What Artists Should Know About Members Media

Members Media (formerly Partnered Projects) offers a variety of campaigns to promote your music. Their latest is Facebook & Instagram Ads, which direct listeners to Spotify and Apple Music.

Meta ads are a great way to grow your active audience, as opposed to playlist promotion, which builds passive listenership. By sending people directly to your release, you bypass the risk of landing on botted playlists and having your music removed for streaming fraud.

Members Media offered to let me take the new campaign type for a spin in exchange for this review. I said no way, get outta here. Haha just kidding. Let’s get this show on the road…

Normally I spend half of the post explaining how to get the campaign started. In this case, it couldn’t be easier. Just fill out this form:

As you probably know, Ads Manager is an unruly beast. Before you can even play ball, you’ve got to set up your pixel, audiences, custom events, Conversions API, smart links, landing pages, etc.

You don’t have to worry about any of that.

They run the campaign from their ad accounts, so even if you’ve had yours disabled for no good reason (it happens all the time), you’re good to go.

My campaign was for my latest single, “Punching Shadows,” with an ad spend of $1000 CAN = $712.63 USD.

Color Theory · Punching Shadows

It ran from November 4-17. Here’s how that looked in Spotify for Artists:

Spotify for Artists streams of “Punching Shadows”

The start of the campaign isn’t glaringly obvious, but the post-campaign dropoff is. Still, the data is noisy, as it also includes streams from playlists.

“Your profile and catalog” and “listener’s own playlists and library” account for 52% of streams over the past 28 days, which include those resulting from the campaign.

The song got about 9K streams in total during the campaign period. My best guess is that 4-7K streams of “Punching Shadows” were a result of the campaign. Presumably some of those listeners went on to stream my other tracks, and some will go on to stream “Punching Shadows” in the future.

Fortunately we don’t have to rely entirely on data from Spotify for Artists. Members Media provides a dashboard in the form of a Feature.fm report. You can access mine here if you want to poke around.

Members Media Feature.fm Report

3575 unique users clicked on the ad to get to the landing page, resulting in 2989 clicks to Spotify (2761 clicks) or Apple Music (228 clicks).

Members Media Geographic Breakdown

Geographic targeting was on point. 45% of clicks to a streaming service were from the US, with Canada and the UK a distant 2nd and 3rd.

The team also emailed me a post-game analysis. Their cost per conversion was $0.24, for a total spend of $712.63 USD (1000 CAD).

93% of the conversions were male, and 82% of conversions were 34 or younger.

My audience typically skews male, but not to this extreme. It likely comes down to the targeting of the campaign, which brought conversions from fans of both boxing and synthpop. Now there’s a niche I hadn’t explored before!

Why boxing? It relates back to the film that I produced the song for, Signals, by German film director and longtime Color Theory fan Louis Bennies. A pivotal gym scene, where the protagonist confides in two older mentors while hitting a punching bag, became the emotional core of the track.

Members Media created 8 different ad videos for the campaign. Here’s the winner:

For kicks, I tried using the same video in my own campaign, but couldn’t get my cost per conversion under $1. Then again, I wasn’t targeting boxing or synthpop! After a couple of days, I pulled the plug.

I also ran my own campaign before the Members Media campaign, from October 17-29 (release day was the 18th).

My Self-Hosted Punching Shadows Campaign

I paid $0.66 per conversion versus $0.24 through Members Media. Put another way, Members Media landed nearly 3x as many conversions per dollar spent.

To some degree, that’s on me. I didn’t put in the work to create multiple videos or test multiple audiences. Maybe I could’ve done better, but it would’ve taken more time and effort than I had to spare. Even then, I don’t have the video assets, editing skills, or even the software to make anything quite as polished.

From my perspective, the campaign was a winner. Had I been inclined to spend more on the track, I would’ve saved both time and money with Members Media over my own campaign.

Steve, my ads specialist for the campaign, shared his insights, which I’ll copy/paste below:

The BadOverall, I would have liked to see a better uplift in Spotify streams, based on the number of conversions we were getting. Also, I would have loved to see more saves & playlist adds, given this conversion volume. This is behavior we see in our campaigns from time to time with songs that have a bit longer & mellow intros. It’s unfortunate, but in a regular 5k budget campaign, we would have called a Pivot @ around the 700 CAD spend mark here, and suggested to transfer the remaining campaign funds to a different song, or a different service of ours, such as playlist promotion.

The GoodWe were able to secure a fantastic Cost per Conversion. On top of that, we were able to do it with what should be an ideal audience. Using our ad text and targeting strategy, we went to get conversions from fans of both Boxing and Synthpop Music. We were so successful in converting the ideal song audience, that the most-liked comment on the winning ad was someone commenting on how oddly niche our strategy was.

With an audience specificity of this degree, this true to the song itself, we usually see an amazing campaign in terms of Spotify metrics, which is why I’m so confident to give the insight that the longer & mellower intro is our limiting factor here. We can actually see a steady climb in daily streams/listeners as the campaign goes on, which makes me confident that our conversions who end up listening through the intro will go on to become high quality fans who listen to each song more times and ultimately stick around longer.

That’s a great point. The first 45 seconds of the track don’t sound like the ad, at all. I’m sure plenty of listeners bailed before getting to the “good part.”

I’d love to try again with an upbeat song that gets right down to business, and maybe I will!

If you’d like to try a Facebook & Instagram Ads campaign, or any campaign Members Media offers, you can get 5% off using discount code BRIANHAZARD here.

Be sure to share your thoughts and results in the comments!