The Music Marketing Genius Behind 300M+ Streams ft. Andrew Southworth

Don't expect your first campaign to be great. Iterate and test and try and fail. If nothing is good enough, go make new ads. It has to cost a lot. If you're running ads like this with the goal of profiting, you shouldn't do it. You're making an investment into the fans of your music. What's like a small campaign that really yielded very impactful results for a client? We did an ad for a song called Ascend. We spent $350. And it has over 700,000 streams now for that $350 investment. Whoa. Wow. Final words of wisdom for artists trying to crack ads. How would you do that? Well spin a rock spin. I think I mentioned to you when we talked before this, it was like Henry did put me onto your channel. Like as he was trying to build up his own, you know, producer career, he was releasing music like on Spotify. Like your channel was like a constant rotation. Dude, I think we binged every fucking video at the time, right?

And so it's really awesome that we get to have you on the podcast now because just like we were trying to learn ourselves, everyone that's part of our community is in the same boat as Henry, right? Like they're trying to figure out, they're trying to crack the code on how the hell do I get people off social media onto streaming platforms, onto YouTube, to my website, wherever I'm trying to bring people, like bring traffic to, like you're the fucking GOAT when it comes to this shit, man. That's what It does, man. Um so like I'm really, really excited for this. I know that your experience is pretty unique in comparison to some of the other, you know, music marketers that we've had on the podcast, because you really do come at this from the musician like lens, right? Which I think is really valuable. So, like, I just want to get a little bit about the like early days. Like, when did you start? So uh I started music marketing period, I believe 2019. That year I tried everything, every playlisting company I could find, every online service I could find.

I mean, I was in Adam's Ivy Adam Ivy's accelerator program then. Um, I took a million courses, etc. Um that year I was also working on a record for a band called Day Four. They, they they flew me out to San Francisco to record vocals. It's like a new metal kind of project. Um, and uh they had a big budget to promote the record. They kind of funded everything, but they didn't really know exactly how to do the marketing thing. And I had a little bit of experience from my trials and tribulations 2019. And I had done some ads before because I was selling like sample packs and contact libraries because I'm also a producer. So I was selling that on ads and doing some other random like little experiments with ads. And so I thought maybe try the whole Facebook ads thing with music and see what happens. And some of the people I hired back then, I mean, some of them vanished and turned out to be you know scams or whatever, right? Like, you know, I that year there was at least a handful of pro companies I hired ended up being just straight out bots, right?

Like, you know, that is a big thing in the music marketing world. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. And and uh, you know, fortunately, I didn't get any problems with songs getting pulled or whatever. But remember, there's this one service I tried where uh they guaranteed a certain number of streams and a certain number of followers, and I thought it was suspicious, but I had hired that company to do my logo and it came out really good. So I was like, they seem like a good people or whatever. And then overnight, literally, the song got 5,000 streams and 500 followers, which is exactly what they promised in the campaign. And I was like, oh, this is bullshit. Um I've heard that like anytime any marketer guarantees you anything, that it should be like a giant red flag, right? Because you don't you don't know how these campaigns are gonna go. You have knowledge and you can do it the best you can do it, but you can't guarantee anything, right? For the most part, yeah. Like nine times out of 10, someone's guaranteeing something, it's a red flag, and you should avoid them. There are certain circumstances where you can do it.

Like when I first started my ad agency, we were we were playing around with the idea of selling people like guaranteed numbers of conversions instead of selling people like fixed ad budgets and ratios. But the basically the way you do that is you you you charge a certain cost per conversion that you know most of the time you'll make a good profit from. And then in the cases where you're gonna lose money, you just you just refund the campaign before, or like you you don't lose much on those, then you profit enough on the other ones to make it a positive positive. And like another scenario is like the playlisting world. A lot of those companies are able to guarantee streams because they know roughly like how many streams each playlist is getting on a certain basis. But it should be a red flag if they're promising like an exact result. Like it should never be like, you know, we're gonna get you X amount of streams, like a specific number and X amount of followers or saves or whatever. Um, because you know, the behind the scenes, those playlist companies get it wrong all the time.

They'll overdeliver, they'll like double the stream count, they'll underdeliver, then you'll have to contact their support and re-add you. Um, and so there's a few other situations like that. Like views on YouTube is another one. A lot of companies will sell guaranteed views. They're just running YouTube ads, but they know, like with the country selection they use, they're gonna get like, let's say, on average, two to three cents a view. And so they're just gonna charge the customer five cents a view. So they're making a markup off like on average, they know they can get this. So they charge this, and then the difference is they'll make like nine out of 10 times. But yeah, I mean, if you have the data on like what you've seen for the average of all your campaigns that you've been running, I mean, that it's interesting because yeah, I would immediately be like, if it's guaranteed, fuck that. It's it's a it's a scam. But now it makes sense, or your money back. The reason why, like ironically, with the guaranteed stream model, that was probably when we had the highest profit margin. Because like the reason we did that is because from a customer's perspective, it's like, oh, like guaranteed number of conversions, I mean my campaign can only be so bad.

But what that means is if you do a killer campaign, you can have this massive profit margin. Um, and you don't have to spend a big chunk of their budget to do it. But but over time, like it became pretty apparent, like this is not a transparent way to run a business like this. Like, We, we we can't tell people how much money we've spent in their ads. We can't tell them what their cost per conversion is. We can't tell them what the audiences did best, because if we did, they would know how much money we were making. It just felt very shady. Yeah. So pretty quickly, uh customers called us out on it. We realized it didn't feel good to be on the other side explaining it. And we said, screw it, like we're gonna go to like a percentage model, like most other agencies. But ironically, you would think very risky way to do business, but a lot of times doing a fixed cost is actually the most profitable way because you kind of obfuscate all the stuff in the middle and you're just selling them like conversions. Uh, but you know, yeah, overall, long story short, should be a red flag when someone's guaranteeing a lot of things. Uh, but sometimes it's actually legit.

You just you have to be like very mindful that it makes sense. You know, you know. If if they don't have a good explanation for how they can guarantee it, um, you should run away. Yeah. Interesting. Is there like a big like lesson learned that came away from some of those earlier campaigns that you were running? Like just looking back on them, like, oh shit. Like in terms of like my first campaigns from our music, or from like an agency perspective. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just even you doing it for yourself. I mean, back when I first started doing it, they were just traffic campaigns because I had no idea what I was doing. What does that mean? You know, because like our audience and uh and us sometimes don't even get used to talking to people who are like borderline ad experts. Yeah, yeah. No, we're not. We're not those people. So there's there's two there's a few ways to run a campaign on Facebook. Okay. Um, every time you run a campaign, you want to choose an optimization goal. Like, what is the campaign focusing on? For example, is your campaign focusing on getting 15 second video views or engagement, like likes and comments, or is it optimizing around link clicks? Meaning you have a button that says listen now is it optimizing for people when people click that button?

Um, or the way that we do it, and a lot of people do it now, is you run it was as what's called a conversion campaign. And so the way that works is instead of optimizing for when people click the listen now button on the ad, it's when they click the listen now button, they go to a landing page, like a feature FM, hyped it, smart noise, etc. Like it's it kind of looks like a link tree. It'll be like the artwork for the song and the title of the song, and then like Spotify, Apple, YouTube Music. Every platform, yeah. Yeah, every platform or or a certain list that you kind of like want. And um, you put what's called a Facebook pixel on this page. And that pixel communicates back to Facebook ads what people are doing on that site. Because Facebook doesn't own that site. Feature FM does, and they're kind of selling it to you as the controller of it. Um, so you put the pixel on there, and now Facebook can see when people click on the ad, do they actually land on the page? And that's step one. But then if they land on the page, do they actually click to go to Spotify or not?

And that's the conversion. So basically, a link click campaign would be it's just optimizing to get people to click that listen now button. And then Facebook's like, we're done, we don't care what happens next. Conversion campaign, if they they have to click in the ad, land on the page, and then click one of those buttons to go to a DSP. And if they don't do that, it doesn't count as a conversion. So the algorithm will basically try to look for people who go through all the steps of that funnel. Click on the ad, land on the page, and go to a streaming platform. And that sounds like an act of God to try and, you know, I mean, get I mean, get people to like take those those steps, right? I mean, it has it has to cost a lot, even it costs more to do a conversion for sure. But the what ends up happening is if you do the traffic campaign, there's no way to filter out bots because bots can click on ads on Facebook and Instagram. They they the bots won't have accounts on Spotify because they're just bots. Oh, we got the thumbs up in my Oh, wow. Is that Riverside doing that.

