Are you looking for a marketing strategy that can increase your authentic Spotify followers, increase your song saves, and build a growing fan base who’s opted-in to pre-save your future releases? Then a Rise Spotify Conversion campaign is exactly what you’re looking for.

This in-depth guide will walk you through how Rise can guarantee these results without any technical or advertising skills.

Contents:

• How much does it cost?
• How does it work and where do the Followers/Listeners come from?
• How do I set up a conversion campaign?
• What are the demographics of the listeners?
• What makes Rise different from other platforms and marketing companies?
• How do I track campaign results?
• What if I have questions about my campaign?

Here’s what Rise Conversion Campaigns do:

1. Get your music discovered and heard by brand new listeners
2. Increase real Spotify followers
3. Get those followers to save or pre-save a song
4. Double opt-in to pre-save all future releases*

*You must create a new Rise Conversion campaign for each subsequent release to unlock your pre-save bank.

By increasing these metrics, this satisfies high-value actions in Spotify’s algorithm, like Follower Growth and Song Saves (or Pre-Saves), and potential playlist additions. You might not see as many direct streams from these campaigns in the short-term, but this can drastically increase your chances of getting in, or the overall scale of Release Radar, Discover Weekly, and other algorithmic placements. 

Building a fan base of authentic followers is one of the most valuable things you can do to succeed on Spotify.

How much does it cost?

All Rise campaigns can be created either as a Single (one-time) campaign or as Monthly Subscription (ongoing until canceled).

• Single Campaign: The minimum campaign price is just $250, which guarantees any artist a minimum number of new followers, new song saves, and each new follower (aka Rise Fan) double opts-in to pre-save your future releases.
• Subscription Campaign: Subscription campaigns are automatically discounted 10% from the single campaign cost, bringing the entry price to $225/mo. Subscriptions require a minimum of 3 months but can be canceled anytime after that. They will remain live until you request cancellation.

Rise also offers Exposure Campaigns to help increase monthly listeners, and we recommend running both campaign types in tandem.

How Does It Work?

How can Rise guarantee followers and song saves? How do you know the followers aren’t bots?

Good questions! Let’s start by explaining where the listeners come from. Once you create your Rise Conversion campaign and it is live in our system, it will begin to recommend your song to potential listeners. We care as much about providing a great experience for the listener as we do getting artists’ results.

As such, Rise created its own proprietary music discovery app, Tout. This is a free mobile-based app that allows listeners to discover new artists, listen to previews of songs, follow or skip artists, and receive personalized playlists. Additionally, Tout sends out new recommendations tailored to listeners’ interests. 

Tout’s playlist network on Spotify currently also tallies hundreds of thousands of followers and is growing daily.

Between the Tout app and our Tout Playlist Network, we can guarantee that real people will listen to your music. We don’t force anyone to follow, so all interest is genuine and authentic.

Try it out yourself at ontout.com/discovery, preferably on mobile.

Here’s what you’ll see:

Tout listeners will click on “Discover Music” and then are presented with 30-second clips in their selected genre utilizing Spotify’s player. This ensures that the listener gets to hear your music and actually decide if they like it or not. This is hugely important – voluntary discovery and follows are the best way to earn a real fan.

Rise runs social ads to fans of specific interests and genres, directing new listeners straight to the genre that they’re most likely to engage with. Rise will always emphasize connecting your music with real people, who the data tells us are most likely to engage with it, rather than focusing on demographics or territories. 

For example, here’s a link for Indie fans.

Once a new listener likes 10 artists, they grant permission to take actions on their behalf, like following, saving an upcoming release, and more for an artist:

Only listeners who click “Like” after seeing/hearing a specific track on the website are opted-in, and end up following artists whose music has connected with them.

Once they’ve granted permissions, our Tout A.I. creates the listener a customized playlist that combines Spotify and Tout recommendations.

From the listener’s perspective, it’s a pretty great experience. They get a customized, regularly updated playlist of new tracks tailored to their tastes, for free. We built the Tout Discovery tool to make new music discovery really easy and enjoyable. Tout is great at match-making listeners with new music we think they’ll like, and possibly fall in love with. 

Listeners can always refine their playlists further by heading back to the discovery page to like and skip more artists.

How Do I Setup a Spotify Conversion Campaign?

Creating a campaign is straightforward, takes only a few minutes, and can be done directly through our website on desktop or mobile, https://rise.la/create. 

For this article, we’re going to demonstrate how to create a single Spotify Conversion campaign for a single release. (Please note we do offer subscriptions, which include automatic discounts, and are a great option for ongoing growth with consistent releases). Additionally, you can promote an EP or Album with a $500 entry budget). 

