You may have heard me sing the praises of playlist building before. But at the risk of being redundant, here’s a quick rehash of the strategy:
- You create your own Spotify playlist that perfectly fits your music – “Best Underground Rap,” for example, or “Sad Ballads for Crying in the Car”.
- You run Meta ads to that playlist.
- You get saves on the playlist and streams of your songs.
This works well because playlists are typically easier to advertise than individual songs; it’s relatively easy to get a fan of indie folk to listen to a playlist of indie folk. (It’s a bit harder to get someone to listen to an artist they’ve never heard of.) So you can usually get results at a cheaper cost.
It also works well because it places your music in the perfect context. In building a playlist, you feed the algorithmic overlords your sweet, succulent data, and so earn their hard-won approval.
It’s a sensible strategy.
But it’s typically required that you have an ad account set up on Meta, and at least some understanding of how Meta ads work. For some artists, these pieces have built up an insurmountable barrier.
Until now.
As I mentioned last week, I recently gave SubmitHub’s ads service a go. I came away impressed at how easy it made the whole process (and, to be honest, a little scared of the portent of this for my own business). In today’s email, per popular request, I’ll share a little more about the experience, as well as my results.
Without further ado:
Here’s what happened when I tried SubmitHub Meta ads.
Let’s start with how it works.
- You go to submithub.com/links and hit the “Create Meta Ad Button.”
- You paste in the URL of your playlist. (They’ll advertise songs, too, but for the reasons I’ve outlined above, they recommend building and advertising playlists.)
- You give SubmitHub a little bit of meta data to help them set up the campaign (i.e., you pick genres, similar artists, and the countries you’d like to target with ads).
- You pay for credits. Depending on how many you purchase at once, they’re about a dollar per credit. (I spent $112 to get about 140 credits).
- You submit the ad for approval.
And that’s it. Not to brag, but the whole process took me like seven minutes.
Within a few hours, I got an email from the SubmitHub team informing me that my ads had gone live:
And boom-presto, my playlist was off and running like Tom Cruise.
Now, all of this was done using SubmitHub’s recommended settings; their easy-mode default is to a) run the ads inside of their own ad account, and b) create the videos and text options for you.
They’ll let you hook up your own ad account and upload your own creative, too, if you really want to. But, let’s be honest, the appeal of this service is that you don’t have to do any of the work. So most artists (hello 👋) opt for the easy route.
Here’s what my results looked like.
As that image shows, we’re looking at 459 conversions (clicks to Spotify), which comes out to a cost per result of around $0.24, depending on how you rate the cost of a credit.
That’s… pretty good.
And things looked pretty good on the Spotify side of things, too. My playlist had already had a couple hundred followers prior to running the SubmitHub campaign, but their ads drove somewhere in the realm of 279 followers. That’s a cost per follower of about $0.40 – which I thought was pretty impressive.
(For context, my campaigns for my own playlists usually get to between $0.20 and $0.30 per follower. But in my 60+ campaigns for clients, I’ve averaged a bit north of $0.70 per follower. So yeah, I’d say $0.40 is pretty good.)
As of today, the playlist has just crossed the 1,000-stream mark for my own songs. I’m sure that, across the 47 other songs on the list, it’s driven several thousand more.
And those numbers will keep ticking up over time, since I plan to keep my songs on the list until I die or Spotify does (we’ll see which comes first).
It’s all rather impressive. Now…
Could I have gotten more streams through some other method?
Psh. Of course. Music marketing is my job.
I was beating SubmitHub’s numbers via my own ads, and I’m sure I could’ve blown the raw streaming numbers out of the water if I’d just paid a third-party playlisting company to get on big SEO-based lists.
But the whole point of this service is that a) it’s building a perfectly constructed list that you own, and b) it’s ridiculously easy.
No need to learn Meta ads. No need to get on a playlist like “TikTok Hits 2025” that doesn’t fit your music. No need to do anything, really, except click a few buttons.
As someone who runs a playlist ads service, I’ll grudgingly admit that this is cool stuff.
Two final notes before I wrap this up:
First, don’t take this review as some guarantee that SubmitHub ads will make you a superstar. They won’t.
It’s worth noting that the service doesn’t always work as well as it did for me. While I know artists who have gotten better results, I also know a few who have gotten disappointing returns. This isn’t some magic bullet; it’s just a tool in the toolbox.
Second, if you’d like to see a little more behind the scenes on how SubmitHub runs these campaigns, I’ll point you back toward my interview with Jason, the platform’s founder.
(As you might expect, given that I was one of half of the conversation, our discussion was meandering. But his insights were great.)
All right, that’s all I’ve got for today.
I hope this breakdown was helpful. And as always, here’s wishing you good luck, however you choose to market your music.