Uh no, it's my Mac webcam. Shout out Mac. Yeah, shout out Apple for that one. Um, but the traffic campaigns, bots can click on links, they they won't translate to streams or anything, they'll just basically click and then vanish. Um Wow. But you'll see on your Facebook, like I'm getting like a penny per link click, and I've gotten a thousand clicks, but on Spotify, I have less than a hundred streams, or sometimes less than 10 streams for those thousand clicks. So it's like, where do those people go? And in the in the cases, what I assume is the case is that they're either never real people in the first place, they click by accident, or they were so uninterested that they clicked and then just got distracted and left. Yeah, right. Um, now when you do a conversion campaign, you're making people jump through more hoops, so it's gonna be more expensive. But if you get a thousand conversions, I don't know what's the excuse for that one. My thumb's not even up. Um but if you have Dude, Apple's just like good point, Andrew. Keep cooking.

Yeah, you are snapping right now. Thanks, Tim Cook. Yeah. Jesus. get out of our fucking interview, Tim. That better be in the recording, by the way. You better be able to see that. I'm pretty sure you can. Good. I've had this on my channel too. Awesome, awesome. Um, if you get a thousand conversions, well, they will cost more. Those thousand conversions should translate to a thousand to fifteen hundred streams. So versus like a thousand clicks, less than ten streams, a thousand conversions, over a thousand streams. Um, and the difference is you have that page in the middle that's filtering out bots because the bots might click in your ad, but they're not gonna navigate this page and click to go to a DSP. They're just gonna vanish. And if someone who clicked by accident is certainly not gonna click by accident twice. And if someone's not interested, they're not gonna click twice. So it basically trains the Facebook AI to look for people that are high quality, filter out the bad actors and the bad bots and stuff like that. Um, and you end up with a much better result in Spotify. Even if it cost, let's say the link click is one penny per click, and the conversion campaign is 40 cents per click, which would be like kind of like a a mid result overall, like not good, not bad, just kind of like meh, um, depending on the country selection.

Even though it's 40 times more, that conversion campaign will do way more on your Spotify than the one penny link clicks because none of those link clicks are gonna turn into streams. Um back in the day, you know, when I started off this thing about explaining link clicks and conversions, I was talking about I was running ads back then, and more the biggest mistake that I made. And it was running traffic campaigns back then. Back then, you could get lucky and kind of get away with using traffic campaigns, and they would just work some of the time. By like this third or fourth campaign I was running, the traffic campaign stopped working. Whether that was just like Facebook changed something, or I just got lucky the first three times and they work pretty well, or whatever. But the reality was I launched a campaign, just the way I was doing it at the time, traffic. And it's like, oh, I'm getting all these clicks for super cheap. This must look really good on Spotify. Look in Spotify like 20 streams. Um, and that's when I started switching to the conversion objective that pretty much everyone does now.

But back in the day, most people were doing just traffic campaigns and wondering why Facebook ads were so useless. And it was because they're just they're getting like bots clicking on their ads and they're not properly like setting it up in a way that gets actual people that will listen to their songs and not just listen but engage in a very high quality. Yeah, but Andrew, let's let's I can just hear our audience right now still listen to some of the like metrics that you threw out and just have a hard time wrapping their heads around this, right? Like, let's do some music industry math here, right? You said a thousand conversions can typically, you know, guarantee a thousand to fifteen hundred streams, right? Like, I mean, walk me through you said 40 cents per thousand conversions, that's $400, right? Mm-hmm. $400 to get $400, you would need to get a hundred thousand streams. Yeah, that's true.

So how do you have conversations with people who do that math and they're like, Andrew, the math ain't mathing? Yeah. Well, you're clearly not getting it back directly from otherwise you got a money printing machine. And that's that's not the well. So, so yeah, like how what kind what what kind of conversation do you have with artists that come to you and they're like, look, bro, like I like this all sounds good. Of course, I want people to like go to my Spotify, but like I I'm having trouble making sense of this. Yeah, yeah. So there's a few angles for this. One is uh if you're in my opinion, if you're running ads like this with the goal of profiting, you shouldn't do it because you're doing it for the wrong reason. There it is. Um that's yeah, cue the sound effect. Uh but that's that's the first point. Now, however, that being said, I do know a ton of people who do this and actually do profit off of the streams alone. So it is possible. Like I yeah, how does how does that happen? So I said a thousand conversions pretty much guarantees a thousand to fifteen hundred streams, as long as it's set up correctly and and everything's working. That's in like the short term, like in that first initial like week of when you got those conversions.

Yeah. One thing that happens is let's say you run a campaign and you get 10,000 streams, and then you stop the ads and never promote the song again. In six months, the streams are gonna double, and in a year the streams are gonna triple with no additional ad spend, with with no algorithmic traction. This is just assuming fans that have found the song from your ad re-listening over the course of time. So double in six months, triple in a year. I don't have metrics for two years and three years, but it kind of keeps going in multiples over time. So that's one part. Second part, if you hit algorithmic playlists, you will end up with way more streams from the algorithm than what you actually put in in the first place. So, for example, this is a very extreme example, but I ran a fairly beefy campaign. I think it was like seven to ten grand ad spend for a song that let me see what it's at streamwise now. But it was a song called Set Fire to the Rain by Baddies only. It was like a cover of an Adele song.

Okay. Um now what we ended up finding out later is he also hired another another ad agency to run a campaign on it too. But their campaign was a little smaller. So overall, let's just say it's I don't know, 15 grand or something. Um but our campaign was like seven to ten. When we looked at the data later, out of the at the time it had 12 million streams. I don't know if I'm mixing it up with another song, but either way, it doesn't matter. I might be mixing up that song with another song we did called Rain. But either way, um the song had 12 million streams at the time. Out of those 12 million, 10 million came from radio or discover weekly. The ads only drove two million directly, at least, like from fans re-listening and all that jazz. Um, and then the other 10 million, it was like 8 million radio, 2 million Discover Weekly, 2 million from ads slash organic audience. So that is like the kind of big oomph factor that can make these campaigns profitable. Yeah, that's interesting.

You don't I wouldn't have thought that, you know, you can there's other benefits directly than than just the you know, the direct listener. The one person that listening, yeah, liked it. And then to his point, I'm gonna listen to it at least once more in the next six months. And I'm triggering algorithms a couple more times. And I'm getting on these playlists. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of interesting. So let me take a moment to interrupt this episode and tell you about our friends over at DistroKid. DistroKid is easily the best DIY distributor on the marketplace. Let me tell you why. It's only $23 a year. That's less than $2 a month for you to upload unlimited music to all of your favorite streaming platforms on the planet. It's so easy that it takes me like five minutes per upload, and that's when I'm multitasking dealing with my two year old son. Hands down, my favorite part about DistroKid is how easy it is to add credits to an upload. I don't know what distributor you're using, but with DistroKid, it's super easy. You can put the artist, the producer, the songwriter. I'm pretty sure you can put like the junior associate engineer of a song.

And me, I I want to know who's on the record. And if you sign up using this link, you're gonna get 30% off an already insanely low price, and you can finally start adding your collaborators because they are checking. They will notice when their name's there and they will thank you for doing it. Let's get back to the episode. What do you think? Okay. That's what can happen. Yeah. That will lead a song to profit. Yeah. But I don't think people should rely on that. Because most songs are not, that's not gonna happen. Like if if you're if you're smart with your money and you double down on the songs that show the good signals and you pull back and spend little on the songs that are doing poorly, um, those are the people that I know that make a living through their streams alone, that's essentially what they do. Um, or they're in like a very bingeable format of music, like some type of sleep music thing, classical, lo-fi, where they're they're they're getting like a ton of streams per person, like driving someone to a playlist and getting 50 to 100 streams per listener, like immediately within like two days. Never mind if that person follows them and listens again.

But the the most people, the way I think people should treat it is you're making an investment into the fans of your music. If you don't have fans, you can't play a you can't sell tickets to a show, never mind, even get booked for a show in the first place. So a lot of times when you're trying to book a show or you're negotiating rates to get paid in a show, like what your guarantee is, they're looking at Spotify Monthly Listeners or and or social media metrics to decide if they're gonna let you play the show, which is silly because it has no bearing on how many tickets you can sell. True. But that's the reality of the industry now. Um and I've heard that for like every genre from DJs to metal artists to hip hop to EDM, like it's every genre, like there's some type of industry bullshit where you need some numbers to kind of prove you're legit enough for them to book you for the show. So are a lot of successful artists, do they just have like some songs that have a ton of streams and then a lot that just have no streams? Is that pretty common amongst winning artists?

