Showcase is set to place music adverts front and center on Spotify’s homepage. Photo Credit: Spotify
Another day, another step on Spotify’s journey towards $100 billion in annual revenue: The service has officially rolled out “Showcase,” a pay-per-click promotional tool that plugs music on the homepage.
Spotify emailed Digital Music News about its latest music-marketing offering today. According to the relevant resources – among them a formal release, an in-depth Spotify for Artists guide, and a minutes-long video for good measure – the program is currently open to stateside artists with 1,000 or more monthly streams during the last 28 days in at least one of the “target markets.”
On the latter front, eligible acts and their teams can customize Showcase campaigns to try and reach fans in 36 countries, among them the United States, a number of European nations, and many states in Central and South America.
Meanwhile, the Showcase promos themselves are simply banners situated prominently on the Spotify app homepage, as mentioned. Besides featuring a track or an entire album selected by the campaign organizer, of course, said banners attempt to draw fans in with titles such as “Releasing music soon,” “On tour,” “New music,” “Recently released,” “Release anniversary,” “Getting buzz,” and “Seasonal vibes.”
Showcase, which Spotify is billing as a worthwhile option for both catalog efforts and new projects, also allows for campaigns to be angled towards certain types of listeners. “By default,” Spotify communicated, “we’ll show your campaign to listeners across Spotify who are likely to stream your release.”
But for those who wish to exercise a bit more control over the potentially pricey process, campaigns can be made to zero in on “previously active audience” members, or “listeners who used to be in your active audience but haven’t intentionally streamed your music in at least 28 days.”
Shifting to the active-listener side, Spotify Showcase includes audience-customization campaign choices for super listeners (“your most dedicated active listeners in the last 28 days”), moderate listeners (“active listeners who intentionally streamed your music many times in the last 28 days, and could still develop into super listeners”), and light listeners (“active listeners who intentionally streamed your music once or a couple times in the last 28 days”).
With a minimum campaign budget of $100 and a per-click price tag beginning at 40 cents, Spotify also described as “billable” all “clicks – including saves.”
Regarding the possible results at hand, the platform further indicated that “people who see a Showcase are 6x more likely to stream the promoted release” – a seemingly feasible stat given that the involved music is plastered front and center on the app’s main page.
Showcase is the latest in a series of paid-promotional features debuted by Spotify since 2020. It’s now been nearly three years since the revenue-hungry business started allowing artists to influence listener recommendations in exchange for a lower royalty rate. And the adjacent “Marquee” marketing option’s beta began making headlines two years back.
As if the difficulty stemming from the monetization of promotion wasn’t enough, indie artists are likewise grappling with a tidal wave of AI music as well as a depressingly low average per-stream royalty rate and compensation proposals that effectively function as entry barriers.