3 Ways to Grow on Spotify. Fast.

When it comes to supercharging your growth as an artist on Spotify, there are three primary metrics we want to look at: streams, listeners, and followers.

Now, the easiest thing to optimize for is streams. We all know that streams are the primary indicator of a song’s success and how we earn revenue from the platform.

In short, streams are good.

But streams are not a one-dimensional metric. Streams only come as a result of listeners; hopefully, every listener will rack up multiple streams, netting you a higher amount of streams per listener.

You want your listeners to come back for more.

And the best way to do that? You guessed it. Turn them into followers.

So here are three distinct music marketing strategies I’ve personally used to earn a combination of streams, listeners, and followers on Spotify.

Let's start with followers

The most effective way I’ve found to grow my followers on Spotify is to send users directly to my artist profile using Instagram ads, run via Facebook’s advertising platform. Users see my ad, click the link, and land directly on my profile.

This achieves two things:

1. the person will listen to at least the top song on my list of popular tracks

2. they will choose to follow me if they like what they hear–the follow button is right in their face.

Next, let's talk listeners

Getting a lot of listeners in a short window of time is an effective way to boost streams for a specific track. This can be a great method of driving a lot of streams to a new release, helping to push the song onto Spotify’s algorithmic playlists like Release Radar or Discover Weekly.

The best way to accomplish this is to send those users directly to the song.

This causes the song to autoplay the moment they land and gives them the option to turn on that repeat function if they really like what they hear.

Bonus points for sending them to a release with multiple tracks like a multi-track single, an EP, or an album.

And finally, streams

The best way to generate repeat streams for your entire catalog is to send users to your own artist playlist. Ideally, this playlist will include 10 or more of your own original tracks.

This allows the listener to go deeper into your catalog and potentially follow your playlist, giving you more opportunities to serve up new music for them in the future.

Each of these strategies can be highly effective on their own, but the real magic happens when you combine all three.

More on that another time.