I wouldn't say no, but yeah, like it's not uncommon to see you know their their top few songs of like a million, and then like they have a bunch more with like a hundred thousand, and then they have others that are like 50K and 20K, 30K. Interesting. Um, and even if you look at like a big artist, that's not too unusual either. Like, I don't know, like if I look up like machine gun Kelly or something. Oh, because I mean let's be honest, if if I want to listen to a certain artist, I'm guilty as fuck of like I even this like local artist uh here in in Atlanta. Um, I went to his profile and I started from the top, most popular, and I didn't have it on shuffle, and it just took me, and I'm not gonna listen to a hundred songs by him, so it probably played me the top five, and it's just this like vicious cycle of just you know, gassing up the top five and then just leaving the rest of the discography like out to dry, you know. You know what I mean? And also the artist and the team promoting the songs that have proven that they can work. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. If you have a song that's blowing up your Spotify algorithm and it's growing your monthly listeners, and it's like you're making money. You know, I the the biggest campaign I ever run is probably like 20 grand, but the reason why they spent 20 grand is because they made it all back like pretty much immediately. Wow. Um so it was it was like they started off with like three or five grand, and then it was like, whoa, like you're gonna make this back in like a month. Uh and the artist is like, okay, here's another five. Just on streaming. Here's another five. Yeah, just on streaming. Like that song we spent, it was about $20,000 USD. And um Oscar Medkay. I made a few videos about these guys, so that's why I feel comfortable just saying their artist names. Usually I keep clients secret, future clients. I keep you secret. Yeah, uh he has nine million streams on Spotify, and most of it, almost all of the results we ran for in tier one countries, which would be like US, UK, Germany, like countries that pay much better on Spotify. Um so that's like, you know, if you assume $3,000 per million streams, which is pretty reasonable in most cases, that's $27,000.

Yeah. Just from Spotify. Never mind Apple and Deezer and Tidal and YouTube. And I believe the success of the song led to it actually getting like a sync license deal because the right person saw it, loved the song, and and put it in like a TV show or film or something. Yeah, man. I I just know I mean, you're guilty of this shit too, bro. Let's don't even like play around. Like we we get told about an artist. What's the first thing you're doing, bro? Going to Spotify, looking at monthlies, looking at streams, going to Instagram, looking at followers, looking at engagement. Like, it's just how the world works. So I mean, I I I love that you you know use that example of just it's a mindset shift that we need to have, right? Like shit. We posted this video, it was just like recapping a story that we heard from this other like social media music manager like character, um, talking about how this band's manager uh paid to sell out their tour, they paid seat fillers to basically sell out the tour, and like the whole fake it till you make it, like perception is reality, like it really holds true in this business, man. Like, especially in entertainment, like other industries too, but like specifically in music and entertainment, like it is a hundred percent like the the way this shit works.

And I think that it it it applies to Spotify and DSPs and it applies to social media, right? And then obviously it applies to live shows, apparently, too. You know, what I mean? that's why you gotta really love this shit. If you want like you gotta really like love music and have to be here in your bones to want to participate in some of this, cutthroat, right? It's tough, man. I mean, just like having money, you know, people that are born with money have this huge advantage, you know. what I mean, like just being talented is like I feel like less important than ever, which sucks for the listeners. If you think about like an artist's whole money making source, like all the income sources they can possibly have, yeah. Um streaming usually isn't the biggest thing. But so the when I started talking about the touring, um, you can't book a show unless you have fans. You can't get the show in the first place if you don't have fans. You can't sell merch if you don't have fans, you can't have a Patreon if you don't have fans, you can't have a mailing list if you don't have fans. So the the Spotify, like while you can make money from it.

Um, in my opinion, you should assume you're gonna lose money on it, but you're investing in the future of your fan base. And at some point, you'll hit a critical mass, or you'll do like one of the other areas of your career will start to make sense, and then that will be the thing where you actually have it financially make sense. And I think people should treat the Spotify as their like top of funnel. Like if it's almost like um like a like social media in a way, YouTube too. You know, most YouTubers don't make their money from their YouTube videos, right? Like YouTube AdSense is maybe like five percent of my annual income. You do brand deals and sponsorships and stuff, right? For some people, it's like almost all brand deals or sponsorships or Patreon or merch or products and services. Like for me, it's it's courses, it's consulting, it's my ad agency. Yep, YouTube itself pays me practically nothing in comparison. Um, and so well, you can make a living like Mr.

Beast does brand deals, but like the amount of money he makes from ad revenue, it's probably millions of dollars a month. He could make a living off of that if he didn't spend so much if he didn't give away all those millions in the next fucking video. Crazy shit he does. Yeah. but you know, it's like most most YouTubers are not, and it's I think it's the same for music. Like, as much as it sucks, your music is like the it's like the gateway drug to your brand, and then everything else in your brand makes the money. The music on Spotify is the ad for you to come in them to come into your world and then buy the t-shirt and the hoodie and come to the show, but bro, is it fucked up that my head immediately goes to wait? No, isn't that what social media is for? Isn't the content what the what's the game? Like, I'm literally so fucked up in the head that I like look at this of like, wait, why would like playing their music be the way to like get the fans? Like, how does that work? But it's obviously how it should work. So thank god that there's people doing this successfully with that like mindset because I was like, oh my god, I just like thought I went into my brain for a second and I was like, Jesus Christ, Ben.

I was like, this is so pathetic. Why does it work like this? Yeah, like I'm thinking that a like a performance like I do think that like performance style content where you are showcasing your music is how you actually get fans, right? Like casual discovery content is just gonna get eyeballs, right? So I at least like thought that, but I was kind of like, dang, it seems like a lot of work where you could just you know drive people to an Instagram video instead of driving them to Spotify. But I mean, like if you think about the the funnel in that perspective, it's like your your widest net uh is gonna be like your social media, yeah. And that's people who you're just trying to get to listen to any like little sliver of what you have to offer. Yeah, and then from there, like they don't become fans on social media, they they discover you on social media, they can also discover you on Spotify, but if they discover you on Instagram, let's say, and then they're like, Oh, this is a good song. The first thing they're gonna do is go to your stream, whatever streaming platform they love and follow you and add their songs to your playlist and all that stuff, and then just kind of live with your music for a period of time, and over a certain period of time, they're gonna be hearing your music, checking out new releases, checking out your content, assuming they're still interested, and then over time, a certain percentage of your audience what's with the thumbs up thing? I gotta figure out. But a certain small we're gonna title this episode, thumbs up. thumbs up with Andrew Southworth.

Everybody smash that like button. Yes, thank you. So um the oh yeah, and then a certain percentage of those people, a small sliver will become your super fans, and that might be one percent, might even be less than one percent. If you had 100,000 fans, you might have a thousand super fans or something like that. Um, and those are the people who will actually buy your shit, you know, they'll buy your merch, they'll buy your Patreon, they'll join a monthly membership, et cetera. Come to a show. So, you know, a lot of our audience doesn't have 20K to spend on ad spend, right? So what's yeah, what's a um what's like a an example or like a go-to case study that you you know like to use as far as like a small campaign that really yielded some like very impactful results for a client? Because I think that's that'd be really valuable to know. A little Success story for someone. Like how much money do I need to spend to see real results, right? Or comparatively speaking, real results.

I would say um most artists I know spend between $500 and a thousand dollars per song, assuming they're running the ads themselves. If you're outsourcing it, you need to do more just because you're not only paying for the ads, you're paying for the fee of the person running your ads. Um, but 500 bucks to a thousand bucks USD, uh, I would say is the most common range I see from artists uh funding their stuff. Of course, there's artists who have 10k plus, and there's artists who have 300 or a hundred dollars. I would say 10 bucks a day is kind of like the lower end of if you can't do, you know, I don't, it's hard to say exactly what the floor is, but 10 bucks a day, whether you're doing it for like the whole month, you know, so 300 a month kind of a thing, or you're doing 10 bucks a day and you're killing it after after like two or three weeks, you know, so it's a little less. I think that's kind of the bottom end. But to give some examples that people can look up on Spotify right now. Um, I have a uh side project that we've been dormant for like three years, but we finally released our a song in like the first one in three years, like two weeks ago.

Okay, shout out to you. Let's go. You know, and gotta get back to it. We did an ad for a song called Ascend. Uh, this was you know 2020 or 2021. We spent 350, and the song did great at the time, but the thing is not only did it get in Discover Weekly and Radio, it stayed in there all this time. Like it's still getting algorithmic traction from that campaign we ran four years ago. Whoa, yeah. And it has over 700,000 streams now for that 350 investment. Now that is a very extreme example, probably like the best case scenario, probably get a little bit lucky. So on that same project, Murder Night, every song except for our newest one, and potentially the ones after that, if you're watching this in the future, um, we also spent 350 on. So the worst song in that catalog, I think has like 20,000 streams, and the best one is 700, and each one get a 350 budget. So that's alone should kind of tell you what's the spread on like one budget.

20,000 to 700,000. But those songs have the benefit of like years to just kind of fester and get relistened. Um, I did a more recent one for songs we ran a campaign for like a year ago at my agency, and I made a video about this. Um, where we got two campaigns that had a $1,500 ad spend. One of them had 15,000 streams. And well, let me rephrase. A year ago, we ran these campaigns, they lasted for about six weeks, and then they stopped, and the artist didn't do anything more. So I was looking at the results one year after the campaigns had ended approximately, and one of them had 15,000 streams for $1,500, the other one had 1.1 million. So that's the difference between like not a very good cost per conversion. Like I think it was like between 40 and 50 cents on the 15,000 stream one. The other one was like 20 cents or less, like 18 or something. So very, very good cost per conversion.

