Why Spotify Monthly Listeners Are a Vanity Metric

Spotify monthly listeners are a vanity metric. They are not an actual assessment of how many fans you have. We all know this. You pay for a playlisting campaign, you put out a release, your monthly listeners shoot up. Once it's over, they're gone, right? Maybe hopefully you see some growth on your follower count, which is actually real people that, you know, took an action beyond listening to that song. But ultimately, you know, that is not a measurable indicator on how many fans you actually have, right? So that's the biggest thing. There's all these strategies out there that are pushing you to grow your Spotify and to build your monthly listeners, to drive audience there. I like to do it the opposite way. I like to grab your audience first, then drive them to wherever they are. Because if I have the means to spend money into any type of campaign in order to acquire a real fan, I want to be able to contact that fan. I want to be able to get their name, their phone number, their email, their location, preferred streaming platform, speak to them directly. And then get them to go to whatever streaming platform they actually use, because maybe they don't even use Spotify. Maybe they use Apple Music, maybe they use Amazon. But ultimately, having that direct communication with them and having understanding of, all right, every time I spend X amount of dollars, it equates to X amount of people in my funnel, right, into my email list, into my text message list. And then from there, these people are then going to take X actions, and then I can actually measure that, right? You know, ultimately, just burning money and driving people to Spotify or to YouTube, it's dead, right? They send them there and then there's no way to re— regrab them. There's no information, we can't speak to them directly. So my whole strategy with everything we do here at Make Our Music with FanFlowy, with our tech platform, in order to acquire a fan, we— it's measurable. We know how much money it costs to acquire that fan into the fan list. And then we could see the measurable results of how many of them are going to actually convert to the actions that we asked them to, such as follow you on said streaming platform, purchase merchandise in the funnel, on offer 1, offer 2, offer 3, right? And then ultimately, if you can measure the ticketing, which, you know, in some cases you can, depending if you're running the show and you have control of that, then you can ultimately see, okay, now did they buy a ticket directly from my email and text message blast and direct communication? So these are actions that you can actually measure and say, okay, I spent X amount of money at the top of the funnel, X amount of people signed up, X amount of people took actions. And then this is really a way that you can get an understanding of how scalable your whole system is in order to grow a fan base to get X amount of them. So, you know, if you want to target within a radius of a certain market, right, you want to fill that place with 500 people, you know that you have to get X amount of those people into your email list, and then you can get an understanding of how many of those people out of your email list actually showed up. And if you can measure that, then it's repeatable. And then you actually have an understanding, okay, if I make X amount on the back end, then, and I spend X amount on the front end, this is what my margin is going to be. So now there's actual like math that's associated with this. And we're not just blindly spending money out there to get optics and metrics that don't actually give, that don't matter, that don't give you an actual fan growth result at the end of the day. Ultimately, it's just a vanity metric if you can't measure it and it's not actually creating any type of considerable action after the fact. So if you want to learn more about this or you want to get part of our system here at Make Art Music with Fan Flowey, hit the DMs. We're happy to schedule a call.