Congratulations! 

You’ve gotten someone to listen to your music on Spotify. 

Now what? 

Well, if they found you through that playlist you pitched your music to, probably nothing. 

But if they found you on social media or through your ads, there’s a lot we can do with that. 

Retargeting 

Getting someone to listen to your music for the first time is a glorious feeling. 

It’s what we’re all after. 

Sadly though, this is often both the first and last step for many artists. 

We get someone to listen on Spotify and that’s all we care about. 

But what happens after that? 

If we want to make a few more bucks than what we get paid per stream, we need to think about how we can turn these casual listeners into die-hard fans.

And, more importantly, we need to think about how we can turn those die-hard fans into customers. 

That’s right. Customers. People who actually make a purchase and support our business. 

The most powerful way to do that is to retarget those listeners with an offer they’ll love—something like a free download or a discount on merch. 

But we have to have access to those listeners to do that, and sadly, Spotify doesn’t offer a way to pull those listeners from their platform into our network, which is why where those listeners come from is almost more important than the fact that they’re listening at all. 

Social Power 

Sending listeners to Spotify from social media—Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and even TikTok—is the single biggest ROI opportunity we have for growing a fanbase. 

Because when people find us through social, we can, in turn, find them. 

This is one of the (many) reasons I am no fan of playlist pitching—there is simply no reliable, repeatable way to pull someone from a playlist into my email list, long-term fanbase, or, ultimately, my customer base. 

But if they find me on social media? 

Well, that’s a completely different story. 

There are many ways this happens, but the crux of it lies in the power of the profile. 

The entire purpose of social content isn’t to get likes or engagement, it’s to get people to click through to your profile. 

Counterintuitive, right? 

Yes, likes and engagement are good in that we need eyeballs to potentially click through to the profile, and enough engagement can throw the net of exposure even wider, but the core purpose is to sell that click through to the profile. 

And the purpose of the profile is to get people to do two things: follow and click the link in our bio. 

Make great content and have a great profile bio, and you’ll get people to your music. 

You’ll also have a record of their interest, which you can use to pull them into your fanbase and your network of customers. 

Enter: Ads 

I love running ads for a host of reasons, but one of the biggest is that ads allow me to take all the social media engagement I’ve had and potentially monetize it. 

If someone watches my video, I can retarget them with an offer. 

If someone visits my profile, I can retarget them with an offer. 

And if someone follows me or clicks the link in my bio to listen to my music on Spotify, you guessed it, I can retarget them with an offer. 

Of course, if I’m running ads to promote my music on Spotify, I’m simply increasing my luck surface area of listeners I can retarget with that same offer instead of relying solely on organic exposure. 

Yet another massive advantage of constantly running ads to grow my fanbase on Spotify. 

Every single person who engages with my content on social media, whether paid or organic, is a potential listener on Spotify, and every Spotify listener I have that found me through social media is a potential customer. 

But if someone finds me through a playlist? Nothing. 

Social media, advertising, and retargeting are reliable systems to not only get our music heard on Spotify but to monetize that engagement and build an actual fanbase of die-hards. 

These tools are more powerful than we can even imagine. 

We simply need to know how to use them.