What are the factors that could make such a wide, you know, discrepancy there? Uh the song is the biggest one. Sure. Um better song. Yeah. And honestly, like that's that's kind of ultimately what it comes down to. Not necessarily better, but just like more marketable than ad creatives and a better fit to audience. So there were two different songs by two different artists. One was like a synthwave thing, and I don't remember what the other one was, but um one did like not awful, but like not good cost per conversion. The other ones did amazing cost per conversion. The one that did not good didn't get very good engagement, the other one had really good engagement, like a high percentage of people saving it, a very good stream per listener. This one had a very low percentage of people saving it, very bad stream per listener. Uh, this one when it got put on radio and discover weekly and release radar, it like maxed it like went shoot super high, super fast, and it stayed on there for months. This other one when it got pushed, it still hit the algorithm, got released radar, Discover weekly radio, it got pushed out and then just died a week later and then never got back on. I mean, I'm interested in the uh not necessarily better, but more marketable, you know, like what are the what are those factors like?

I think that's about pretty much hot button. Yeah, that's an interesting uh concept is because music's subjective, so better is kind of an irrelevant term in music. Um, what you might think is a better song, I might think is a pile of trash, and vice versa. Um, and sometimes you have a song that's objectively great, do bad, and sometimes you have a song that's objectively not well mixed, performance is not that tight, lyrics, eh, whatever. Uh it's not a bad song, it's just like not great, just does amazing. Um, and you know, for example, this might offend some people, but teach me how to Dougie. I would say that's objectively a bad song. Hot takes with Andrew. It's super repetitive, but like it's it's it's not come, it's not complex, it's not unique, it's not exciting. It's just like a fun song to dance to at a wedding, essentially, in my opinion. And I'm sure some people love it.

And like that's the thing about music, it's objective. Like, like no one's gonna give that song a Grammy, right? It's just a fun, marketable, memorable song. Um, and I'm trying to think, I don't know what a good opposite example would be, but you know, you can think of some songs you're listening to them like this is like powerful, this is making a strong statement, this is complex. People spent time on this, and then you hear another song like someone just like crapped that one out in an hour. But it's fun, who cares? It's memorable, it's cool, it's whatever. And and like a lot of times when the success of a song isn't necessarily tied to how amazing it is. Sometimes it is, right? Like Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, I'm sure everyone would agree, is like a masterpiece, one of the best songs of all time. Um, you know, and some if you look at Taylor Swift's catalog, there's some songs that people would probably say, like this one actually feels like it's like unique and exciting, and it's got this cool story. And then other songs you feel like this is her song, like just trying to be like a radio hit. And I think that's kind of one way to think about the marketability thing.

Um, some songs don't stick. They might be objectively great, but they just don't, people aren't excited about them. They're aren't compelled to go click. And another kind of category in that if if you think of like your favorite artist of all time, chances are when you first discovered them it was for some mainstream single that they did and then if you think of what your favorite song is it's probably not that mainstream single it's probably some like B side from their third album that never made the radio um man there it is again so apparently I stick my thumb out too much um yeah does that make sense you know it's like yeah it's it's it's kind of a harsh reality you know that some people because you know artists are guilty of you know they they love to pick their favorite song off the album or or like this one is the single but sometimes maybe they need if you want to be successful anyway or you want your ad to get the most conversions maybe you need an outside opinion telling you like this one is the most marketable this one maybe is the most fun this one is probably gonna you know perform the best for your marketing dollars. So well so let's do this.

Let's say I have two songs and I'm an artist, right? And I do want to determine which of the songs is more marketable and will drive the highest uh you know conversions for link or sorry the highest amount of conversions what kind of tests can I run to just get to that answer as quickly as possible posting content. Well let the fucking expert answer I'm not interviewing you about ads to conversions. One really good way to do it um a lot of people have a lot of artists have used like TikTok as kind of a way to test ideas and they'll do it before the song's even done because the the idea is if you know, if if I write 10 songs from start to finish and then have to release them and find out which one's gonna work, that's a that's a lot of work for to find one song. But like let's say I write like 10 choruses and I just pour them out on social media at scale and see which one takes off and then go finish the song and release it. I've saved myself from finishing 10 songs, nine of which weren't gonna do that well in the first place.

So that is that is a valid strategy. Um it's also a ton of work. The way that I often do it is let's say I'm working with an artist that's actually prepared, which is not a high percentage of artists. Not not not very well prepared in the future. A lot of artists, just like how a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck. A lot of artists are living song to song, not a good feeling, you know, because like you're dropping a song without any indication of what your future is gonna be and what's the strategy like linking them. Um so if you have let's say you have five songs done or 10 songs done, and you're pretty prepared and linked up, but you don't know what order you're gonna release them in, and you don't know when when to release them yet. You can run an ad campaign that I call a multi-song test campaign. You make videos for all five of those songs, and you run a campaign on them as if the songs were all released. But like so, you know, videos as if the songs were released, people click on them, go to a landing page if the song is released, and then when they click to go to Spotify, they just get thrown to your Spotify profile. And at that point, they're just gonna click on one of your other songs.

Why does that keep happening? They're just gonna this is gonna be the the the joke in the for this video. Yes, it already is. We're not even done yet. But but um the when I get to Spotify, some people might feel bamboozled, like, hey, like I clicked on the song and now I can't find it. But you're not gonna do this like at scale. You, this is something you would do like a hundred, $200 on, just enough to figure out of those five songs, which ones do great, which ones do bad, which ones are the middle, what do those videos like? And then if you find those winners, now you already know. You already know what are the winning songs, what are the bad songs and bad songs, say for the album, maybe good songs releases singles, songs in the middle, maybe go film new ads and then do the test again. Hmm. So with those five songs and five videos that are in the multi-song test campaign that you're referencing, are those like same location, same outfit, like same everything except for the song? Like are we keeping that all consistent or if you can, chances are probably not though, just because uh, you know, it's hard for an artist to to realistically kind of plan for something like that in a lot of cases, but in a perfect world, everything would be controlled, exactly the same and controlled.

Yeah, to just know which song's hitting. It's only the song at that point. It's just the song difference. Now, in reality, you'll have different ads and those will contribute to the differences, but most of the difference between performance is actually just because of a song. So I do want to talk about like what are all the factors that like contribute to an ad campaign, right? Like to the success of it, because obviously you do have the song, but then you have, you know, you're mentioning like what is the ad actually, right? Like there's literally like words and stuff, you know what I mean? Like, can you walk us through just like the different varying factors, right? Um, that can exist that we need to potentially tweak, you know what I mean? Um to to see what works. The number one factor, fortunately, is the song. Okay, good. That's good. Um, I guess fortunate or fun or unfortunate, depending on how the music is. For the for the real for the real ones out there, it's fortunate.

Yes, exactly. For the for all of our people, it's fortunate. Only only people who follow the One More Time podcast, make fire music. So every single one of them all of them, exactly. Um, and so number one thing song. Number two, I would say is the ads that you're showing to people. Meaning the actual the actual video, the actual video. Okay. And of that video category, there's a subset of like things to try. So you can try different parts of the song, and that's like one of the number one things I make sure I try for every song. Is I'll try, you know, let's say verse one, pre-chorus, chorus, verse two, bridge, last chorus, right? I've I don't know, I lost count, but was that like six different parts of the song? Yeah. Some songs might have less, some songs might have more. And that's but for videos, you can also have different locations, or maybe one video is like a TikTok style lip sync video standing in front of a beautiful mountain with some caption like POV. You just wrote the best banger hip hop song of the year.

You know, you've seen the song of the summer, song of the summer, and then you do another one on the beach, and then you do another one in the snow, or maybe you have like a lyric video, or maybe you have a music video, or maybe you have a so there's an in like kind of infinite variables in the videos, like maybe one has lyrics in the bottom and one doesn't. Maybe one's in black and white and one's in color. And so typically you narrow it down to some subset, like we're gonna try performance videos of the artist lip syncing on screen, like the TikTok style one I mentioned, and we're gonna try that for four parts of the song, and then we're gonna get um the artist had a music video. We're gonna chop that up and do five parts of the song for that, for example. And those might be the ads you're doing. So song ads, different variables in the ads, but ads are the next most thing. Because that's what the people actually see. The thing after that is the targeting, the audiences that you're running. So for example, you have a um you know, an alternative metal song. Let's say it's like a classic Lincoln Park hybrid theory era day stuff.

