Spotify's sneakiest move of all 🧐

Read this if you want to save yourself $$$

In the last week, I’ve had about 60 calls (I’ve lost count) with independent artists, discussing their problems, concerns, aspirations, and what they ate for dinner.

In fact… I have another call in 17 minutes…. so I’m about to crank this article out in hyperdrive.

Here’s another way that Spotify is screwing you, but if you can understand this, you’ll save yourself a kitten caboodle.

Here we go:

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Almost every artist I’ve spoken with is doing everything they possibly can to push their audience to Spotify.

The belief is, if they can get enough people to stream their song, they’ll trigger “THE ALGORITHM” and suddenly their phone will ring and someone will offer them a bag of money.

How do I know this? I tried this exact route when I was an artist.

I threw a shizload of money at Facebook ads that pushed to Spotify, and…. it worked.

My debut song got added to Fresh Finds on Spotify, and proceeded to get 200,000 streams.

I waited by the phone… kicking my legs and twirling my hair in excitement.

It never rang.

In fact, over time, my streams started steadily decreasing, leaving me with this sinking feeling that I was “missing my window”.

So what did I do?

I paid for more ads.

Are you following so far? I only have 12 minutes so keep up.

Now… this is a good time to teach you a common marketing principle.

It takes ~8 touchpoint with someone before they’re willing to make a purchase from you.

That means you need to get someone’s attention ~8 times if you want to sell them tickets, merch, etc, and actually MAKE MONEY (what’s that?) from your music career.

But because Spotify does not share the data on who the 200,000 people who streamed my song, it is impossible for me to ever re-engage that audience.

It’s like having 200,000 people walk into your store, say “nice stuff”, and then walk out forever.

So essentially, what my ads were doing were simply pulling people off of Facebook/Instagram, and pushing them to Spotify. Spotify said “thanks”, and kept the data for themselves, allowing them to monetize the audience (and not me).

Sneaky lads.

So what’s the stupid point of this stupid article?

(9 minutes)

If you want to actually make money from your music, then you need to completely rewire your relationship with music marketing.

Instead of driving people somewhere else (Spotify, Apple Music, etc)… you need to drive them to someplace that you own, like an email list, SMS list, etc.

Once you do that, you can build an actual relationship with your audience and develop trust and awareness (just like you and I are building right now ☺️).

In hindsight, I would’ve been much better off with 2,000 emails than I would with 200,000 streams, because I would’ve been able to actually monetize that list at some point instead of simply paying for more ads to try and trigger the algo again.

(6 minutes)

So - please - for the love of all things….

Hear me when I say that “THE ALGORITHM” won’t save you.

Trying to make money by triggering the algorithm is like trying to pay rent by buying lottery tickets.

Instead… take that effort to build a real asset that you can continue to engage with.

Eventually, with enough trust and time, you’ll be able to actually sell something without paying out the wazoo to do it.

FOR EXAMPLE: We’re still enrolling in our 3-month mentorship program that lets you sit in on our record label meetings and work directly with our team on your music promotion…

So if you’d like to learn more about this program, simply click this long and overly hyperlinked link that will take you to a page to learn more about that very program.

Back to work, thanks for sharing my 15 minutes of free time.

• Michael from MAD RECORDS

(If you’d like to learn more about “The Artist Incubator” and work with our team to develop a marketing strategy for your music that actually works, click the button below: