Spotify Countdown Pages

Are you ready to up your music marketing game?

Spotify is an awesome platform, doing some pretty awesome things which the marketing world can learn from.

They have just released Countdown Pages, a new feature allowing artists to set up a campaign landing page with audio previews, a countdown timer, notifications, and a pre-save function directly on Spotify. It even includes some insights and analytics.

Service providers like Spotify and Apple et al push hard for artists to drive pre-saves, but I’ve not been a huge fan of asking followers to pre-save something they can’t listen to. So, this is a welcome change.

Countdown Pages are only available for albums and not singles, but here’s a hack: Spotify classifies an album as any release over 30 minutes. So, you can game the system with say a 4 track EP, as long as it’s over 30 minutes.

Unfortunately, Countdown Pages are only available to artists with over 5,000 active listeners per month.

This seems like a real oversight, considering up-and-coming artists are probably the ones who need a helping hand the most. So, come on, Spotify—let’s make this function available for everyone!

Did you know that 65% of people in Australia aged 15 to 64 get their music, podcasts and audio books from Spotify?

Spotify Campaign Kit

Spotify continues to battle some pretty heavy brand bashing, facing ongoing criticism of its royalty structure. However, they are responding with an excellent communications strategy and a suite of tools to help artists market their releases more effectively, while counteracting the negativity with positivity.

In my opinion, it’s a masterclass in brand management that any company can learn from.

Spotify’s Campaign Kit offers a range of tools and advice to promote and market releases, arming artists with the resources they need to succeed and positioning Spotify as a sort of mentor.

Their native marketing tool, Marquee, allows artists to target fans within the app. But—and it’s a big butt and I can not lie! At a cost of 75 cents per click, it feels like a bit of a rort.

Let’s do the math on that. Artists roughly receive about 0.004 cents per stream. Now, let’s say roughly 75% of that goes to the label and the costs of making the album—that’s about 0.001 cents per stream, if you’re lucky. This means you would need 750 streams just to pay for a single click. Even the most devoted fans aren’t going to stream a song 750 times, at least not in the short term.

For me, this is really disappointing and undermines all the great work Spotify for Artists are doing. Perhaps a more reasonable ROI would be a 3 to 5-cent per play.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not jumping on the brand-bashing bandwagon. I’m a big fan of Spotify. It wasn’t so long ago that the music industry was grappling with the idea that music would have to be entirely free, with no solution in sight to remedy file sharing.

Yet Spotify and others have monetised the industry again against all odds. There’s still work to be done, but we’re moving in the right direction, and these tools are great for both artists and the Spotify brand.

In other music marketing news…

Multitrack Madness

According to Instagram, creators can now add up to 20 different audio tracks to a single Reels video. This is a great function if you want to preview an album or EP or just get more experimental when creating Reels.

Events Are Not Dead

Live Nation in the US have posted huge growth and profits which suggests the downturn in Aussie events are at least in some part to do with event organisers needing to up their game.

Believe In The Bird

I’ll leave you with this fantastic piece of marketing from KFC, which I have found myself replaying and sharing multiple times. It’s a great example of “value exchange”, in that the brand entertains the viewer for a period of time in exchange for their attention and exposure of the brand or product. In this case, there is no mention of product or even price, just excellent out-there entertainment which ensures KFC is top of mind the next time I find myself yearning for the dirty bird. Bravo KFC, I am now a believer.

Keen To Dive In?

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