Um if you show that to people who are fans of Lincoln Park, they're gonna respond to it one way. If you show it to people who are fans of Nirvana, they're gonna they're gonna react differently, or fans of Red Hot Chili Peppers or fans of Taylor Swift. Like they're all very different audiences that like different types of music. And so that's kind of the last part is how what audiences do you try and how well do they do? And part of that is how accurate they are, or how receptive they are to your music. But the other part is that Facebook's an auction. So if there's heavy competition for an audience, you're just straight up gonna pay more to target that audience. So it's not necessarily like I sound like X, therefore that's the best audience. It's I sound like XYZ. Let's try all three of those and see which one does better or worse, and then turn off the bad ones, keep the good ones, and keep testing new ideas until we find the best combination. Because Nirvana fans, it might be cheaper even if it's slightly different sound. I might convert better.

Maybe everyone's targeting Lincoln Park fans because it's obvious, and no one's remembering that they can target Nirvana because I don't know, whatever reason. How do you figure out who to target? Is there a method? I well, usually artists have some type of indication of what they sound like. A lot of cases they're shockingly wrong, but um not surprised. Uh yeah, yeah. It's hard, it's hard to be so objective with your own music for sure. So uh, but some artists have it good, and from there you can look at Spotify for related artists and see like what is Spotify. I think is similar to that. I recommend asking maybe asking like five friends what they think you sound like, and then also asking five strangers who don't give a fuck about your feelings, what you they think you sound like, probably even more valuable than the friends, I would say. Yeah, and you'll there'll be an overlap there. There'll be like if you find an artist that the strangers and your friends and you all align with, it's probably a good pick. If you find one that your only your friends are saying that none of the strangers are saying, maybe they're telling you what you want to hear. Yeah, because they know you love Linkin Park, so therefore they're saying Linkin Park.

But if the strangers are like, yeah, this sounds nothing like Linkin Park, um, they'd be embarrassed that you even thought you sounded like them, right? Like you know, who knows, right? The strangers are going to be more blunt. Um, is the best form of targeting then uh targeting people who are fans of other artists? Uh you can also do genres and you can also do interests. So let's say you feel like your song would be actually the perfect song of the summer, and it's a very beach vibe song. You can target people who like certain like beachy, summery traveling type niches who also like your genre, or let's say it feels like a camping song, like it's a folk song that feels like you might sing it at a campfire on a road trip. You can target people who like folk americana singer-songwriter, acoustic music who also like camping RVs, road trips, and maybe some films that kind of fall into the niche where that music might be found. Hmm. Or tours. Let's say you you sound like you belong in like Lollapalooza or Ultra Music Festival or whatever, uh, or warp tour. Like you can target tours, you can target movies, TV shows, etc.

So, what's the best form of retargeting? Like, how should I approach retargeting, right? So, once I've maybe spent money on ads, right? Like, what are the different methods to retarget certain personas? Yeah, so retargeting can be a very good tool. And in some levels, it's great, and in some levels it's over blown in some ways. I was like, it sounds like he doesn't even want to retarget more of a cold audience guy. Yeah, I just yeah, I just I just asked about retargeting, and and Andrew is literally like I guess I'll answer this question, but like but retargeting is kind of ass if I'm being honest. It's a double-edged sword. Um people you get from your retargeting are almost definitively going to be higher quality, assuming you're retargeting the right people. That's the idea. Yeah. But there are a lot of people I know, like they're like, Oh, I need to build my audience so I can start doing retargeting, and all my ads are magically going to get cheaper. And a lot of the times those retargeting audiences cost more, not because they're not good leads, but because of the competition thing, like Facebook's an auction, so if you have a smaller audience, you just raised your auction rates essentially because the Facebook is less flexible to find people who are less like competitive.

Um, so it's for like streaming Spotify campaigns, which is the most common type of campaign that people run, I found retargeting is a good tool to try once you have a big enough audience. Just don't feel like you should get to this magical moment where everything's gonna be retargeting because that never happens. Um, but when you start getting into the realm of like merch and touring, specifically like touring, retargeting is fire, but you need a big enough audience. So when I run touring promotion ads to sell tickets, like 90% of the results often are coming from retargeting audience, at least in the case of a regular band. It's a little different if it's like a party, you know, those like EDM dance parties that crop up around cities and stuff like that. You don't know if you've ever seen those, but those are different. Like those have a value outside of the artist itself. But if let's say you're a band coming to town, it's very hard to get someone to that never heard of you before to buy a ticket. And so for those, retargeting is like almost mandatory.

So let's actually break down all the different ways that artists can be running ads. Like what should they be trying to achieve? Like we've mentioned driving them to Spotify, but let's let's literally walk through all the different use cases, right? That artists can be, you know, using paid paid ads for. Yeah. All right. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna start listing stuff. Let's go. Yeah. So um you can run ads for more music and streaming services. Yep. You can get more video views or engagement on your posts and social media. Okay. You can get more views in your YouTube video, you get more subscribers on YouTube videos. You can get more followers in your social media pages. Yep. You can sell tickets, you can grow your mailing list, you can sell merch, you can grow your Patreon, you can grow your TikTok following. And also basically everything we just said, you can do on multiple ad platforms, actually. So all the stuff that I just said, you can pretty much do all of it on Meta or TikTok or Google, but different ones will have certain better places to do it. Overall, right now I'd say Meta is like the best ad network.

Um, you can run ads to if you have another business. I've run ads selling uh getting leads for tattoo parlors and hairdressers and photographers. I've run ads selling courses. I've run ads selling sample packs and contact libraries. I've run ads promoting people's recording studios to try to get more clients to come into their recording studio or for mixing jobs or for mastering jobs. Um I'm starting to run out of ideas. No, that's a lot of things. That's a lot. Are any of those there was like 10 that were specific to artists, and there were like another eight that were like music adjacent. Yeah. Are are any of those like cheaper or harder to get you know what I mean? Like any any big differences in like some of those. So I kind of break things down by two different types of artists. One is what I call the industry artist, and the other one's what I call the indie artist. The industry artist is focused on getting as many fans as possible to check them out in streaming services and on social media.

But they're not gonna build like a grassroots movement of diehard fans that are super fans that are gonna buy stuff. They're focused on numbers. The other indie artists, they're focused, they don't care about the numbers, they don't care about social media. They mostly care about growing their email list, playing shows, and selling merch. The indie artist will make money sooner than the industry artist, but they're likely they're they're not as likely to become like what you would consider famous or like big as a big artist or whatever. But a lot of the cases are making way more money than the industry artist. Um, the industry artists will, if they pull it off right, they'll make all their money later once they're like actually successful. The indie artist is more focused on like making things immediately profitable. So for for some people, the indie side, you're gonna be focused on running um, you might run like a top of level, top of funnel awareness type of campaign for like video views, um, on like a longer, like three-minute performance video. And then you might retarget people who watch more than 25% of that video and try to offer them some sweet free goodie or experience to join your mailing list. And then you have your mailing list has an email automation sequence to try to sell them on some type of easy product to say yes to, like a free plus shipping and handling offer, a very cheap digital product, a very cheap product that that can be mailed, and then they're gonna try to get people to come out to their shows.

And they're mostly like if they're an American artist, they're gonna be doing almost all of that USA only. The indie artist is gonna primarily be streaming doing streaming campaigns up front, maybe campaigns to grow their social media following, promote their posts, make themselves look like they have a lot more going on. Or yeah, the industry artists, yeah. The industry artists, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're they're trying to do all the social media stuff, streaming platform campaigns, but they're not gonna do the email campaigns for a while, and the tour campaigns for a while, and the merch campaigns for a while. Um and there's not really a right or wrong way. It's just when you talk to an artist, they kind of naturally fall into one camp or the other. Like I'll I'll almost every time I've explained those two camps to an artist, and I'm like, which one are you? It's always like an immediate answer. Like, I'm the industry artist or I'm the indie artist. That was the best. It's huge. I love that breakdown, bro. Oh my God. Because I'm just in my head, like thinking of all the artists I know. And I immediately categorized them.

I immediately bucketized them. And I was like, this motherfucker, an industry artist, bro. This dude, an indie artist. I was, that's a that is a great way to think about it, man. Um I think artists need to, you know, be pretty self-aware in that sense too. Probably makes it easier if you kind of understand your path a little a little more, you know. Absolutely. So so one you can move around like over time. Like I know artists who start off in the indie and then they they like they actually are making good enough money where they're like, oh, let's invest some in like the streaming world. Or on the flip side, once the indie industry artist gets bigger, now they have enough funds and like retargeting audiences pulled up where they can start doing some of the indie game stuff. So you you can do both, but you need like a ton of time and resources if you want to do both from scratch. But it's not uncommon for an artist to start here and then test some of this stuff or start here and then test some of that stuff. Yeah. So, you know, you kind of mentioned like, oh, well, that campaign cost per whatever metric was kind of mid, right? Can you walk us through some of the most common examples of what good looks like, right?

