Spotify adds paid Showcase banners and free Songwriter promo tools

Spotify For Artists has added Showcase, a paid Home screen marketing banner, as well as new free marketing tools for songwriters.

Why more ads?

An analysis by MBW offered a hint at why Spotify is adding new paid placements for artists. Spotify is generating less than USD $5 million per day from advertising, while YouTube is generating $84 million, and Meta is generating $346 million a day, respectively.

How Spotify’s Showcase works

The new Showcase mobile banner will appear on the most visited place on Spotify – the top of Home – and can be used to promote new and catalog music using customizable headlines like new music, recently released, release anniversary, and getting buzz.

Spotify says that users who see a Showcase banner are 6x more likely to stream the promoted release, but those streams aren’t cheap.

The minimum spend for Showcase is just $100 when booked via Spotify for Artists and runs until you either spend your budget or 14 days after your campaign starts, whichever comes first. But Showcase is priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. starting at $.40 per click. So at best, $100 could net 250 streams.

Learn more here.

Free Marketing Tools For Songwriters

A new Spotify For Artists songwriting, production, and publishing hub includes Spotify for Publishing, Songwriter Pages, Written By playlists, instructions on how to apply for use of our free Songwriting Studios, and information on clickable credits, along with career-development tools and content, and new features and tools like the Songwriter Promo Cards.

The new Promo Cards enable songwriters with active Spotify Songwriter Pages and Written By playlists to create customizable graphics that can be used to market their songwriting on social media.

Clickable links in song credits lead curious fans to Songwriter Pages, which will now also feature a “Written By” playlist of songs written by that songwriter.

Learn more here.

Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.