Spotify Marquee is a native advertising format inside of Spotify to premium users and free users. You can show a pop-up message inside the Spotify app showcasing your latest release to people who have engaged with your music, and you only pay for the people who click your ad.
This is what it looks like:
Basically right when you open the Spotify app on your phone a pop-up box opens showing you the new music release of an artist you listen to. You can either click to go to the song / album or dismiss the message.
In this post i’m going to cover how you can get access to Spotify Marquee, an example of a campaign i’ve run on Spotify Marquee, and my overall opinion on how effective it is.
How do you get Marquee on Spotify?
To get access to Spotify Marquee you must have at least 15,000 streams in the past 28 days from the United States. As of right now you also must use a credit card from the United States to pay for Spotify Marquee, and your Marquee ads must run to listeners in the US. Spotify has plans of expanding this over time.
Update: July 2022
You can now run Spotify Marquee campaigns in these countries:
- Argentina
- Australia
- Austria
- Brazil
- Canada
- France
- Germany
- Ireland
- Liechtenstein
- Monaco
- New Zealand
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom
- United States
You will be eligible for Marquee if you have 15,000 streams in the past 28 days, or more than 2,500 followers in any of those countries.
How much does Spotify Marquee cost?
There are two groups of people you can target with Spotify Marquee with slightly different price points.
- Your reachable audience – these will cost you $0.50 per click in the USA
- Segments of your reachable audience – these cost $0.55 per click in the USA
Pricing varies for each individual country Spotify Marquee is available in.
Segments of your reachable audience gives you finer targeting control in the following categories:
- Recently interested listeners – Actively streamed your music in the last 28 days
- Casual listeners – Actively streamed your music in the last six months, but less than your other listeners
- Lapsed listeners – Have not actively streamed your music in six months
Depending on your release strategy you might want to hit up everyone, or only hit the most interested fans, or specifically only people who haven’t listened in a while. But Spotify charges you more to get that extra level of control.
The minimum campaign cost is $250, and the maximum size is really dictated by the size of your audience that you can retarget. For example one particular artist has 67,000 USA listeners and Spotify recommends a maximum of $3,000 for the budget.
On one hand $0.50 sounds expensive, especially when you compare it to Facebook conversion ads going to Spotify. However when you factor in that these are all United States listeners that $0.50 price point is a lot more reasonable. Also you know that the data is 100% accurate because it comes directly from Spotify.
Is Spotify Marquee worth it? – The Data
The question you’re probably here for… is Spotify Marquee any good? To answer that question we’re going to take a look at a campaign i’ve run. Since this wasn’t on my own music i’m going to have to blur out all artist information to keep them anonymous.
Here are some raw numbers:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Budget | $800 |
| Clicks | 1,756 |
| Reach | 13,623 |
| Listeners | 1,603 |
| Streams/Listener | 4.56 |
| Saves | 530 |
| Playlist Adds | 329 |
The first thing you’ll notice is that Spotify actually overdelivers, this seems to be typical across other campaigns as well. They should have given us 1,600 clicks but instead we got 1,756 – nice!
These 1,756 clicks resulted in 1,603 listeners who streamed the song 7,310 times. This repeat listen rate of 4.56 streams per listener is above average for the artist, and above the performance of the song overall. Looking at this month the song gets an average of 2.263 streams per listener.
The save rate is also quite high at about 33%, and the playlist add rate is high at 20%. Both of these numbers are better than what the song gets overall.
Here’s what the data looks like in Spotify for Artists:
Bonus Data
On top of this Spotify shows some metrics that people from Marquee generated on other music in the artist’s catalog. 330 listeners also streamed another release from the artist for an average of 7.01 streams per listener. People added 100 other songs by the artist to their playlists, and 140 other tracks got saved.
All of these data points are also quite nice, meaning that Marquee spills over into other music from the artist which is exactly what we want. When a marketing effort is 100% isolated to one song its not nearly as effective as when people check out other songs. This is one reason why Spotify playlist marketing isn’t very effective – nobody listeners to your other music.
Here’s the bonus data in Spotify for Artists:
What does this mean?
Is Spotify Marquee worth it?
Yes! Spotify Marquee not only has a reasonable price point of around $0.50 per USA listener, but the listeners engage with the music at a high rate. You can expect save rates of around 25%, playlist add rates of around 15% and a stream / listener rate of 4.56. In addition to that these people also take action on other music by the artist.
If you want to learn more about Spotify Marquee i’ve made a video going over even more metrics.
If you don’t have access to Marquee yet thats fine! Marquee is only for retargeting your existing audience so even if you had access it won’t really help you grow your audience.
I’ve used Facebook ads to grow my audience and have gotten millions of Spotify streams using it, alongside thousands of social media followers and hundreds of email list subscribers. Check out this detailed article I wrote on how to use Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify: https://musicgrowthmachine.com/facebook-ads-how-to-run-a-conversion-campaign-for-spotify-streams-full-guide/