Because we're not aiming for mid around here, Henry. Yeah, we're aiming for good. And meta ads doesn't say your ad is great or terrible. Yeah, yeah. So just so ironically, sometimes they do, but usually they're wrong. Oh, yeah. Okay, well, hot take, Andy. This new thing where they'll call your ad high performing, and And you'll you'll, you'll have a campaign. It's like the worst campaign you've ever run in your life. And you want to turn it off and I'll be like, are you sure you want to turn off this high performing campaign? Because you're not gonna pay them any. It's high performing for them. High performing for Mark Zuckerberg's wallet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we get how he has all those bees. but yeah, no, so it just you know, for people who are gonna start because a lot of people are gonna literally like exit out of this interview and immediately start trying to get into ads manager or like buy your course and then learn how to do this themselves or binge all your videos and figure this out. Like, what cost per whatever metric should they be looking at? And what does good look like as far as the cost?

Yeah, I would say that for specifically for what I call tier one and tier two countries, because keep in mind the results different depending on the country. Yep, yep. Um, so that would be like a mixture of countries like US UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and also countries like Brazil, Mexico, and also Italy and Spain end up being kind of cheaper too. Yeah, um, so kind of just targeting all of those. It's a list of 43 countries that I have, which if you grab my course, you'll also have it too. Link in the description. Link in the description. There you go. And um that for that particular configuration, uh, I call 20 to 30 cents per conversion great, 30 to 40 cents per conversion good or okay, 40 to 50 cents per conversion, like meh or fine or mid, as I said before, and under 20 cents, phenomenal. And if it's under 10 cents, I just call that stupid good. Stupid good money. like you can, and essentially if you were to do like tier one only, for the most part, just double that. And if you were to do US only, for the most part, like double to triple that.

Okay, way expensive out here, yeah. Yeah. So when when someone like hires my agency and they're like, I want to do US only, and we're like, You sure about that? You know, yeah, are you sure about that? If they have a good reason, yeah, like let's say they're like they're they're gonna be touring in six months, or they're they're they're an indie, they're an indie artist, they want to be able to do like retargeting stuff for the email list or whatever. Or maybe they make politically charged America music. I mean, I don't know. Who knows? I'm just saying. There's like a million good reasons to pay more for your ads, but what is a bad reason would be like I just want US in my stats. Like, like yeah, and that's usually what it is. Um, like sometimes people are like, for some reason they associate like as if if it's US, it must be real. And if it's like Brazil or Mexico, it's fake or something. Yeah, like as in top listener cities. Yeah. Yeah. People get really skeeved out and they want to have a certain vision of what their audience should look like. And for our marketing, it's it's just kind of like a joke. Like I know an artist with a million monthly listeners.

He's grown his career organically, he's been in multiple record labels, super long, satisfying career touring, all that jazz. His biggest country is the Philippines, which most people think of as a bot ridden place, which it can be if you're running ads, but like there, believe it or not, there are real people that live in the Philippines. No, no, there's not. And I bet he's gonna tell me they're called Filipinos or something. What? So it's a lot of times artists want to do US only. Like if it's a good reason, then good. But like a lot of times it ends up being a bad reason. And then they will spend people's money however they want us to spend it. Amen. Yeah, we just want to warn them. Do a cha-ching sound effect. You got one of those. I don't have that. Okay, no, my sound effects. I just thought you might've brought the money one to the Andrew Southworth episode. Our buddy Cato just had uh did a podcast with people at Spotify, and he posted a stat about the percentage of money that um American artists make from international listeners, and it's massive. It's all that ad campaign that Andrew's running.

It's all the Filipino bots, yeah. Cato is the uh he's the producer dude, the most viral producer on social media, of course. I think I've seen a few of his videos. I'm sure you have. He's good. Yeah, he's great, man. Yeah, um, but yeah, okay. So so the cost per cost per cost per conversion is that that's like the only metric then that you give a fuck about, huh? Uh that's the main metric on Facebook. Yeah. That's right. From there, you're looking on Spotify metrics after for the most part. So like what is your stre uh uh save rate, playlist ad rate, stream per listener, uh follow rate, et cetera. So like save rate would be what percentage of the people that listened to your song saved it, playlist ad rate, what percentage of the people that listen to your song added it to a playlist. Follow rate, what percentage of your listeners followed you? And a stream per listener, how many streams has each person listened to your song? And that's all in Spotify for artists, or it's all in Spotify for artists. It used to not be well, sorry, save rate and playlist ad rates are not in there, but the numbers are in there for you to calculate it. So let's say you have a thousand.

listeners. And there's like 200 saves, your save rate's 20%. Gotcha. so you could do it in a spreadsheet, which I recommend if you're new to kind of get the hang of things. But over time, you know, you just you get used to looking at it and just doing quick mental math in your head of like, oh yeah, that's about a 30% save rate, that's about a 25% playlist ad rate. Um, but oh, you open up Spotify for artists or a song, you get streams, listeners, streams per listener, playlist ad and saves, and on your artist level, you get all that again plus followers. And I'm just hearing a bunch of people now just hearing that for the first time that they even have access to that. Like, y'all get into your Spotify for artists and start crunching these numbers, y'all. Like this is, yeah, yeah, and Apple Music for Artists, you know, set up your YouTube and uh set up Amazon Music for Artists, set up your title. Like a lot of artists, uh, even if they have the Spotify, they're like very Spotify only, which that is where most of the people are. But you know, every so often I'll meet an artist where their biggest platform is like Pandora or Amazon or whatever, or iTunes.

So it's good to just set up it everywhere just to make sure you're present. Um Spotify is King of the Castle now. Who knows what will happen in five years? Who knows? So, all right, if I have $500 to spend on an ad campaign for my for my uh music, right? I don't even want to say song because maybe the whole testing different songs thing comes into your approach. Like, how would you spend my $500 on an ad campaign? And I'm an emerging artist, right? I don't have tons of fans, right? Um, maybe not too much data to go off of, like, let's say I'm an emerging artist. Yeah, I would I would probably do all of it, assuming that you have like videos that are cool looking, you don't need to like hire that out or whatever. Yeah, I'd probably do the whole 500 in like a meta ad campaign for streaming, like what would people call like a Spotify conversion campaign, which is the Facebook conversion ad to a landing page going to a DSP thing. Um if they have a really badass music video, I might do 10% of the budget in YouTube ads.

Um, but at the 500, you're you have enough budget where if the campaign goes like reasonably well, you'll trigger a bunch of algorithmic playlists. But if you start fractioning off your budget where it's like we're gonna do, you know, 250 on YouTube ads or something, it's like now your 250 budget for your meta, you're probably not gonna trigger anything on Spotify with that unless you get do very good or get lucky. Um, so I would do all 500 meta ads. But so, like, are you doing a certain type of targeting right? Like, you know, walk us through even just more granular. Yeah, so you know, it would be that conversion type campaign. Um, I would probably launch it at and like, yeah, over what time period, you know, what I mean? Like, like give us give us the sauce, bro. It'd be uh typically at like that budget and most budgets between like 300 and three grand are going to be a roughly four to six week campaign. Okay. This is a smaller end of that, so it would be four weeks. I'd probably launch the campaign at $30 a day, and over the course of that month ramping down the budget week by week.

So going from like 30 first week, 20 for the second week. So that first week would be 210, that second week would be 140, which that's 350. And the next week, let's say you're doing 15, that's one oh five, right? And then so that would be four fifty five. And last week do 10, and that would be 520. So roughly 500. So if you do 30, 20, 15, 10 week by week, that'll be about 500 bucks. Um you're launching at 30. So my rule of thumb is you don't want to have less than one dollar per ad per day. So imagine you have five videos you want to test, and you can think of four audiences you want to test. You have a total of 20 ads, four audiences times five ads that are running in each of those audiences for a total of 20 ads. You have more than one dollar per ad per day, you pass the test. That would be a pretty nice configuration. You know, those five videos, probably five different parts of the song, performance-based videos. And then for your four audiences, one example might be um, you know, let's say you're a pop punk band, and you do one audience is like more modern pop punk artists, um, that you almost wouldn't call pop punk, like machine gun Kelly is kind of like he's pop punk, like modern pop punk.

Um, and then like there's like the warp tour era pop punk, which would be like all-time low and paramore, and then you have like the more classic pop punk It's like Blink-182 and green day and and stuff like that. And so you're kind of segmenting these artists by different categories, and then maybe for the fourth one, you're targeting the genre pop punk music. Um, there's a million different ways to do it, but that's one reasonable configuration that I set up pretty much exactly like three hours ago. Yep. okay, it's hot off the press. All right, so that that's for that first week, 30 bucks a day, and that's how we're kind of setting up the 20 different variations of the ads themselves. Then how do we progress through the next week? You launch the campaign, you don't wanna touch it for a solid two to three days because the campaign just needs to spend money, collect data, learn your your Facebook pixel, your ad account are always collecting data, optimizing and learning, and that improves over time. So if you it's not unusual for like the first day to be like two dollars a conversion, you know, so bad you wanna throw up. like day two, it's down to like 80 cents, and day three, maybe you're down to like 40.

