It is 100% feasible for you to get your first 1 million streams on your music in 1 year. All you need is good music, a hard work ethic and ideally some budget.
This strategy revolves around 4 core principles:
- Your music is good
- You’re able to release new music every 4-6 weeks
- You’re able to release social media content regularly
- You have some budget for marketing
I can hear you cringing at the idea of making social media content already, but don’t worry we’re going to go over that in more detail later.
If you want to watch a video version of this post, check it out here.
The first thing I want to address is the ratio between social media content and budget. While steps 1 and 2 focus on music and release schedule, steps 3 and 4 are all about traffic. To get people to listen to your music you need a traffic source to get their attention, and you can get that traffic for free or pay for it.
Creating social media content is time consuming and can take a long time to grow, but its free. Ads take little time and act quickly, but they cost money. In a nutshell the lower your budget is (or if its zero), the more social media content you’ll need to post. You need either time or money, and ideally some of both.
Why I Know This Works
My music alone has over 10 million streams, and i’ve driven over 150 million streams on Spotify alone with my marketing and i’ve worked with thousands of artists over the years, many who’s music is doing drastically better than my own. However the reason I know this works is because in 2022 I started an alternative metal band called Every Waking Moment.
From February 2022 to the end of 2022 we got around 350,000 streams (280k of which coming from Spotify) releasing only 6 songs in that time period. In our situation our social media content was minimal, but we had $500 per month that we allocated to Facebook ads. In those 10 months we spent about $5k.
This made me realize: if someone started in January and release 12 songs instead of 6 and posted 3-5 times on social media per week with good content, they could very likely hit 1 million streams in their first year with the same exact ad budget. If you have less budget you can compensate with more social media content and more music (and better social content and music).
Over the years working with artists i’ve seen many people pull this off. Many people think it’s impossible, but as long as you work hard it’s actually a reasonable goal.
Having Good Music
It’s hard to say what music is good or not as music is subjective. I don’t like country music or hip-hop, but you might not like metal and I do. However I can tell when i’m listening to a well written country or hip-hop song. Despite this, sometimes songs I think are horrible become popular and there are millions of people that love them.
So my rule of thumb for you here is make sure your music is at least 80% as good as music that currently commercially viable in your genre.
Also, ask 5 friends and 5 strangers to give you their honest feedback. Strangers don’t care if they hurt your feelings, so don’t skip that part. There are many online communities, subReddits, Discord channels, Facebook groups etc. that exist for artists to interact and share their work and ask for feedback.
Release Schedule
When you’re starting from nothing, releasing more music is better. The more music you put out the more you have to talk about on social media, the more chances you have at the algorithms, the more songs you can pitch to editorial, the more songs you can test in ads etc…
I usually say 4-6 weeks is a great plan because it’s possible for most music artists to keep up with and it’s frequent enough where you can stay top of mind for fans. If you’re able to release music faster – go for it. However keep in mind the music has to be good, and you’re better off doing something slower and consistently than faster at the start and burning out later.
Hip-hop artists are typically able to thrive in these fast release schedules because in many cases they’re buying / leasing their instrumentals, and they can record their parts at home. I’ve seen people in almost every genre be able to pull off every 4-6 weeks however faster is not always possible. Batching music ahead of time can allow you to pull it off though.
Social Media
Stop thinking about social media content as creating content and doing stupid trends. Think about it more as your stage and your journal. Your content can be as simple as you performing or lip-syncing your songs in interesting places, mixed with behind the scenes clips of you in your natural element.
When it comes to the performance content, consider this:
- Pick 3-4 interesting locations (abandoned building, the park, a mountain etc)
- Film a lip-sync and/or live performance video at each of these locations
- Cut the video up into 3-6 parts
- Think of 10-20 ‘hooks’ to tie the song to people’s lives
- Put the hooks on the parts
When I mean by hooks are things like ‘I can’t believe this really happened…’, ‘this song is for the lonely people out there’, or ‘if you’ve had a breakup recently, this song is for you…’. They anchor your song to a feeling, a moment, or a particular type of person. It makes your song relatable and gives the audience a reason to care.
You want to come up with 10-20 hook ideas so you can pick the best 5 or so to use in your content.
