Getting a Massive Discover Weekly Push

I’ve been advertising my music on Instagram for the past two years without taking a break. Literally every day for over 700 days, I’ve been marketing my music on Spotify with paid advertising.

Quite the routine, huh?

When we do something for this long, we develop habits and routines, a certain way of doing things, that can be beneficial for repeating our good results and eliminating the bad stuff we don’t want. 

But these habits can also come at a cost: testing new options that may just yield even better results.

Sometimes our own habits and systems can become a weakness instead of a strength.

Breaking your own rules

In order to address some of the faults in my advertising systems, I recently decided to throw all the rules out the window:

• Instead of targeting countries, I targeted cities

• Instead of targeting similar artists and genres, I targeted nothing and no one

• Instead of targeting my listener demographic of 18-34, I opened it up to 13-44

This was a considerable risk because my ads manager is seasoned and dialed in. When you work as hard as I have to get something working so smoothly, the last thing you want to do is screw it all up.

Fortunately, though, it all worked out. Quite well, in fact.

Risk and reward

As a result of this new targeting system, my results on Spotify exploded in a way I hadn’t seen before–I got my biggest Discover Weekly boost to date for my song “Hero”: 

And not only did I get more listeners and more streams, I even began to see more listeners specifically from the cities I was targeting. I mean, London is now in my top five cities on Spotify!

So my point is this: work hard to develop habits and systems, but don’t be afraid to stress-test what’s already working.

You may just stumble onto something even better.