Today I checked the Spotify for Artists page and was surprised to see that so far my two albums have received over 250,000 combined streams!
It's clear that the new album will blow past the first one before the year's end, since it's over halfway there in less then three months. I'm so excited about this momentum! A big part of it has been Meta ads and Spotify campaigns. I didn't try either of those with the first album and I can really see the difference. Meta and Spotify know so much about a listener, so they can target the ones that might like my music. I guess I assumed those ads were more random, but it makes sense that they are not.
I also got this YouTube notification recently:
Pretty cool! If you combine Spotify and YouTube streams I'm over one third of the way to a million! When I released my first album a friend asked what I hoped would happen and I said 100k Spotify streams would be amazing. My new amazing is when the number hits 1 million, it will be cool combined with YouTube first, but I mean one million on Spotify. I can see now this is totally attainable, so it's a great goal. I just need to keep putting out good songs, promoting them regularly on social media and running ads when I can.
Right now I'm also helping another songwriter that is about to release a fantastic album, but he is relatively unknown, so we are working on a strategy to best get his music noticed by the people who will love it. It's been a great exercise as I'm still trying to figure it out myself. Sometimes clarity is found when you start documenting and describing things to others, and the more important pieces stand out against all the optional things. Also having a tight budget, while limiting, makes decisions a bit easier.
On top of that I'm helping a young songwriter record his first songs. He has a lot of talent and enthusiasm. It has been a blast! Can't wait to share more about that soon.