How To Get Your First 10,000 Streams on Spotify

There are many articles out there about how to get your first million streams, or how to go viral on TikTok, or a host of “get rich quick” music tricks.

But there’s not enough articles out there to help the 99% of musicians out there who are passionate about getting their music heard, are just getting started, and need a really barebones approach to getting their first listeners.

This past year was the first time I had a track break the 10k listens mark, and that took almost a year after the song had released. Soon after that I got a second track to break 9k listens within 1 month of releasing it (and well on it’s way to 10k)!

While it’s not a lot compared to Drake having 60m monthly listeners, or even barely a scratch against the many musicians I know with well over 100k or even 1million streams. But over 80% of Spotify artists have less than 50 monthly listeners.

I wanted to write a post to help you.

Those of you who are just starting out.

Below I detail the music marketing tactics I used to get my music career off the ground and how you can too! These aren’t some quick listen tactics, this is about a creating repeatable process to grow your music career over time.

But first- Who am I?

My name is Brian Clark and I produce electronic music under the name ADXRE (pronounced Adore) feel free to check me out on Instagram @adxre.

Here’s me DJ’ing a show earlier this year!

I sort of “fell” into music.

In 2019 after 5–6 years of trying to build my own tech startup I finally shut it all down and took a job for the for the first time in years. I went from working 80–90 hours a week to a 9–5 and suddenly found myself with a lot of free time after work.

I’ve always been passionate about music, going to raves since my late teens/early twenties, am an audiophile with a passion for speakers and headphones, and have a nice vinyl collection.

Cue up 2019 some friends and I are hanging out in a park and I’m playing some music off a bluetooth speaker. Someone asks me what playlist I was playing and I told them I was just picking random tunes. This person asked if I was a DJ, and I answered no but that does sound fun.

Two days later I bought my first turntable!

For the first year I was just dabbling and played my turntable in my apartment for friends. When the pandemic hit a friend asked me to do a livestream to keep us entertained and people were jamming to it!

Fortunately for me my brother (@LostLumens) has been producing electronic music off and on for a few years so the idea of making music wasn’t completely foreign to me, however it had never crossed my mind that I would like to make it myself.

Fast forward to December 2020 and with my brother’s help I produced my first song and released it Jan 2021. It’s an experimental electronic music track called “For Me” and when I made it I didn’t have any idea of what kind of music I wanted to make.

But it was so exciting putting my first song out there.

I then decided to focus on making party friendly house music to get my music career started, and I plan to expand from here, but I’m excited to let my creativity guide the way as I continue to grow as an artist!

So that’s cool and all, but how about those 10k streams?

Yes, enough about me. From here I plan to write out a functional guide on how you can achieve traction on your music.

The first thing I will say is this isn’t a guide to “free growth”. Most of these strategies do have some costs associated with them, nothing comes for free, but I do keep it relatively budget friendly for emerging artists.

One last note, I plan to mostly focus on Spotify, but some of these tactics may or may not be applicable to other music services!

I’m going to break down my guide into 6 main growth mechanisms:

1. Social Media Ads
2. Playlist Submissions
3. Organic Reach
4. Collabs
5. The Spotify Algorithm
6. The Most Important One

1. Social Media Ads

One of the most important parts of building your initial audience is going to be using social media ads. This is a way to connect directly with new listeners that haven’t heard of you before and find new fans.

This section is going to be the longest part of this post that I write, but it’s the most effective for me and also the most complicated, so it warrants a bit of a long read but I promise you it’s worth it!

Running an optimal ad

Before I start, this post won’t be a how to setup and run social media ads, I would search on google or youtube “how to run instagram ads to my Spotify.” I’ll be focusing more on strategies and please look online for resources on how to put these into practice! There’s a lot out there!

Every time I release a song I create a budget. Typically anywhere from $100-$300 per song for social media ads. I only run ads on Facebook and Instagram so this post will be about that.

I will say it’s important to create a budget and stick to it, whether it’s $50 or $500. Don’t fret if your song doesn’t work out, most of mine haven’t. Stick to your budget and let the song perform how it will perform. Don’t throw more money at it hoping it’ll make people like your song.

All that said, there are two ways to run social media ads, I’ve tried both and am a proponent of the second option (Using Hypeddit) but will detail both here.

1) Run a Cost Per Click ad directly to your song on Spotify.

With this method you run an ad with the link going directly to your Spotify song.