First, you choose a platform: i.e. Spotify

Next, choose a “Single Campaign” or “Subscription”, and what to optimize for. For this example, we’re continuing the process of setting up a Single Conversion campaign:

Please note the Pro-Tip above when you’re creating your campaign(s).

Next up, choose whether it’s a single or EP/Album.

Finally, set your budget. You may enter any budget you like and preview the guaranteed results before you pay for the campaign. Go to https://rise.la/create to experiment with optimization and budget to see what results Rise will guarantee. Larger budgets will guarantee larger results, and will take longer to run. If you ever have questions about allocating your budget, you can always contact us in advance: https://rise.la/contact-us

After this, Rise collects payment with a secure integration to our merchant provider, Stripe. After payment, there are additional and important details needed for Rise to process and run a successful campaign. You’re probably wondering, “When do I input my Spotify URL?” and other important details. This is all in the next step and only takes a few minutes to complete:

For Conversion campaigns, you don’t need to supply or upload any creative. Our Tout platform will automatically use your Spotify Profile photo, and pull in the preview of the promoted track from Spotify. But if you’d like the campaign to have more possible options, you can upload them during this stage.

You will select which genre best fits your music, and you can include more than one genre.

During this next step, you tell us if you want to promote an existing release, or an upcoming track:

If you select “Pre-Save”, and start a Conversions campaign, it will accumulate all pre-saves until the release date. We suggest starting a pre-save campaign 3 to 6 weeks prior to the release date, and longer for larger budgets. If the campaign goal is not met before the release date, the campaign will still accumulate song saves automatically after the song is out. This means even if you do not submit your song far in advance, you will still see great results!

These new followers are opting-in to pre-save future releases that you create Rise conversion campaigns for. After the course of just a few campaigns, you’ll have an increasing bank of followers on deck to pre-save your next release. We’ve seen countless artists benefit from consistently using Rise campaigns as part of their overall marketing strategy.

For a pre-save campaign, your song link is not required, so don’t stress there. All Rise needs is the song title and release date. Because our platform connects directly to the Spotify API, we gather new followers and song saves by using an existing track, so we also don’t generate or need any pre-save links you’re using elsewhere. 

Note for brand new artists: If you don’t have any existing songs on Spotify then we can not run a pre-save campaign for you, and we suggest starting with an Exposure campaign if you have less than 10K monthly listeners. We do not recommend using conversion campaigns for brand new artists.

Every Spotify Conversion or Exposure campaign you create on Rise:

• Includes a submission to Rise’s own playlist network with hundreds of thousands of completely authentic followers, and growing daily
  
• Your song will be heard by our in-house curators
• Your song may be pitched to Rise’s premium playlist partners, i.e. The Nations, Red Bull Music, Playmaker, and more

We do understand that not every artist, or every track fits perfectly into a specific genre. We curate our playlists based on a mood or vibe, rather than genre, so we ask which playlist best fits your style. No need for concern if it’s not a perfect match.

We also ask for you to list similar creators. We recommend finding smaller and mid-sized artists, as the superstars you likely style yourself after have such large audiences that targeting those aren’t as valuable as something more niche. 

Now, just one more step… 

For a Spotify campaign, we don’t have a firm requirement for account access, but it can help us optimize your campaign and get better results. And if you can send us reader access to your Spotify For Artists account, we can help us effectively monitor and provide accurate reporting for your campaign. 

For Spotify campaigns you do not need to connect YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, or TikTok.

And congratulations, your campaign has been created, and everything else happens for you!

What are the demographics of the listeners?

This is a great question and is asked frequently, and for great reasons! In short, Rise targets listeners primarily following Spotify’s own advice and trends:

• Listeners based on engagement. Meaning, who are the most active listeners on Spotify that are the most likely to listen, follow, save, or become a fan.
• Based on mood or genre. Rise prioritizes targeting to reach like-minded listeners of specific moods, feeling, speed, and other facets.
• Re-targeting the warmest fans. Our campaigns deliver re-targeted ads to listeners who have shown repeated interest in our ads and music recommendations. 
• Finally, location. Spotify encourages artists to accumulate a global fan base in different cities and countries around the world, especially ranked by engagement. Depending on the campaign type, Rise offers global targeting or Big-5 (US, UK, CAN, AUS, NZ). Over time, it is likely that more options will roll out.
• Based on these factors, you could expect to see a wide variety of locations in your analytics from a Rise campaign. Listeners will never be exclusive to any one location and must be real Spotify users.

Some artists ask to target only specific markets, i.e. “I want only people in New York to follow me because that’s where I live and perform”. Beyond the fact that Spotify is not exactly designed to increase your physical footprint in specific markets, obtaining clicks and listeners from exclusively premium cities is a very expensive endeavor and would tremendously increase the cost of results – regardless if they are from Rise or any other marketing company.