So you're like, cool, like going from two to 80 cents to 40, which is still not great, but it's like you you're seeing this graph, and then at some point it's gonna plateau, uh right. And hopefully it's plateauing around that first like two to three day mark, and then you're gonna look at those four audiences, and chances are one's gonna be winning, one's gonna be the worst, but maybe there's a couple that are the worst. So let's say there's two that are pretty good and two that are way worse. Like, let's say there's two that are uh 40 cents and the other two are more like 70 to 80 cents. Turn off those two that are bad, replace them with two new guesses. So so far we've tried three different artist groups and a pop punk group. Let's say we had to turn off two of those artist groups, and we have the art, the third artist group and the pop punk group. Maybe because the pop punk group worked, and then the let's say the artist group that worked was like the warp tour era pop punk bands. It's like, well, the warp tour era pop punk bands work the best. So let's target Warped Tour as our one of our new audiences. And the pop punk genre where it was the other audience that was doing the best.

So let's try just generic, or maybe what we do is we try people who like pop music and punk music. So in Facebook, you can target pop punk, but you can also target pop and you can also target punk. So pop punk is not necessarily the same as targeting people who like pop and punk. You know, um, and so you just kind of like basically every two to three days, like looking at the data, purging the bad, replacing that with new guesses, and just iterating, iterating, iterating. Um, typically, like the way my agency works and what I do for my own campaigns too, is about a weekend. you've tried a enough audiences where you kind of have an idea like is anything moving in the right direction? If after that week, if nothing is good enough, or you don't see it's going to likely end up being good enough, um, go make new ads. Like maybe if you had those five videos, go make five more, and then relaunch the campaign with the brand new videos using the best audiences from the first campaign, and then follow that rabbit hole every two to three days to find a, find out if it works. And and you know, if it's like two dollars by that one week mark, it might not even be worth doing.

It's just like, okay, let's just kill it now. Instead of spending that 500, we've only spent, you know, like 150 or 200. Let's just can it save that money for an extra release. Um, but if it's like promising, where you're like, I can see that if we if we do more audiences or do more ads, we're probably gonna get there. Um, and you you develop an intuition for that, just the more campaigns you run, you know. And it's hard to know the first one because you have no baseline. Once you've done a few, you kind of know, like, you know, oh, like my best result was this, and my worst result was this. So you can kind of like put into context like what's a good result and bad result for you because it is it is quite different for a lot of people. Like I know people who are happy with 60 cents conversion because that's the best they've ever gotten. And eventually, hopefully they'll find a better result. But it is it is relative, right? And and basically the way it works is the more money you have, the worse result you can accept and still get a good result. So if you have a very small budget, you can't really tolerate any badness in your campaign. But if you have $10,000, like you know, let's say you have $10,000 and you have $2 per conversion.

That's really the same as having $1,000 at 20 cents a conversion, right? Um, so I mean I'm interested in it. That's my conversion rate. I don't know. I'd be upset after watching this episode with Andrew Southworth. But yeah. So then by week three, when we are at $15 a day, if we're trying to stay at the $1 per ad per video, are we just kind of lessening the ads into you know, picking the 15 best and kind of that's a good point. So the one dollar per ad per day is what I like to launch with. Once the campaigns and the ads are through the learning phase, I don't worry about it anymore. Okay, that's just the beginning. Exactly. Oh Wow. damn. Yeah, that's that was a little rabbit hole. I was locked in. Dude, me too. I was like, I came out of that black hole I'm like, oh shit. I woke up just now. I mean, I immediately want to go launch a campaign. I'm ready, dude. Me too. Yeah, yeah. Oh my god. We're definitely gonna get two dollars. Yeah, don't anticipate like it's it's a skill, you know. Like at some point as an artist, you had to learn how to use Ableton Live or how to use Logic Pro.

And if you're capable of learning a DAW, you're capable of learning Facebook ads. Yeah. Oh it might the the con is that when you mess up in Ableton, you're not spending money. So that's like the difference. Well, you can. It's still a dog. It's just a digital ad workstation. It's still a dog. You know what I'm saying? Oh, I see what you fucking did there. Give him a thumbs up, Andrew. Let's see if we can trigger another one. Oh, fireworks. Whoa, shit. shit. Damn. On that note, we've been in a final segment of the podcast. Andrew Southworth. Let's go. I have no idea what's about to happen. Yeah. That's the best part. That's the best part. I know. Andrew, this is the rapid fire rampage. It's gonna be a three-part rampage. I'll explain the parts as we go. Part one is just some short answer questions. Let's get into it. Starting with, how are you doing? Great. Thanks. In Case anyone was wondering.

Andrew's doing great. Love that. Um, you don't have to go as in depth as the last one. It's kind of just a bigger version of uh Ben's last question. Tate McRae has $10,000 for you to run ads for her new album. Give us like a little breakdown on how you might do that for her with on the bigger budget. Or like 20, what would she pay? Probably more than 10. Way more. 50,000. Yeah, either way. Either way, the answer I think will probably be similar. Um so Tate McRae probably has massive retargeting audiences across all of her socials. So the whatever ad campaign we do will heavily leverage the that. Um, additionally, she's probably in a situation where she actually doesn't really need to promote the streaming at all because she has so many fans. So typically, the bigger the artist is, they're less concerned with one of the streaming, the more they are concerned with monetizing their existing audience. So for her, it it you know, it might actually be best to think about like what song-specific like merch items or experiences or custom things can we retarget and sell to her audience.

That probably would be the best bang for the buck for her case because the song's gonna do great anyways. But let's say that that's not the case, and they want the song it is about all the song in Spotify. That was a gem, though. I don't know. Yeah, I fucked that. That was a great answer. I immediately I immediately went to sell her tour tickets. Yeah, right. Like I like that's all I see of major A-list artists. I only see tour ads. I'm almost, yeah. I don't see, I don't see Go stream Billie Eilish's new fucking song. No, we know it's there. It's by the merch, it's a limited edition Billie Eilish fucking capsule collection. Yeah, or it's she's on tour at every goddamn stadium, you know, or arena and buy the tickets. Exactly. Yeah. I've worked with uh a metal artist that has like 5 million monthly listeners, which is metal is like huge. Yeah, that sounds and it might be the number one metal band. We were running streaming ads Just to kind of like, you know, to build up like the rest of their catalog, like not the leading singles and stuff. But the bulk of the money we spent was on retargeting their fans for limited edition time-sensitive merch drops. Yeah.

And there was one campaign we ran, we spent a grand and we made seven in a weekend. Yeah. See, that's a money, that's the actual money printing machine. And I think that's where if you think about the Spotify shit that Andrew does in the on the front end when you're building the fans, then you can actually start printing money. You know what I mean? I think it's an investment. Exactly. It's long term. Yeah. You gotta believe, man. You gotta be a little bit psychotic, I think, to actually do this. But just or just have a business plan. Yeah. Like almost any other industry would be a better place to go. Yeah. Every every time, like someone's like, like, oh, it's all a I don't know. Like they're they're trying to do some get rich quick scheme or whatever. It's like if they were trying to do a get rich quick scheme, they wouldn't be in music. They would be in like the YouTuber space because you could charge like 10 times more in that space, or they would work B2B, work with other businesses, and you can charge even more for that. Yeah, yeah. Or drop a meme coin. Yeah, yeah. Like you you you do music because you love it.

Exactly. Almost anyone that works in the industry could get out of the music industry and make five to ten times more. There it is. I hope you guys love this shit. That's that's a that's a big take. That was the most depressing shit ever. I don't know. Yeah, let's move on. There's still plenty of stuff to go around, right? It's just a matter of um Yeah, it shouldn't be the it shouldn't be the number one driving factor here. Most businesses fail too. You know, I don't want to I don't want to give people false hope. It's like a lot of artists just simply don't pull it off. And it's because they give up too soon, or maybe their music wasn't ready yet, or whatever. But it's it's the same thing in business. Most businesses fail, most YouTube channels fail. Most most everything fails. And that's because what's successful is typically it's like what whatever people have the most staying power or whoever's the best. Dude, the the only thing I attribute right now to the fact that we're at where we're at is never quit. It's only that, bro. It's literally only that we're 200 plus episodes, do it every week, pretty much. Post every day pretty much.

Like we just are the reason I have a YouTube channel. I've uploaded 800 videos. There you go. There it is. If you're not tired, then like you're not doing it right. I'm just gonna say that. You need to be tired. Yeah. Let's move on. Um, Andrew Trump has just appointed you to the brand new position of music industry czar. What is your first order of business? Oh, Man. And you can do anything. Man. Anything. Oh God. Hold on. How are we gonna fix this industry? Or you don't have to fix it. Yeah, someone exploited it. You could just exploit it. Yeah, someone exploited it. So I don't know. I mean, just blow it all up. I don't know. So I think as much as I hate the idea of government being involved in stuff, because usually anytime that happens, they fuck it up, right? We all know this, at least here in America. Um, but I think there has to be some type of regulation for like what is like the minimum amount of stream is worth or something. Like it doesn't have to be crazy.

