For context, this is a continuation of my answer to the question: How should an indie artist spend their limited time and money? In last week's Part 1, which you can read here, I offered a basic three-step plan for anyone who wants to build things online:
- Pick one social platform.
- Develop a repeatable broadcast format – i.e., a Thing.
- Invite people who like your Thing into a deeper community.
And I thought I might just stop there, but enough of you asked for a Part 2 that I've decided to acquiesce and write more. (I am, for better and usually for worse, a people-pleaser.) So here's additional advice, mainly focused on the thing I failed to give any guidance on last week:
How to spend your money
It's fun to spend other people's money.
Part of me wants to tell you to put all yours into Chipotle burritos and rare coins. But don't worry, I'm going to take a narrower view here and limit my advice to your music marketing budget. (That said, in general I think making music should probably take precedence over marketing it, and obviously your housing costs and groceries and toothpaste should be prioritized over that, and don't forget that a penny saved is a penny earned and all that. Oh, and don't buy NFTs.)
So, leaving obvious financial wisdom aside, this is what I'd do:
I'd put most of your budget toward Meta ads. In my experience, Meta is the best platform on the planet for advertising music. This might change in the near future (I'm planning to make a video on this topic soon), but it holds true for now.
If you have a small budget, I'd focus on awareness marketing, by which I mean getting your artistry in front of new people. If you have a bigger budget (or an existing big audience), I'd consider conversion marketing.
More specifically:
If you have less than $300 per month, I'd focus the spend on one of two things:
- Building your own popular playlist
- Building your social platform (ideally Instagram)
Depending on whether you place more value on streams or social followers, pick one or the other and put $3 to $10 per day behind it.
I've written about the first tactic in more detail here. For the second, you're going to want to run traffic ads, with your objective being to optimize for Instagram profile visits. Assuming you're regularly posting your Thing, all you need to do is take your highest performing content and pay to put it in front of more people. (You can use an existing post as your ad, and you should.) Run that each month and your follower count will steadily increase – and whenever you have things go a little viral, it'll jump sharply.
Your goal at this level is just to put a little additional momentum toward your audience-building efforts.
If you have between $300 – $500 per month, I'd promote one of your songs directly using Meta ads.
In other words, send people to a landing page and from there to a single song on streaming platforms. Ideally, you'll be able to use your highest performing organic content for your ads here, but depending on what your Thing is and how consistently you post about it, there's a good chance you'll need to make standalone ads as well.
I've made a bunch of videos on this exact tactic (not to mention built courses and a whole membership community around it), so rather than giving you another tactical breakdown, I'll just wave you toward my YouTube channel.
Your goal at this level is the same as above, but you can build your fanbase faster and potentially at a greater level of depth.
If you have between $500 – $1,000 per month, this is when I'd start putting some spend toward conversion campaigns.
What I mean by "conversion campaigns" is anything where you're actually capturing contact information (like an email address) or selling something (like a Patreon membership or tickets or merch, etc.). These sorts of campaigns are generally more expensive than awareness campaigns of the sort listed above, but they also have a more direct return.
Again, I'll point you toward my YouTube channel for button-click breakdowns of a few campaign types, including list-building campaigns and ticket sales campaigns.
And if you have more than $1,000 per month, I'd consider working with an agency¹, because this is the level where having someone manage your ads starts to make sense. It's not a hard rule or anything, but in my experience most of the options that are cheaper than this aren't all that great. And anyway, if you have a couple hundred bucks, it's usually better to send it all toward ads than to put a chunk toward someone's management fee.
I'll end with a few ways I wouldn't spend your money:
1) On playlist promotion as a standalone tactic. You know, the classic "spend $500, get 5,000 streams from our curators" thing. It's not that playlists are bad (they're not), or that the streams from this tactic aren't legit (when you use good playlist companies, they are). It's just that they aren't all that meaningful, and they're almost always unsustainable.
Playlists are a nice supplementary thing. You can use them to hit arbitrary numbers or plug them in tandem with ads to reach algorithmic thresholds, but I wouldn't pay for them as a standalone strategy to build your audience.
2) On PR without a plan. I love press coverage because I love when people meaningfully engage with art, but it's not a great way to get in front of new people. Even the biggest outlets, like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, etc., rely on artists to send them their audiences rather than the other way around. PR is validating – it'll make you feel good – and it's nice as a means of telling your story to your existing fans. But it won't win you many new ones.
3) On radio. Honestly, I wish radio worked, but I've never seen a campaign by which I've been impressed. I think people just don't find new music on radio stations anymore; at most, they listen to old music. I mean, who was the last artist that broke big via radio – Elvis?
(Radio promoters, come at me. I would enjoy being proven wrong about this.)
4) On influencer campaigns. It is entirely possible to run an awesome influencer campaign, but to do that takes thoughtful strategy. Don't throw money at creators unless you have a great plan – some creative concept that complements their normal content and in which your music is featured. If you spend without a good strategy, you will wind up paying a teenager to dance in their parents' basement while your song plays unnoticed in the background.
I could go on, but I'll leave you with two final thoughts.
First, paid advertising is a boost rather than a base. You should have a Thing before you pay to promote it.
The value of any paid advertising is hugely dependent on the quality of your artistry. If something isn't interesting, showing it to a bunch of people won't suddenly make it so. On the flip side, if your artistry is awesome, a little bit of paid advertising can go a really long way. Basically, ads won't replace the three steps I outlined last week, and budget is only fuel for an already-burning fire.
Second, I think a lot of artists view marketing as some sort of mysterious black box – as if its outcomes are unknowable and its success depends on reaching a vast, faceless public via limitless money and magical marketing hacks. And to be fair to you, some marketing agencies talk as if this is how things are.
But screw that. Marketing should really not be mysterious. Good marketing just makes sense.
It makes sense that showing people a cool video of a good song on Instagram would make them want to hear more. It makes sense that active listening, where someone clicks over to Spotify with the express intent of hearing a song, would lead to more engagement than passive listening, where a song is on in the background. It makes sense that people who have heard your music and liked it might want to sign up for your email list. It makes sense that your folk song would be placed on a folk playlist rather than one called "Los mejores éxitos de club de TikTok de 2026 para empresarias de mediana edad."
A good rule of thumb: If you are considering a marketing strategy and you don't really get why it would work, you probably shouldn't pay for it.
– Jon
Jon Anderson
Founder @ Two Story Media
Surprisingly Good @ Sitting Quietly
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100% Human Guarantee
I wrote this, not AI.
Today's random photo: My grandpa celebrated his 93rd birthday last week in style. True to character and abounding in wisdom, he was much more interested in the quality of his ice cream sundae than in the photo ops.
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P.S. – Last week, I gave my three-step plan on how to build an audience for your music online. You can read it here.
¹Speaking of ad agencies: I mentioned on Thursday that we had three slots open for new ad clients. That's no longer true; we're booked for the next several weeks. If you missed out on this round, you can still apply for our waitlist here. You never know, but I'd guess we'll have a few slots open up by October.