Spotify for Artists is an incredible online profile management tool for Spotify’s artists, providing users with tons of features to help gather audience data for marketing your music.

It’s important for independent artists to understand how to use these insights and numbers to get the results they’re looking for. 

Here are 3 ways you can use Spotify Analytics through Spotify for Artists to build your fanbase, plan your tours, and create successful marketing strategies.

Understand Your Fanbase

If your goal is to increase your fanbase, it’s important to first understand your current fan base and then to use that information to increase your number of your monthly listeners and followers.

Spotify gives you demographics on a granular level allowing you to find out how you’re being discovered, where these listeners are located, what releases they enjoy the most, and other interests these listeners have. This information can help you determine future collaborators, song concepts, and narrow down your audience targeting.

You can begin the journey of understanding your fans by diving into the audience tab inside your Spotify for Artists account. In the audience tab, you’ll discover the popular ages and genders of your current fanbase. This info can help you refine your promotion and marketing strategies. The better you can target your audience, the better you can find people who will stream your music and follow your profile.

Another great section to focus on for audience research is the “Listeners Also Like” section. This section is based on listener trends and data gathered by Spotify. Finding similar artists to you points you to similar audiences. 

Within the audience tab, you’ll also find a world map that shows what countries are streaming your music the most. Below that map is a chart of top cities. This is great for securing brands or bookings. If you are able to show that you have a significant amount of listeners in a location, this will help promoters, bookers, and event coordinators feel more confident about securing gigs with you.

Create a Marketing Strategy

Creating a successful marketing strategy begins with clarifying your goals. 

What are your desired results? Do you want more engagement from your fans? Do you want to reach more fans? Are you curious about what songs you should invest in? Trying to decide who to collab with?

Measuring your Spotify performance is a great way to make data-informed decisions about your music releases and marketing efforts. Spotify’s In-Depth Analytics provides incredible tools that if used well can help you develop and test out effective methods to promote your music and get desired results.

For instance, within the audience tab, you are given a timeline of how your monthly listeners have changed over time. This can help you understand whether your marketing efforts have been successful or not. If your audience has grown over time, this indicates that your music is reaching more people, and you can assume your marketing strategy is mostly working. However, If you see a decline in listeners over time, this may be an indicator that you should try different marketing methods. 

In Oct of last year, Spotify introduced the New Audience Engagement section which  allows you to look at what Spotify calls “High Intent Actions” your audience makes with your music. High intent actions are things like saving your track or adding it to a playlist. 

One of the most useful metrics inside the engagement tab is the streams/listener metric. This essentially shows how many times each listener listens to the song. The higher this number is, the more you can assume your audience enjoys your music. In other words, if you notice that you are having an increase in your streams/listener, it means that the strategy you are using to promote your music is 1. Finding the right people and 2. Retaining your audience well.

As an additional note, higher engaged audiences typically convert better in campaigns. It may be worth it to invest in providing merch and even further advertising to scale on these results. 

Plan Out Tours

Ready to start touring? You can use Spotify to discover where your audience is and make better decisions about planning your tour. Spotify’s audience demographics, top countries map, and top cities list can help you discover tour stops you may not have on your radar yet. 

You can then also use Spotify Analytics to decide what to put on your set list by looking at your number of streams, saves, and adds to playlists.

If you are trying to decide on tourmates, you can use the “Listeners also like” feature to check out what other artists your listeners also enjoy. If they see you performing with another artist they love, that doubles the chances of them attending your concert while also giving you an opportunity to reach new audiences and markets.

Lastly, knowing which songs or releases your fans resonate with most can help you with designing merch to sell at events.

The other new feature introduced was the New Release Details Page. Where you can narrow down and get specific details about a particular release. At this section, you can view how many streams it got during a particular period, and even compare that to the previous period. You can also track the number of saves and adds to playlists the song received. A useful tip to try here is comparing the streams/listener across several of your latest releases. The release with the highest metric can help you decide which song should be promoted on marketing t-shirts, or which release would have a successful music video. Overall, this view gives you insight on what tracks to focus on as you create marketing stats.

Now you can strategically make decisions about your music through better understanding of your audience with in depth data and insights.

Keep in mind, nothing is guaranteed, but at least knowing how to use stats can help you make more informed decisions with marketing as opposed to doing guesswork.

Dont forget to download the Spotify for Artists App to monitor stats on the go.