There are many ways to increase your streams on Spotify from good marketing to making friends in a community of artists. Did you know you could increase how many plays you’re getting straight from your Spotify for Artists account?

Once you’ve spent time bouncing your musical ideas out, recording the music, mixing it to perfection, and putting a final release together ready to release it into the world there’s another step of potentially huge difficulty: Getting your release seen and heard by people. There are endless ways an artist can reach fans and new listeners with their music including a range of marketing tools and SEO tactics. With Spotify leading the digital age of music streaming, their in-house marketing features for artists are driving increased streams and engagement.

Their promotional tool, Spotify Marquee, is a – sometimes controversial – offering that allows artists to pay for targeted promotion with their new releases. Marquee campaigns use Spotify’s in-depth understanding of listener’s tastes and trends surrounding the music people are listening to on Spotify to present a full-page promo card for a release that has been found to align with a listener’s tastes.

Any artist can create a Marquee campaign from their Spotify for Artists account. Once logged in as an Admin or Editor the campaign creator can head to the Campaigns tab to launch their promotion, choosing the release to promote. Set the budget that you’d like to spend on your campaign and Spotify will give you an estimate for the number of clicks you’ll be getting on your release when it’s presented to listeners.

More than 15% of users who see a Spotify Marquee card on their app go on to listen to that release within two weeks. Spotify have found that Marquee campaigns give an average of 2.2x more saved and playlisted tracks on releases which have been presented to a listener via Marquee.

Spotify Marquee review success story

Recently Spotify shared how Marquee is working to increase clicks and plays for artists with anecdotal evidence from Wolf Alice and how they used the promotion tool to reach even more fans with their celebrated album Blue Weekend this year. When the album launched on June 4th their Marquee campaign went live presenting the album to interested parties to notify them of the drop and give them a chance to jump straight into streaming the whole thing.

Spotify found that 35.8% of the Spotify users who were presented with Blue Weekend’s Marquee card went on to stream the album in the first two weeks. They saw an average of 32 streams a listener as the album connected deeply with existing fans and brand new listeners alike, with 34% of those who saw the Marquee campaign saving tracks from the album and adding them to their playlists.

Perdi Higgs, Streaming and Digital Promotions Manager for Wolf Alice at Dirty Hit, ran the campaign alongside another Spotify tool; using Spotify Canvas artworks to bring their singles to life in the lead up to the album launch. She said “A lot of our strategy was making sure that, from before we even launched the new music, we were using the tools to re-engage the fanbase and help drive followers.”

She continued: “An engaged fanbase is one who will embrace what you’re releasing in its full form. They take time to understand the album, and Blue Weekend was tied to its visuals. We released an official video for each track on the album, which was replicated on-platform with 11 unique Canvases for each song. We wanted to create an experience by which this fanbase was engaged, because they were taking in the whole album in all forms while consuming it.”

Spotify have covered Marquee success stories with a bunch of artists, showing how bbno$ doubled their active streams, Kaskade connected listeners with their new single, and girl in red was able to build excitement and awareness around the release of their first album.

How much does Spotify Marquee cost

Marquee lets you choose your own budget so that you can spend within the limits of your own capability and reach as far as you’re willing to go. The minimum budget for a campaign is $250 and the maximum is $10,000, so you can spend anywhere between those two figures on your campaign. Spotify will offer a prediction for the number of clicks you will get from your campaign.

Assuming you reach your target audience with Marquee, Spotify say that it is worth $0.50 a click from a listener. By spending the minimum Marquee budget, you have the potential to have 500 listeners click on your release to immediately be sent to it for streaming and saving.

Spotify for Artists presents you with a more accurate and up-to-date pricing for your team, as the price can change and will vary as countries and features are added.

Is Spotify Marquee worth it?

There is no guarantee that a campaign will inevitably lead to more clicks and plays but on average the response is positive and results in more listens on releases. If you’re looking for a hassle free way of reaching more listeners and engaging them through one of the most popular music platforms in the world then a Marquee campaign is a fantastic simple marketing tool with the option to spend what you want to.

Their are criticisms of the tool from some with opponents when the tool first launched criticising a perceived ‘pay for plays’ system. If Spotify were to lower the visibility of non-paying releases then I’d understand, but as a card that is simply presented to listeners with the option to click on it or ignore it with no detriment to the base user interface I don’t see it. At the end of the day any marketing with a budget is a pay for plays tool.

Recent critics of the tool cite the fact that Spotify is often presenting these cards to existing listeners and fans, arguing that artists are paying to be promoted to listeners who would find their album regardless. This is a fair point but with a wider Marquee reach the more likely you are to find new listeners amongst the crop or make fans aware when they might not have been otherwise. Spotify’s data shows reasonable success from campaigns though artists can decide for themselves how truly the data represents the growth.