagement from their Spotify ads. For whatever reason (and my main hypothesis is that native Spotify ads just aren’t very effective), that doesn’t seem to have been the case.
The other thing that’s left me slightly disappointed has been Spin’s communication during the campaign.
Most of the bigger playlisting services have portals, where you can log in to see the curators to whom your song has been pitched and monitor the status of your campaign. Spin, so far as I know, doesn’t have a portal. They provide all campaign updates via automated emails.
In principle, that’s totally fine. But after an initial email letting me know that my song had been added to those two playlists, I never heard anything else.
I ended up emailing the company directly to confirm that my Spotify ads had gone live. Matt, the founder, promptly and kindly emailed me back with confirmation.
I appreciate Matt’s response, and honestly, I’ve got a lot of grace for slow email threads – as someone who runs a similar business, I’ve botched client communication more times than I’d like to admit. When you have hundreds of clients, keeping everyone in the loop is tough.
But still, I would’ve liked a preemptive note to let me know that the ads were going live.
On the good side, though…
Spin’s playlists do seem to be high quality. They’re engaged, they’re decent fits, and they’re still featuring my music 48 days after my campaign started.
For $299, that’s not too bad.
And that’s my scoop on Spin.
If you’re thinking about trying playlisting (whether through Spin or somebody else), I hope this little recap of my experience has been helpful. And if you’ve already tried Spin yourself, I’d love to hear about your results – shoot me a reply and let me know how things went for you.
Regardless, thanks for reading, and as always, here’s wishing you good luck.
