Miles Coronin

Building marketing plans for your future favorite bands

Spotify Marquee – Is It Worth It?

Brief:

Spotify Marquee can be a valuable marketing tool when used properly, mostly because of its ability to send highly targeted notifications to listeners. When the time is right it should definitely be a part of a healthy paid media campaign.  

1. It works best on drop day or shortly after

Spotify Marquee is most effective when used around new releases (it does have a fairly short deployment time span, after all). This is when ads can capitalize on people who are more likely to take action and stream when reminded – between release day buzz, organic content and supporting ads, Marquee can be a slam dunk. 

2. Hard push notification that will make you “drop everything”

By sending a push notification to a fan’s phone Marquee leverages its urgency: HEY THIS ALBUM/SINGLE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR IS NOW OUT, GO CHECK IT OUT! Being a hard push notification it will stand out if you’re out and about listening to music or in the middle of typing away on your screen. As annoying as it may be, it’s effective: it reminds you the release is out, and can be a very imperative “jam it now” incentive.  

3. It seeks out the fans who are most likely to stream

In Spotify’s own words: “By default, your campaign will be optimized to reach listeners who are most likely to stream your release after seeing the recommendation”. In short, Spotify will seek out those fans who are likely to stream (most likely by leveraging its own data and algorithms) to capitalize in conversions to streams. 

4. Default audiences work best

By letting Spotify find the people who are likely to stream, and by trusting its algorithm, which is usually pretty spot on, selecting all audiences will allow it as much free reign as possible. This in turn tends to result in maximum “fans who are likely to listen” reach, as mentioned above. For context, targeting only specific segments for Marquee has resulted in 81% higher costs/listener and 320% higher costs/stream than when leveraging default/all audiences. 

This is all cool and dandy, but now, who should be using Marquee? Artists who have a decent amount of listeners, for starters. The smaller the audiences, the harder it is for these ads to make a dent, and because we can control only certain variables (countries, audiences), we want to get the best bang for our buck with something that’s mostly out of our control.

What’s a decent amount of listeners? 500k-1M+ listeners, ideally. 

I’ve taken the time to dig into 18 different Marquee campaigns run in the past 1-2 years to better understand what costs artists can expect, and two main takeaways stood out:

1. A higher budget does not equate to a better performing campaign
2. The more listeners, the cheaper the results

The results below come from 10 campaigns run for artists who boast 1M+ listeners on Spotify. I was able to pull data from Rock, Pop and Metal acts. 

And no, the $3,000 spend was not the best performing campaign.This simply means the results are not necessarily scalable or directly proportional to the spend we allocate. 

I’ve also dissected 8 campaigns for artists who have less than 300k monthly listeners. These, too, include Rock, Metal and Pop Rock acts.  

We’re seeing listeners are costing 24% and streams are costing a whopping 233% more. This is a significant difference in results, reflected also in a significant difference in fan base size and consumption. 

Want to check the data yourself? Be my guest, here you go. 

With all this said and done, do I think Marquee ads are a must? No.

Should artists with less than 500k listeners use them? No. It does not seem to be worth the spend and lack of control incurred into. 

Can they support additional paid media efforts, and should they be used in conjunction with a more well rounded paid media strategy? Absolutely.