A “Cost Per Click” ad means that you can budget $10/day on social media ads and the ad system will try and get you the lowest cost per click on your ad. I’ve seen as low as $0.03 cost per click and as high as $1 ($1 was bad I turned the ad off and tried something new).

The pros of this method is with just one click a user will land on your song in Spotify and it will start playing. The cons with this method is you may be getting listeners who don’t have Spotify, or be getting bot clicks, or a host of other bad actors, and it may mean that your ads aren’t going to people who actually end up listening to your song. I’ve run ads like this where I got 1000 clicks but only like 10 listens so I knew something was wrong.

2) Run a Conversion ad to a Hypeddit Landing page

This is not a paid promo for Hyppedit, I just think they’ve actually made a very quality product.

With this method you create a landing page for your song to send your listeners to.

Every time someone clicks on your ad it will take them to your Hypeddit landing page for your song, and then the user has to click on the “Play” button to open your song in Spotify, etc. When the user clicks on that button it sends a message to Facebook and says “hey a user actually clicked to listen to the song.”

This allows you to run what’s called a “Conversion” ad.

The benefit here is bots or users who wouldn’t actually listen to your music aren’t likely to click through. So what Facebook and instagram will do is optimize to show your song to people who actually clicked on the “Play” button, giving you a much higher quality audience of potential listeners that Facebook will show your ad to!

This has worked wonders for me in comparison to the other method and I use this with every song I release.

I could continue adding more here but Hypeddit has a lot of content on YouTube about optimizing social media ads for music and if you want to learn more I suggest checking out their content!

Creating engaging content

The second most important part about running ads is creating an engaging ad that your users will want to click on.

There‘s a lot I could write here but to keep it simple I’m going to give you a list of things to think about when creating your ad creative:

1. Use a video not an image
2. If there’s lyrics adding captions is great
3. Videos of you or people reacting to your music has done the best for me — this video worked well for my ad, while this one didn’t perform as well
4. Post teasers of your songs on social media with various videos. The videos that perform well organically have typically done well as ads for me
5. Run multiple ads at the same time for your song with different videos per ad, see which ones perform the best, and use that one

Again with this section I kept it short and sweet but there’s entire books written on creating and testing content for your ads! I really enjoyed a book called “One Million Followers: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days”

Another important note here — some of my social media ad budget may go to hiring someone to create content for me if I don’t like what I’ve made on my own! Don’t be shy to get help if you need from others!

Fine Tuning Your Ads

This is for those of you getting into the details of running your ads and a few details for optimizing your ads! If you haven’t created an ad yet I suggest skipping to the TLDR; and reading this section later!

While running a conversion ad and creating good content for your ads are the main things you need to know, and I told you all to look elsewhere for tutorials on running social media ads for Spotify. I wanted to add a section here with just some random tidbits I learned from running my ads that I think would be very helpful!

Many of these will only make sense after you’ve setup and run an ad or two, so read them now but come back after you’ve run an ad and it will be very helpful!

1. For Facebook ads you can configure many things to optimize not showing your ad to “junk” viewers

2. For “Interests” I set my audience for my ads to have the interests of “Spotify” narrowed by “Tiesto, EDC, etc.” and other interests I think align to my specific brand.

3. You want a fairly large audience size, 10m-50m people, and let the ad algorithm optimize who to show it to.

4. I only run ads on the Facebook feed, stories and reels, and Instagram feed, stories and reels (Audience Network is especially bad)

5. I run the same ad as separate campaigns for different country groups

Group 1 — Western Europe, US, Canada, Group 2 — Mexico, Brazil, Other South/Central America, Group 3 — India, Indonesia, Group 4 — S. Korea, Japan, Etc.

These are grouped by countries that have similar cost per conversion. If I run a single ad campaign to all of these countries at once, all of my ads will be shown in India as my cost per conversion may be $0.10 there but $0.30 in the US and Facebook will show it to the lowest cost per conversion. To make sure everyone sees my ads I run separate ad campaigns to each country group

6. I typically will run anywhere from $10-$20/day in ads for the first 1–2 weeks a song is out.

So possibly $5/day to each country group 1–4 for a total of $20/day for 14 days is a $280 ad budget. If I’m only looking to spend $10/day I’m likely to cut a country group rather than spend lower than $5 per group. (I’ll explain why only 1–2 weeks in the Organic Reach section below)

That was a lot, TLDR on social media ads?

