Spotify recently unpacked three marketing features they’re building on their platform. 

In digging into the details of this year’s Stream On event, I’m seeing a unique opportunity to leverage these new tools within our existing music marketing framework. 

If done correctly, I believe we may be looking at a lucrative opportunity to combine what we’re already doing with Facebook ads with what Spotify is rolling out.  

Here’s how I’m thinking about it: 

First, Spotify’s new tools

Spotify has three distinct features they’ve outlined for marketing music on their platform: Marquee, Showcase, and Discovery Mode. 

Marquee is a popup that is available to promote new releases only. 

Discovery Mode is a means to boost existing releases that have been out for at least 30 days. 

And Showcase seems to be akin to a dark post (feed placement ad) on Instagram or Facebook, within Spotify’s home feed. 

There’s less information on Showcase, but for Marquee and Discovery Mode, certain milestones have to be met on Spotify for an artist to even have access to these products (which we’ll get into below). 

But the long and short of it is this: we have to build a fanbase on Spotify first. 

It all starts with ads

In my mind, Facebook ads are now more critical than ever. 

Of the three tools that Spotify is now rolling out to users, they have documentation covering the requirements of two: Marquee (read more) and Discovery Mode (read more). 

Marquee is still only available to users in select markets, and Discovery Mode is still in beta and limited to an even more finite set of users, but all things being equal, here’s what we’ll need to access each of them:

Marquee - more than 1,000 followers and over 5,000 streams in a single market within the past 28 days. 

Discovery Mode - at least 25,000 average monthly listeners and a track that has been on Spotify for at least 30 days (the song also has to have been streamed on Radio or autoplay within the past 7 days). 

So if you’re an artist starting from zero, these tools are effectively useless. 

This means that to reach these milestones, we have to market our music off-platform first. 

Enter: Facebook ads. 

If we know how to effectively use Facebook ads to drive traffic to Spotify, we can build a foundation to level up to Spotify’s on-platform tools. 

The correct ad strategy is the foundation for everything else. 

How I see it stacking

Once Marquee, Showcase, and Discovery Mode roll out to a wider range of users (e.g. more distributors for Discovery Mode, more markets for Marquee), here’s how I envision an effective music marketing system working for an artist starting from square one: 

First, start with Facebook ads. 

Using ads, we consistently drive traffic to our Spotify profile to build our initial audience. 

Depending on our budget, this will take time, but the primary goal here is to unlock listeners in select markets that we will later leverage with Marquee. 

Our goal: 1,000 followers and 5,000 streams per month in one country like the US or Germany. 

Next, use Marquee. 

Once we’ve hit this first milestone, in theory, Marquee becomes available for all new releases. 

Now, we keep running our ads every single day, but every time we drop new music, we run a Marquee campaign for each market that is available to us as well. 

Our new goal: 25,000 average monthly listeners. 

Finally, Discover Mode. 

Once we hit the 25,000 listener mark, we have access to every tool in our arsenal, including Discovery Mode.

Now: 

→ we run ads on Instagram to beef up our fanbase and add available markets to our Marquee options, 

→ we run a Marquee campaign in each market available to us for every release, 

→ and we move our winning tracks over to Discovery Mode once they’re outside the initial 30-day window. 

Release music. 

Rinse. 

Repeat. 

Now, obviously, there are some holes in this plan at this point. 

There’s still a lot of unknown and we’re completely sacrificing revenue for growth here, but this feels like a potentially high-leverage audience-building opportunity for those of us who want to dig into it. 

I’m sure I’ll uncover more as these features become available to me, and I will most definitely be reporting on my experiments with them, but, for now, I’m optimistic about the options this combination of marketing elements presents. 

I hope you are too.