How to track my results?

Once your campaign is live, you can sit back and watch the results come in, usually within 24 hours of launch. You’ll receive email notifications about your campaign status, for example, an email confirmation that we’ve received your campaign, a notice that your campaign has been scheduled for the date you selected it to start, or that your campaign has been completed. You can monitor your campaign from your customer dashboard. This updates every 24 hours with the core metrics for your particular campaign. 

For a Spotify Conversion campaign, this means you’ll immediately start seeing new Spotify followers, and song saves. If our Tout Playlist Network curators are really digging your vibe, you might even see that you’ve been playlisted as a bonus. Of course you can also track this from your Spotify For Artists account, but keep in mind that their data is typically a min. of 24 hours behind real time. 

In your dashboard you can see a historical list of every Rise campaign you’ve run, and by clicking VIEW on any particular campaign, you can see that campaign’s individual results. 

Once you click VIEW, you’ll see that corresponding campaign’s results:

We will only ever report metrics and results that are a direct result of your Rise Campaign, that we can transparently guarantee. For example, if you also are using an third-party link to collect pre-saves (FFM for example), your Rise pre-saves will not appear in their reporting, and similarly, your third-party pre-saves will be excluded from your Rise campaign reporting. This way you can always evaluate your campaign and compare it directly to other marketing strategies you might be using, and compare it with your organic growth too. 

What if I have questions about my campaign?

In a world of shady third-party playlists, fake Instagram promoters lurching in your DMs, Rise prides itself on customer service. And just like the people we get to listen to your music, we are real people who are monitoring, optimizing and managing your campaign. You can submit a support ticket from your dashboard, and someone from our team will reach out to you.

Keep in mind that the platform is heavily automated, and while we do have quality control personnel on staff, there are certain things that we won’t catch. (For example, if your release date changes, or you made a mistake during your campaign set up by inputting the incorrect date, you can solve that quickly with a support ticket, and we will manually update your campaign details).  

We understand that every marketing dollar is precious, and we are grateful to have earned your business and your trust. Keep Rising!

What makes Rise different from other marketing companies?

There is a lot that separates Rise from other companies. First of all, Rise is the only platform to fully guarantee campaign results and also fully automate the campaign delivery from start to finish. 

This means that Rise can be seamlessly and regularly incorporated into your marketing strategy, used in tandem with other tools, or by your marketing team. We’re not looking to replace anyone, but simply be a complimentary resource that can help your team become more efficient and achieve greater results.

Guaranteed results

Every Rise campaign includes guaranteed results based on platform, optimization and budget. We only guarantee results that we can directly control. For example, on a Spotify Conversion campaign, we guarantee a minimum number of people will follow your Spotify Artist profile, save a specific song, and/or execute pre-saves upon a new release. But we can’t guarantee that every follower will love your music, stream it immediately, or over and over again, but we hope they do! This is why the dashboard includes only tangible results we have control over.

We don’t promise you streams

Though it might seem strange for a marketing company to not promise Spotify streams, we won’t do it. We don’t because that’s a direct violation of Spotify’s Terms of Service. Anyone who is promising you streams, or a specific number of streams for money is breaking those terms, and likely using fake streams. You’ll almost certainly see streams as a result of your Spotify Conversion campaign, but those are authentically earned and are either voluntary by the listener or as a result of a boost in algorithmic listening.

Built to play the long game

Each of Rise’s campaign types is built on a specific strategy that our strategists have spent countless hours, and our own resources to test and develop, each designed to reach a specific goal. If you’re looking for a quick increase in vanity metrics, fake streams or results that seem too good to be true, Rise is not for you. But if you want real, sustainable and authentic results, and you consistently use Rise as part of a well-rounded strategy, you will increase your chances for success.

Authentic

Rise helps indie artists and developing acts alike clear one of the most difficult roadblocks in the industry — getting real people to listen to your music. This doesn’t mean that every impression or engagement will result directly in a ticket-buying, merch-wearing fan. But even for minimum budget campaigns, we can get people to discover and listen to your music. This helps you increase your brand awareness as an artist. And because our data-driven approach targets people who are most likely to engage with your music, these impressions have a better chance of resulting in real engagement.

We take the Y out of DIY

Other companies or platforms offer artists a DIY option to promote their music, or run social ads to cold audiences. But that requires you to become a Social Ads expert and offers no easy way to directly track results. With Rise, our team of experts monitor your campaign daily, ensuring maximized success, and delivering guaranteed results, so you can spend your time doing things you enjoy, like making great music!

