Part 21 - Appendix 2 - experimenting with paid promotion

 After last month's disappointing experiment with playlisting via SubmitHub, this month I've been looking at direct paid promotion.

It's not something I know a lot about and none of my immediate muso buddies were able to make any recommendations so I ended up putting some money behind a company called Badenstock. They're a fairly typical label / promoter / distributor / collective - everyone wears multiple hats these days, not just the musicians - based in Finland.

There were a couple of red flags on their website (that I'll come back to) but they seemed to be honest about certain genres not being in their wheelhouse, the fact that there were no guarantees, a commitment to not using bots, and - as a label themselves - they have an interest in making sure their playlists are effective for their own artists.

And fundamentally they have a very cheap entry level - $20 gets you a seven day boost with your song being placed on their 'high-quality' playlists and social media advertising.

Submitting

Well, on Saturday last week I paid my $20 and submitted a link to a song that is pretty representative of my style and has had a reasonable number of plays already (about 2500 since launch) and on Monday morning I received an email saying it had been added to five Badenstock playlists: 

• Indie Superlist, 
• Fresh selections, 
• Car Ride Time, 
• Badenstock Boost, 
• Pop and Dance Hits

Checking the playlists in question my song was either first or in the top five on each list - no need for people to listen to an hour of stuff before they reached my track. 

So far, so good, but that last one rang a bit of an alarm bell. The song I submitted was Northumberland and whilst it might class as 'Indie' in some places it's definitely not Pop or Dance.

Promotion

Listening to the first 20-or-so songs on each of those playlists confirmed those alarm bells. With the exception of the Car Ride Time playlist, the other four were all basically the same content. A handful of the same tunes from non-Badenstock artists scattered amongst a bulk of content from their own EDM catalogue. There was no discernible difference between the Indie Superlist and the Pop and Dance Hits and no clear genre in either of them. Car Ride Time was much the same but included a handful of major label artists as well.

There was clearly no actual curation going on, just a spray and pray with no compelling reason for any listener to actually select any one of these playlists.

As for the social media promotion, I've seen no evidence of that at all on Instagram, Facebook, Threads, or Youtube. They don't appear to have a presence on BlueSky (which is the only other social media I'm on).

Red flags

Before I get onto the results, I'll just expand on the two red flags that I mentioned above. The first was that, whilst they do say that some genres don't perform as well as others, there was nothing there about exercising their right to not accept a track for promotion. Whether they ever take this decision is not something I can confirm but the absence of a disclaimer like this implies no basic quality check. 

The second red flag was that the list of genres available to select from when I submitted contained nothing remotely like the genres I would normally choose and I was reduced to selecting 'other'. If I'd been doing this more seriously, that would have been enough of a warning.

Results

Fortunately, Spotify for Artists has a page where you can see what playlists have been playing your tracks over a specified time period, so we can get a direct measure of return on investment.

Checking my numbers this morning, covering the seven days of the placement, I can confirm that these five playlists have resulted in a total of...

Zero plays. 

Yep. Zero plays.

For reference the standard algorithmic playlisting has resulted in 59 new listeners across two tracks in the same period. 

So that's... not good?

Well, no, it's terrible. And it could actually be worse than useless.

Because Spotify only counts it as a play if a track runs for longer than 30 seconds, there are two possible things happening here. 

The first possibility is that no-one is listening to these playlists. Given the lack of any real curation or targeting going on this could be the case - there's really nothing to draw you to them and minimal to zero advertising.

The second possibility is actually worse, and that's that people are listening to the playlists but because my track is so far removed from the rest of of the EDM-based content they're skipping my track before it reaches 30 seconds. This is worse than no plays at all because the propensity to skip is one of the metrics that Spotify tracks. If my track is being regularly skipped then it is now less likely to be promoted or added to algorithmic playlists.

Interestingly this same week has coincided with a 25% fall in my listener numbers.

And as for the alleged social media campaign, funnily enough there has been absolutely zero result there either.

Lessons

I think there are a couple of lessons from this:

Firstly, do your research. Make sure your choice of promoter is actually a good fit with your music. Look for personal recommendations. Have an actual plan rather than just throwing some money around.

Secondly, trust your instincts. If something seems dodgy, walk away. I ignored two red flags on this experiment and the results speak for themselves.

Finally, a conversation on the Sound On Sound forum brought up the reminder that in 'the old days' if you were releasing some music you'd be spending several hundred pounds on a CD run. If you were to take advantage of the near-free streaming options we have now and parlay that several hundred pounds into a proper promo campaign, with a legitimate agency, I suspect you might get a bit further than lobbing a few bucks into the wind.

So $20 for promotion = useless. But as an experiment? I think we've learned something - or at least confirmed a hunch or two.