The Best Music Marketing Newsletter You'll Read In The Next Five Minutes.
“Actually, this is the only music marketing newsletter I read.”
– Jon’s Mom

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,

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

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

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.

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

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