What to Target When You Run Music Ads
Published · updated · by Loopin
Targeting is where music ads are won or lost, and the instinct — name the biggest artist you sound like — is exactly wrong.
Three to five artists, none of them enormous
Fans of an artist with two to five million monthly listeners are a usable audience: specific enough to mean something, large enough to deliver. Fans of an artist with eighty million are, statistically, everybody, and the ad system cannot learn anything from that.
Get the names from your own analytics rather than from your opinion. The "fans also like" panel in Spotify for Artists is a list of artists your actual listeners actually play, which beats your sense of what you sound like every time.
Keep the audience above 500,000
Below roughly half a million people, delivery gets expensive because the system runs out of room to optimise and starts paying a premium to reach the same small pool repeatedly. Stacking five interests and three behaviours feels precise and produces bad numbers.
Add age and country, and stop. A 20-year age band and two or three countries is enough narrowing at small budgets; everything else is the algorithm's job.
Retarget before you prospect
People who watched more than half of one of your videos are the cheapest audience you will ever buy, often several times cheaper per landing page view than a cold interest audience. Build that custom audience first, even if you do not spend against it yet.
It needs volume to be usable, so it is worth creating early and letting it fill up. An artist who sets it up a year before they need it has an asset; one who sets it up on release day has an empty list.
Lookalikes, but only after 100 real events
A lookalike built from fifty people is noise. Wait until you have a few hundred video viewers or landing page visits, then build a 1% lookalike from the best-quality source you have — savers and repeat listeners beat page visits, which beat video views.
Then run it against your interest audience, not instead of it. The two find different people, and the comparison tells you which half of your assumptions was wrong.
The three exclusions worth setting
Exclude existing followers if the objective is finding new listeners — otherwise you pay to reach people you already have. Exclude anyone who already converted on this campaign. And exclude the countries where clicks are cheap but listening is not, if you see traffic with a near-zero save rate arriving from one place.
That last one is uncomfortable and it is also where most small music budgets quietly evaporate. Check the geography of your clicks in the first three days, every time.
Frequently asked questions
Which artists should I target in music ads?
Three to five with roughly two to five million monthly listeners, taken from the "fans also like" panel in Spotify for Artists rather than from your own sense of what you sound like. Very large artists give you an audience that is effectively everybody.
How big should a music ad audience be?
Above about 500,000. Narrower than that and delivery gets expensive because the system runs out of room to optimise. Add an age band and a couple of countries, then stop.
Should I use lookalike audiences for music?
Only after a few hundred real events. A lookalike from fifty people is noise. Build a 1% lookalike from savers or landing page visits and run it alongside your interest audience, not instead of it.