Advanced audience data and access 

Rise has invested an enormous amount of money, time, experimentation, and energy into developing proprietary audiences and strategies to reach listeners. There are a few major factors that make Rise’s ability to convert engaged listeners more effectively than any one artist could achieve independently:

1. Scale. Rather than a single artist spending a few hundred dollars here and there to promote their music and get clicks to their socials, Rise is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time to accumulate warm audiences. This allows us to “win” the attention of listeners more effectively, faster, and at a tremendously larger scale than DIY promotion.
2. Perspective. Advertising and promoting your music to your existing fans is always a win, because they already like you and your music. They’re likely to engage with your posts and click when you ask them to. However, when you are advertising to new fans who have never heard of you, you’ll be running those ads from your own account. This comes across as self-promotional and in some cases “spammy”. Rise is an authority for recommending new music and through our discovery app Tout, listeners are voluntarily signing up to receive new music recommendations. This changes the perspective from unknown artists, to an artist who is now being recommended by a credible music curation brand.
3. Listener App. Rise has invested as much time, money, and effort into creating a great experience for listeners as we have spent creating great campaign results for artists. As such, we have more than a million subscribers opted-in music to receive new music recommendations through our discovery app, Tout. At the time of writing, over 100,000+ new listeners visit the app monthly to discover artists. Rise has direct access to these listeners including ad re-targeting, email addresses, and additional data used to make quality recommendations. 
4. Pixel Data. Rise has been running ads on social platforms targeting music fans non-stop for the past few years. Our pixels have millions of potential listeners spanning every genre from basement trap to yoga and meditation instrumentals. By running campaigns on Rise, you are automatically tapping into our database of valuable ad data that is not available anywhere else.

Backed by real people

Most music marketing websites are shady at best, and there’s often no chance of seeing the individual or team behind it. This should always be a huge red flag. Everyone at Rise is credible in the music and entertainment industry, you can check out our about page to see our photos, bios, and more. A lot of us are artists ourselves. 

If you’re new to Rise, and want to speak directly with one of our growth experts, you can schedule a video meeting. Though just about everything you need to know is on the website, sometimes it helps to have a conversation. You can also email us to get answers to your questions. We’d be happy to take a look at your profiles, and recommend campaign types, or budget allocation. 

Will Rise work if I’m running other campaigns? 

The quick answer is, absolutely. Rise sees best results when it’s used consistently by artists, and as a part of a well-rounded marketing strategy. Our results are tracked separately and will not interfere with other platforms or tools you may be using.

Real listeners, Real people. No Bots.

Rise knows the danger in bots, and the value of real listeners. Let’s start by explaining where the listeners come from. Once you create your Rise Spotify Conversion campaign and it is live in our system, it will begin recommending your song to potential listeners. We care as much about providing a great experience for the listener as we do getting artists’ results.

As such, Rise created its own proprietary music discovery app, Tout. This is a free mobile-based app that allows listeners to discover new artists, listen to previews of songs, follow or skip artists, and receive personalized playlists. Additionally, Tout sends out new recommendations tailored to listeners’ interests. Tout’s playlist network on Spotify currently also tallies over 350,000+ Followers (as of Jan. 2023) and is growing daily.

Between the Tout app and our Tout Playlist Network, we can guarantee that real people will listen to your music. We don’t force anyone to follow, so all interest is genuine and authentic.

Try it out yourself at ontout.com/discovery, preferably on mobile.

No expensive creative assets required

Even in a time of AI generated art, and ChatGPT building good creative assets can be taxing and expensive. With Rise your content is the creative asset. You don’t need to hire designers or editors to create special content for this campaign. In fact, if you’ve never posted a video anywhere on the internet, we can still deliver a successful Spotify campaign.

Never pay for the same fans twice* (*Spotify Conversion) 

With a Rise Spotify conversion campaign, you’ll never have to pay for the same fan twice. Once a listener follows you, they’re double opted in to pre-save all of your future releases. All you need to do is be sure to have an active conversion campaign, which will unlock your banked pre-saves, and gain you even more, depending on your budget, and release date. 

Can I see any case studies?

Rise has published a number of public case studies on our website. You can check those out here!

Who uses Rise?

Rise is a majorly vetted music marketing platform that works with Sony, Warner, Universal, Nettwerk, The Nations, Scooter Braun Projects, Red Bull Music, Empire, The Orchard, Curb, Black Box, Awal, MTheory, Rock Mafia, Heroine etc. and thousands of independent artists globally.

We’ve also been fortunate enough to receive many public testimonials and endorsements from many loyal artists, labels, distributors, and management companies.

Who is Rise?

Rise was launched in 2020 and ascended rapidly as a trusted marketing platform in the industry.  Our executive team ranges in experience from record label ownership and management, serial entrepreneurs and investors, software developers, growth, social, digital marketing, paid ads and e-commerce experts, to Entertainment and sports executives and marketers, analytics  to musicians and artists just like you who share the same passion for music.