These are only a few tips and I’m sure I’m just scratching the iceberg but the real thing to remember here is:

1. Use conversion ads with Hypeddit and watch their YouTube tutorials
2. Experiment on your ad creative and watch your cost per conversion
3. Aim to run the bulk of your ad budget in the first 1–2 weeks the song is out
4. Fine tune your ads to reach the best audience possible

I definitely suggest running an ad and getting your feet wet with how it works then coming back and reading this section again and applying some of my tactics!

2. Playlist Submissions

The second most important way that I reach new listeners is by getting my song on Spotify playlists managed by curators.

These are regular Spotify playlists created by people that are passionate about music or possibly musicians themselves and have created playlists that have garnered hundreds, thousands, or even 10s of thousands of followers. Websites exist that allow you to submit your songs to these playlist curators (some paid, some free, more on that later) and if they like your song they will add it to their playlists and you can get many new listeners from there!

My suggestion is to set a budget for submitting your songs to playlist curators with some details of do’s and don’ts below:

1. Submithub.com—Probably the most popular option, you pay per submission for curators to listen to your track. Placement percentage may be low but tend to be high quality playlists
2. Playlister.club — Similar to SubmitHub but you pay a monthly fee and their pool of playlisters will listen to and possibly add your tracks to their playlists. I’ve noticed there’s some overlap here and with Submithub.
3. https://playlistpush.com/ — Another paid promotion but this one is a bit more “high end.” With a decent budget they push your music to playlists, TikTok, etc. While I will say this service is great, it may not be the most budget friendly for up and coming artists.
4. https://dailyplaylists.com — Free playlist submissions website, just click through it!
5. playlistsupply.com — This is a website where you can search a database of playlist curators and find their emails/IG handles and reach out to them directly to add your song to their playlists
6. Pitching Other Playlists — This last one is the same as above, but you can research playlists on your own, create a spreadsheet to track who these curators are, and reach out to them to have them add your song, any avenue works!

My suggestions would be to use all of these and any other locations you can find to submit your song to various playlists! That being said…

With playlists there are KEY things to avoid doing

Do not fall for pay to play

There are many services out there that say things like 50k streams for $100. These are fake bots and will harm your account. Avoid them.

That being said one (or more) of your songs will eventually get botted. It’s not good for your song but it happens, just ignore it and keep doing your thing.

There are also two grey areas here:

1. Pay for Placement

There are some playlists with legitimate listeners where you play for placement on their playlist. You may reach out and they’ll say “PayPal me $5 and I’ll add your song to my playlist.” Sometimes these are legitimately genuine playlists, other-times they’re bot playlists. It can be hard to tell so I don’t pay for these placements.

1. Pay for “Listen”

This is what SubmitHub.com and Playlister.club fall into. You pay the curator to listen to your song and if they like it they add it to their playlist. While I have ended up with some bot streams from these services, I would say its about 80% genuine from what I can garner (or so I hope! 😳). This is the “pay for placement” I’m personally ok with doing.

So there you have it! That is my playlist tactic for getting my music into the ears of new listeners. Feel free to try those out and if you have other websites you use feel free to send them my way!

3. Organic Reach

This is one most people probably already do but I did want to highlight a few important things about making sure you optimize your organic reach!

Release Radar

As you release more music you ideally get followers on Spotify.

When you release a song you should make sure Spotify has your music ready for release at least one week before your release date. You can then pitch your song to their editors. Two things happen here:

1. If an editor likes your song they will add it to an official Spotify playlist (although I still haven’t had any editorial support).
2. More important for early artists, pitching your song one week in advance means that your song will show up in all of your followers Release Radar on the Friday after your song comes out. You have a natural audience there and make sure you take advantage of it!

Post about your song!

This one goes without saying to post about your music online, but I’m here to say don’t just post on the day it comes out.

Do teasers the weeks before.

Post reminders about it a year later.

Never stop promoting the music you’ve put out!

You get the idea :)

4. Collabs

This is a huge one. I’ve seen people get 100k+ streams on their first release because they collaborated with a known artist. While this can be hard to do (first you have to know an artist with a following, and second you have to be able to create music that is up to their quality bar), but if you can make this happen it can be a career boost!

My first song that hit 10k streams was a collaboration “Always By Your Side” with my brother @LostLumens and that still took almost a year to hit 10k streams.

5. The Spotify Algorithm

When I release a new song my main goal (aside from artistically being happy with the song) is to get an “algorithmic push” by Spotify.

This is when Spotify thinks your song is likely to be popular and adds your song to a bunch of listeners Release Radar playlists that don’t follow you. This push is a very powerful way to get a bunch of new listeners for “free.”

