The Answer is 222,222.
Does that seem like a lot?
If you had 5K Monthly Listeners generating 222K streams, it breaks down to:
The average American spends over 2 hours per day listening to music. When you isolate music fans, that number shoots up to almost 5 hours per day.
Humans are creatures of habit. We all have a routine and our routines have a soundtrack. Our morning shower, commute, work, dinner, and romantic time all have soundtracks. Every day people hear the same songs multiple times and multiple songs by the same artists through what I like to call their “Routine Rotation.”
The Routine Rotation is dictated by a Feedback Loop where the songs users stream most often are fed back to them. To break into a user’s Routine Rotation, an artist must first break into their Feedback Loop.
The more a user streams a song or songs from a particular artist, the more they’ll have that song & songs from that artist fed back to them.
For example, my “Liked Songs” playlist is the soundtrack to my routine. It is a master list of all the songs I like. I shower to it, I work to it, I run errands to it. It’s not crazy to say it’s the soundtrack to my life. I have 155 songs on that playlist, but I might spend no more than an hour streaming music during each activity. That makes out to 20 songs a session with 155 songs competing for a slot. When I hit the “Shuffle” button, what decides which one of those 155 songs gets a slot? The Feedback Loop.
When I stream a song, it establishes a preference for that song. The more often I stream the song, the stronger my preference. The stronger my preference, the more the song is fed back to me by being prioritized in the rotation when I hit “Shuffle” on my Liked Songs playlist. This causes me to stream the song more often resulting in more prioritization. That’s the Feedback Loop. The songs that get recommended to users are the songs from the feedback loops of other users.
When I add your song to my library, it gets listed but doesn't enter the rotation. To make it into the rotation, the song has to generate streaming activity similar to the tracks already being played regularly.
What I’ve developed is a system that instructs artists on how to drive new listeners and break into the Feedback Loop resulting in cracking listeners’ routine rotation. I call it The Ladders Method where we turn Cold Leads to Warm Leads, and Warm Leads to Hot.
Here’s how it works and what you can expect to spend to get it to work for you.
Here’s our Ad campaign cost breakdown - Note, these are numbers from real campaigns:
By advertising to Hot Leads, a number of things happen:
Here’s what that means for us:
You earn $180 per month per song you push through the system at a one-time cost of $30 for each song.
Total Budget
The cost of building an audience of 1,000 Hot Leads ranges from: $700 - $900. Once you have an audience of Hot Leads, it’ll cost $30 - $60 to drive 1,000 Listeners per song.