The filming will give you 15+ unique videos, but you can re-use videos with multiple hooks if they’re relevant. I think you could turn this into 30+ videos.
If each video gets 200 views, you’ll get 6,000 views if you post 30 of them. If you post those videos to Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok now you have 24,000 views. Some of them will pop off and give you more, and over time you’ll attract followers leading to further growth. This means you might end up with 24k views for the first song, 32k views for the second, etc…
By the end of the year you should have accumulated a substantial amount of views and followers. At least if the music is good and the content is good. Even if you fail to hit the 1 million goal and your content is kind of crappy, you’ll be in a much better spot for year 2 because you’ll have some audience and you’ll have gotten MUCH better at creating content.
Having A Budget
As I mentioned earlier in my example, we had about $500 per month. I totally get that many of you may not be able to swing that, but if you can it’s worth it. Here are some ways you might be able to afford it if you don’t think you can:
- Do you go to coffee shops? I found I used to spend $8/day at these places, which is $240 per month. Making coffee at home is practically free in comparison and now you have $240 to spend on marketing that month.
- Do you go out to eat or have food delivered? Even going out to eat once per week could result in $300+ per month in costs. Cooking at home is much cheaper, now you have a marketing budget.
- Can you pick up or create a side hustle? Many artists have skills they can monetize in some way, music related or not. Teach lessons, sell beats, record session parts, mix other artists music, edit their videos etc.
- Lastly, consider just working more if you can. If you make $20/hour and work 5 extra hours per week thats $400 per month.
At this stage and budget don’t bother with playlisting, don’t bother with PR – put 100% of this budget into Facebook / Meta ads. There are nearly 4 BILLION monthly active users on Facebook and Instagram. This isn’t accounts, this is active users every single month. You can target them by what artists they like, what genre they like, what streaming service they use, how old they are, what country they live in and a whole lot more.
If you want to learn how to run Facebook ads to promote your music, check out this blog post or this video to learn it in detail. I also made a course called Spotify Growth Machine if you prefer that format.
If you have a larger budget I have an ad agency called Forbid Media that specializes in running ads for music artists and labels. Click here to reach out.
Let’s say you happen to also have $500 per month, just to make my example easy to explain.
Now you aren’t just going to spend $500 evenly on every song. You’re going to launch your campaigns and see how they perform during the 1st week. If the best you can do still sucks, cut the campaign short and save that leftover money for when you get a campaign that doesn’t suck.
Every song gets a push, but some songs may only get $150 while others may get $1,500. You have to separate yourself from feeling like certain songs are better or worse. In marketing it doesn’t matter which song you like best, it matters which songs are the most marketable.
Bad performance doesn’t mean a bad song, it just means the song isn’t sticky enough to people.
If you have less budget (or no budget) you’ll want to go heavier on social media content, and potentially release more music. Remember, all you need is a traffic source and it doesn’t have to be paid traffic. Some artists go from zero to top 1,000 artists in the world with social media alone, but they worked their ass off for it.
Bonus Tips
There are many other things you can do as well, here are some of them.
Collaborating
Making music with other artists is fun, but it also allows you to cross pollinate your audiences for free. Additionally it can allow you to double the effort in promoting the song either because you now have double the content, or double the budget.
Playing Live
If you want to play live this can be a great marketing opportunity if you play at the right venues with the right bands. At first it will pay little or nothing, but over time it can become a great income strategy. At the start treat it more like marketing though.
Fans see you live, they check you out if you do a good job. You also get to network with other artists and fans of those artists, which is massive win.
Build Playlists
You can build your own playlists on Spotify that tie your music into larger themes that people are searching for. On one hand this can generate organic traffic on Spotify, but it also gives you a place you can add other small artists in your genre and an easy place to send fans from social media to check out your music.
For ads though i’d send people directly to songs and not playlists (from a landing page of course).
Meet People
This might sound silly, but one of the most valuable things in my life has been the people i’ve met over the years. It can be people you collaborate with musically, people you become friends with or people you trade services and knowledge with.
Your first show might come from a random local artist you bumped into going to a show, your biggest song might come from a collaboration you did with a singer you found on Instagram, a fan you took the time to reply to might own a massive Spotify playlist.
Don’t treat music like a competition, be willing to help other people and be willing to learn.
