Allocating the Marketing Budget for Your Next Release

If you are in the lucky position to have some marketing budget to promote your next single, spending it the right way can have a significant impact on the track’s performance. In today’s music marketing landscape it doesn’t have to be thousands of dollars to get the ball rolling. A few hundred dollars can do a lot already.

In this article we put together 4 pillars that we think are currently the most important when it comes to your paid marketing activities as a musician. At the end we give you additional information on how we’d allocate the budget percentage wise.

Playlist Pitching

Streaming took over the recorded music industry and playlists took over the streaming platforms. Getting your music added to third party playlists that help you to grow your streams and artist profile organically can have a significant impact on your career – as these playlists path the way for bigger editorial or algorithmic playlists.

So how can you get on playlists legitimately and grow organically?

There are a couple of ways. One of them is the our Playlist Recommendations engine.

It’s the most convenient way to find playlists which are most likely to have genuine interest in adding your track to their playlists. After scanning your track’s audio features and artist profile, our algorithm puts it in perspective with genres you select manually. The ForTunes playlist recommendation feature then provides not only the playlists but also the playlist owner’s contact details. Playlists recommended by our engine won’t take money for placements but might ask for a small fee for their time invested to listening to the music.

It also goes hand in hand with other legit platforms which you can use to manually pitch songs to 3rd party playlist owners like Submithub, Groover or Daily Playlists.

Facebook / Instagram Ads

To this day Instagram still remains one of the most popular social media platform especially when it comes to music marketing relevant demographics. If your song is decent and you have a solid visual you’re good to go.

With the right targeting you can achieve a cost per conversion (someone clicking the ad and listening to your song) of down to $0,15. Obviously, with an average payout of $0,004 per stream on Spotify this is not a good ROI. The end goal should be to trigger algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly.

A nice side effect with Instagram Ads is that you’re gaining new followers along the way, which are most likely the people who not only dig your song, but also you as an artist. These fans are here to stay for your next release too.

There are plenty of good music marketing related tutorials on YouTube on how to set up campaigns in the Facebook ads manager. We’d recommend Andrew Southworth as we enjoy his videos a lot.

TikTok Influencers

TikTok can break not just a song but also an artist as a whole. Ever since Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” breakthrough via TikTok music marketers bet on the platform’s ability to make a song go viral and spend their budget accordingly.

The problem is that it can be a quite expensive endeavour, if you want the big influencers to do a video to your next single. This doesn’t have to be the case though. If you can come up with a simple TikTok idea for your song you’re already have way there. Make a list of micro influencers and and offer them each a small amount. If they like the song and the video idea is easily executable, chances are high that they’re in.

YouTube Ads

In case that you have a music video for the single you should also put some of your budget in YouTube Ads / Google Adwords promoting the video itself.

We recommend a mix of in-stream and discovery ads. Just as with Instagram Ads there are a lot of good tutorials which help you set up your campaign.

Although it varies from genre to genre we personally recommend you to spend ~30% of your budget on playlist pitching and ~30% of your budget on Facebook / Instagram ads.

When it comes to Tik Tok Influencers we suggest spending roughly 20% of your marketing budget on TikTok influencers, but don’t try force it! If you can’t come up with a good idea you might be better off spending the budget somewhere else.