What is the Spotify Campaign Kit and How Can it Help You?
Spotify’s Campaign Kit is a set of tools Spotify has made that can be used by you to promote your music. There are four tools that they have in their Campaign Kit that can be useful to promote your music. These tools are Playlist Pitching, Discovery Mode, Marquee and Showcase. These tools provide ways to promote your music in different ways, but not every tool is available to everyone.
The Tools in Spotify’s Campaign Kit
Playlist Pitching
The Playlist Pitching is a free tool that allows you to submit the tracks you’ve made to playlist curators. If the pitch gets accepted it will be added to their playlists, but pitching doesn’t guarantee placement in a playlist. Specifically, it can be used to pitch upcoming, unreleased songs to playlist editors. There are some criteria for the song you are pitching to be eligible:
The song is at least seven days before release so the playlist editors can listen to the music
You aren’t just a featured artist on the song
Only one song can be pitched at a time
The song has to be unreleased, if it goes live it is not eligible
Tracks that get submitted will automatically be put in the Release Radar playlist for your followers.
Spotify is also adding playlist pitching for videos but it is not available to everyone yet. There are some differences that video pitching has. It has to be an official music video or performance, and it has to be delivered by your label or uploaded directly through Spotify for Artists. You can also pitch multiple videos at the same time but only one pitch per video even if there are multiple people who have access to the video.
Eligibility
This tool is available to every creator on Spotify, but video playlist pitching is not available to everyone and is still being rolled out.
Discovery Mode
Discovery Mode is a tool that allows artists to market songs they have chosen as a priority and promote them in personalized playlists. These signals increase the chances that the tracks will appear in personalized playlists, but it does not guarantee those tracks will be recommended. They will also look at how the track is performing and will use that information to determine what tracks to recommend.
In contrast to Playlist Pitching, Discovery Mode has a cost associated with it. There’s no upfront cost, but when you use Discovery Mode; instead Spotify will take 30% of any revenue generated on the priority tracks you have selected that are played in Discovery Mode contexts.
Discovery Mode is useful for promoting new tracks and also bringing attention to older tracks. It is also useful if you have recently gotten an influx of listeners and you want to expose them to your older music.
Eligibility
Currently in beta, so it is not accessible to everyone yet. It also has some eligibility criteria to be able to use this feature. The criteria to be able to use Discovery Mode is:
At least three songs that have been released on Spotify for at least 30 days. It also needs to have been streamed at least 20 times in Discovery Mode contexts and it is distributed by Spotify for Artists licensors.
25,000 monthly listeners
Your account is registered in a valid country found on their Discovery Mode support page.
Marquee
Marquee is a fullscreen notification in Spotify’s Home that gets sent to listeners who are most likely to listen to your music. They are promoted to Spotify Free and Spotify Premium users.
Marquee can target certain audiences if you have a big enough audience to support it. They have categories based on your monthly active listeners. These are light listeners, moderate listeners and super listeners. You can also target previously active listeners, programmed listeners and potential listeners.
Marquee campaigns are a paid advertising campaign that you can run. It works by setting a budget for the campaign, and then the campaign will run until the budget is spent or 10 days have passed. Marquee uses the budget based on clicks and will only use the budget when someone clicks on the ad. They will also target the ads to people who have not streamed the song intentionally during the campaign.
Showcase
Showcase campaigns are a banner placed on Spotify’s Home. They are a sponsored recommendation that can be used to promote new releases or older tracks. Showcase campaigns can be used to promote whole albums, singles, and EPs while also targeting different audiences. You can run multiple campaigns for the same track targeting different markets.
Similar to Marquee campaigns, you can target light listeners, moderate listeners, super listeners, previously active listeners, programmed audience and potential audience. The budget for this campaign works the same as well. You set a budget and then it will use the budget when someone clicks on the banner. The campaign will run until the budget runs out or 14 days have passed. Spotify will also filter out people who have streamed the release within 21 days.
Eligibility
Both Marquee and Showcase campaigns are known as display campaigns. As a result they have the same eligibility requirements. To use a display campaign you need:
1000 streams over the past 28 days
Be in one of the target markets
Marquee requires at least 5,000 active listeners in your target market
How we can help
At Defined Sound Records we offer Spotify marking services that can manage all aspects of marketing on Spotify. We also offer custom marketing services to promote your music on more than just Spotify but other various social media services such as Facebook, X, Instagram, Soundcloud, YouTube and more. If managing these tools feels overwhelming, contact us and let us help with your marketing needs. We also offer stem mastering and mixing and mastering services for your tracks.
If you are a house or melodic techno artist looking for a label that values growing artists, you can submit your demo to us. We are a house and melodic techno label that wants to help artists reach new audiences and grow their fan base.