I think some people are too aggressive, like, oh, you should be making like 10 cents per stream. I think that's silly and that'll never work. You think a penny is realistic? I think a penny is realistic. However, for Spotify to do that, they would effectively have to triple their revenues. customers triple. So, like, I I think it's possible, but I think there has to be some type of realistic law that takes into account Spotify has to make money because if they don't, they're gonna go out of business and then we're all The industry crumbles. Yeah. So, but like some type of legislation that like actually consults with actual artists, not labels, but like indie artists and industry folk who care um to set up like realistic things that are win-win for the streaming services and the indie artists and the major labels. So, whether that's maybe Spotify charges double, and but like all streaming services charge double. I think people will pay 20 bucks a month for music streaming. I pay 100. Wow. To have access to every song on the planet? Like, think about what we're talking about.

You would. I thought you were saying you already do, and I was like, I would, I would. Yeah, yeah, you would. Yeah, and that's the that's the difference. People will pay 80 bucks a month to have access to Disney Plus and Amazon streaming and Netflix. I do, and you guys might, or at least some of them. Um, but then people are complaining about spending $12 over $11 for Spotify. For every song on the planet, guys. I mean, like, Jesus Christ. Would you prefer the situation where a third of the world's music's in Spotify and then like a quarter is on Apple, and there's a little bit like this artist is exclusive to exclusive to title? No. No. Um, so I think people would pay it. They're not gonna go back to downloads and torrenting. Bro, that's an I've never thought about what if uh music streaming went like in the production house way, you know, way, as far as like I have to have Netflix if I want to watch XYZ show. I have to have HBO Max if I want to have this access to this show. Universal only is on all our artists are on Apple. That's yeah, like what if that was what if that was the case? Let's not even go there.

I don't want to go there. No, people, bro. would have like several multiple accounts, yeah. That's not I don't even want to think about that. It sounds horrible. Move on. Um, Andrew. What is your best quick tip for getting ad watchers into our email and phone number databases? Where, how do we bridge the gap? The most impactful thing is having a really good offer. It can't be sign up for my list to get updates. It should be more like sign up to my list and I'll give you this unreleased live concert footage thing I filmed. Or I'll give you, I'll let you hear my next five songs before they come out, or you get my album for free as a download. Like, there should be some incentive. If the incentive sucks, the ads are gonna be super expensive. No one's gonna want to convert. So the offer, it's it's all about the offer. I'm gonna give them an offer they can refuse. Okay, fucking. That applies to paid off godfather.

I like it. Free thing or a paid thing. It's all about the offer. The offer sucks, everything else sucks. It makes sense. Um what are just some like final words of wisdom for artists trying to crack ads? How could you like sum all this up in like a quick how would you do that? Well, it's a good question. I'm I've been figuring that out for the last five years. Fair, fair. I guess I'll I guess what I'll kind of leave it off at is um, you know, don't expect your first campaign to be great. Your first song probably sucked. First time you played guitar, you probably sucked. The first ad campaign you run is probably gonna be one of the worst ones you ever do. Um I would say just open the process of like being willing to continuously iterate and test and try and fail. And um, you know, just be willing, be willing to pivot and try new things. Like if the first song doesn't work, it's like okay, test different things, but keep in mind that some songs will just never perform well. It's not unusual for one song to do 20 cents conversion, and the next song, even after testing dozens of audiences and dozens of ads, the best you can do is 70 cents.

Not every song will do well, and that's honestly probably how it should be. You know, it's just life, I think, right there. That's good. It's tough. I think the hardest part about that that we touched on in the episode is it's not gonna be like the best or your favorite. You know, it's gonna be that's gonna be the hardest part for I think everyone, at least like the artists I know, bro. This is my single. Yeah, like this is my single. It's gonna take a lot of maybe not. Trying. trying. It's gonna take a lot of trying, different things. And I think unfortunately, we are talking about paid ads. This does take money, yeah, right. So it does it is gonna be yeah, it's harder to swallow when like you gotta get through a bunch of L's to find that like winner of of a song, you know, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And and I, you know, not everyone has money to market their music. If you don't have money, it it doesn't mean you're just screwed and you should give up as well. Like, there are plenty of free organic strategies to do. I tend to focus on paid strategies, but like I'm a big advocate that you should still post social media content, you should make great content, you should talk to your fans and play shows. Like it shouldn't be all about the ads.

And if you have no budget, like start off just with social media content. You can. I know people who are build millions of followers online just by posting videos on the internet. There you go. Love that. Believe it or not, we haven't run a single single paid meta ad. Well, after this, I mean no, literally, bro. Like, I've been asking you to do that for like a year. For building a YouTube brand, uh, I wouldn't even run an ad like you for YouTube music videos. You kind of have to, if you want anyone to see your video, you kind of have to run ads on it. But for like in a content-based channel, like what you do or what I do, you don't I don't really think you necessarily need them, or at the very least, most of your fans should come organically. Yeah, okay. You know, all right, it's good to hear. I've never run ads on my channel either. Wow, see, bro. I'm I'm like, I think ads are good, they're good. All right, but I think they should be for some of the other shit that he's talking about. All right. Well, I run them in my music videos, I just don't run them on like my content stuff. But for you guys in particular, you could get clips of your show from all your different guests. I legally, you might want to like get their permission first, but I'm sure most people do Nah, fuck it.

And then you could set up a campaign testing out all these different clips from all these different people, and you could, let's say, start an email list to go along with the show, and then you could have clips and basically tell people like, hey, if you sign up, you'll get access to all these free goodies or something, or get this behind the scenes content from the show. And then maybe every guest you film, you film an extra 30 minutes that's exclusive to your email list subscribers. And then you run an ad campaign on that to get people to sign up to your email list using clips from the show. He's cooking. So you got 30 more minutes or Joking, joking. That was so good. Thank you. Thank you. Now, last one of the short answer, Andrew. What is your favorite curse word? Fuck nugget. Oh, we put nugget at it at the end. We call one of my dogs Nugget because uh he's our sweet. Well, originally because he's our little chicken nugget, uh, because he's terrified of everything, and then that turned into he's our little nugget, and then now he's our nuggy. And so fuck nugget. Fuck nugget. There it is. Fire.

Okay, moving on to part two. This is the this or that. Andrew, I'm gonna just give you two choices. You have to pick one of them. Starting with meta ads, TikTok ads. Meta ads. Lemon or lime? Lime. Instagram carousel or Instagram real. Real. Golf or bowling? Bowling. Cold audience or retargeting, which I think we know the answer. Maybe cold audience. Yeah. Squid games or hunger games. Squid games. If an ad isn't working, scrap it or tweak it. Tweak it. Luxury hotel or cozy Airbnb. Cozy Airbnb. Rich or famous. Rich. Concerts or festivals. Festivals. And finally, become a full-time K-pop producer or leave the music industry forever. No shade to the K-pop producer.

I'd say become a full-time professional K pop producer. Jesus Christ. Somehow that was the most savage question. Somehow. That's why I saved it for last, Andrew. Holy crap. Those are some tough ones. Hunger Games, Squid Games, man. Like Hunger Games. is classic. Never did that one before. Squid Games is sick. It's just uh it's top of mind. It's it's the thing right now. No, it's that's a good point. Last one is the word association. I'm gonna say one word, and I just need you to give me the first word that you think of right off the top of your head. As little thought as possible. There are no correct answers. You are only judged on speed. All right. Starting with music, marketing, ad. Campaign, Spotify. For artists, label, radar, chorus, verse, content, machine, viral, success, AI, machine learning, brand, awareness, podcast, YouTube, Southworth. Let's go!

What a final what a word association. He's like fast, bro. Yeah, I know. That was impressive. Maybe the best word association ever. And an incredible episode. Yeah. Holy shit, man. I feel like every artist is wanting to sprint to go try and like learn more about running ads. As he mentioned, he does have a Spotify growth machine course that we will link in the description. Um, incredible stuff. Like I said, Henry and I have been huge fans of yours, man, for the longest time. So it's really great to have you now pass your fucking uh years of of uh wisdom and knowledge on to our audience. They're gonna learn so much from this episode. I'm ready to go fucking run. Every time we do an ads episode, I'm like, Let's do it. And then I get distracted by some other fucking thing we have to do. But um, but no, appreciate you coming on. Give us one last thumbs up, real quick, if you don't mind. I want double thumbs up. So we get the fireworks. Hey. This may be the funnest podcast interview I've ever done. Let's go. Thank you, man. Stamp. Andrew Southworth. Stamp of approval.

Yeah. One more time podcast. Let's go. Until next time, Henry, what are we doing? Getting out of here. Getting the fuck out of here, y'all. Peace. Yeah. Peace.