You can’t exactly control the algorithmic push happening, but you can do your best to make it happen, and I’ll shed some light on what I’ve been able to figure out.

In order to trigger the algorithm Spotify has to think your song will do well.

There isn’t one single factor that determines this but I will share what I think to be useful knowledge and what you can do to improve your chances.

Spotify has a few stats you can see, and many more that are hidden.

Ones you can see are plays per user, number of saves (and thus you can calculate save rate), and playlists you’ve been added to. Some hidden numbers are things like skip rate, popularity score and I’m sure more.

Of note you can check your popularity score on websites like muicstax.com although they aren’t updated daily and aren’t the perfect indicator. A baseline goal is 20% popularity to get an algorithmic push. But don’t quote me on that!

Those numbers plus things like number of followers you have, how your previous songs have performed and many more data points are plugged into the Spotify algorithm.

Timing matters

Above I mentioned that I try and focus my ad budget on the first 1–2 weeks. Your songs are only eligible for Release Radar for the first 4 weeks they are out, and the algorithm is heavily weighted to the first 1–2 weeks after release.

So all of my organic posts, social media ads, and playlist submissions are focused on the first two weeks after release in the hopes of garnering enough song popularity that Spotify notices the song and pushes it out algorithmically to new listeners.

If your song does well on a Release Radar push I’ve seen things like a second larger push later, or making it into Discover Weekly or other algorithmic playlists Spotify offers.

Larger artists have much bigger budgets and existing fans and don’t have a need to trigger the Spotify algorithm, as a small undiscovered artist on a budget it can be a powerful tool to get your music into the ears of new listeners!

While an algorithmic push ins’t the be all end all, I consider my song release a “success” marketing wise if I can trigger the algorithm. It means I ran my ads well enough to convince Spotify the song may be good and from here it’s on the ears of listeners if they like it enough to save and stream and and Spotify to keep pushing it out to more listeners.

That being said for any of you out there reading this who aren’t releasing music, favoriting and adding your friends songs to playlists, and most importantly streaming the the songs (and not skipping them), helps them out a ton!

(Of note this is what I’ve learned as of publishing this article, I’m sure it will change in the future as Spotify continues to grow and change.)

6. The Most Important One

The last thing to share, and most importantly, you have to consistently put out quality music and continue to get better.

While this is a marketing guide, honestly you should spend less than 1% of your time setting up and running social media ads, creating graphics, and pitching playlists. 99% of your time should be spent honing your craft and becoming a better musician.

When I release a track I spend one day making creative, setting up the facebook ads, finding playlists to submit to. Usually I do this 2–3 days before a song comes out. And then the day the song comes out I spend about 1–2 hours submitting to the playlists and posting on social media.

Otherwise I’m spending all the rest of my time becoming a better music producer. This guide is to help you streamline and know exactly what to do for that one day of prep work, but the other 29 days in a month should be focused on your craft!

One of my good friends and electronic music producer JayBird told me “Chasing streams can be a money pit, and while you may see some initial success, it won’t hold up if you aren’t putting out quality music. Once I honed my craft and was able to get my tracks signed by labels my streams grew exponentially.”

If you’re an electronic music producer and looking to improve your craft you should absolutely reach out to him via his producer collective The Birdhouse!

That being said, if you do truly believe you’re making great music and you haven’t been able to find your initial audience yet, this guide should be perfect for you to start to slowly grow your fan base and get into the ears of more listeners!

In Conclusion

This is still likely just a primer on the many things you can be doing to promote your music. I didn’t cover things like getting your song signed to a label (which ideally has it’s own reach), days of the week to release your songs, posting reels and other content to keep listeners engaged, and more.

If you want to just make music to make music, by all means do that. But if you want to build a following and become a bigger artist, you do need to treat it as a “job” at times and put in consistent and specific work.

I really like this 3 tips to make it as a DJ video James Hype did.

Once you feel you have great music, putting out social media content, running ads, all of these things will help you grow, but having quality music first and foremost is what matters.

I wanted to summarize all the most important points for you here again as the TLDR;

1. Put together a budget and run social media ads to get listeners
2. Pitch to playlists to find new listeners
3. Make sure to submit your music to Spotify early and get on Release Radar
4. And most importantly, spend 1% of your time marketing (and if you follow this guide that should make this much easier!) and 99% of your time becoming a better musician

I hope this was helpful and please share what does and doesn’t work for you all and continue to learn from others on how to promote your music!

To end on a high note, keep going, enjoy the process and you got this!

If you enjoyed this would love a follow on instagram @Adxre and DM me any questions!