New tools for music marketing ROI: Key webinar takeaways

By:Cherie Hu

Published:2025-05-09

On May 7, 2025, Water & Music hosted a webinar exploring one of the most persistent challenges in the music business: Measuring and achieving positive ROI on marketing campaigns in the streaming era.

Nearly 200 members joined our session featuring Darya Pourshasb (Founder/CEO of Ampd) and Nicholas Minicucci (Founder of Immensity), two entrepreneurs addressing the same problem of marketing ROI from complementary angles.

At a time when an estimated 90% of artist marketing campaigns lose money — and 40% of industry pros struggle to measure whether their data investments are actually paying off (according to our 2024 State of Data report) — the insights from our webinar offered a rare glimpse into what actually works in music marketing today.

Below are the full webinar recording and slides, followed by key insights that emerged from our conversation.

Follow along

Recording:

Discussion Slides:

The streaming-era marketing dilemma

The fundamental challenge of music marketing today stems from a brutal economic reality:

Traditional marketing approaches largely fail to deliver positive ROI, yet teams continue to allocate budgets based on industry conventions (e.g. $5–10K for major releases, $500 for mid-tier artists), rather than truly data-led strategies that have a clear tie to outcomes.

"There's a bit of an excuse in the music industry [that] we're $0.004 per stream, so the economics don't make sense for us to think about ROI. I completely refute that,” said Pourshasb. “Precisely because we're $0.004 per stream, we should be very measured and really use data to achieve ROI."

Why traditional ROI measurement is so hard for music

Our 2023 marketing research project attempted to establish industry-wide benchmarks for ROI, and encountered three structural barriers that remain relevant today:

These challenges have led to a situation where many marketers adopt a spray-and-pray approach, particularly for frontline releases — throwing marketing dollars at buzzy platforms without systematic measurement.

Four key insights for measurable ROI

1. The algorithmic multiplier effect

One of the key insights from our webinar is that direct paid marketing alone can't achieve positive ROI in streaming economics.

Instead, the path to profitable campaigns involves triggering algorithmic amplification — i.e. when streaming platforms begin organically recommending a track through discovery playlists, radio features, and recommendation algorithms. This multiplier effect generates streams far beyond what paid marketing alone could achieve cost-effectively.

Pourshasb explained Ampd's approach: "Paid media is going to be inherently expensive... even if you optimize a Meta campaign really well at 3 cents per conversion, and then we're talking $0.004 per stream, it's quite difficult to break even,” she said. “So what we do is get the best of paid media, but targeted towards an outcome on the streaming side where you're gonna get an algorithmic boost, and then all those streams together is what is gonna achieve your return on investment."

In one presented case study, Ampd helped an artist grow from 50K to 170K monthly Spotify listeners, generating 1.1M streams from a $1,526 campaign spend — representing a 350% ROI.

2. The forgotten middle period

While frontline releases and deep catalog receive most of the marketing attention at a label, our webinar identified a significant opportunity in what Pourshasb called "no man's land" — the period 3–18 months after release.

Marketing in this period offers two advantages: Clearer attribution (as organic noise has settled), and significant potential for algorithmic reactivation with the right triggers.

This window represents an underutilized opportunity for sustainable ROI, particularly for mid-tier artists who may have limited marketing budgets. During this cooldown period, Pourshasb noted artists can more easily identify tracks with potential by examining specific metrics like save rates, playlist adds, and Spotify popularity scores, creating a clear picture of which catalog items have unrealized algorithmic potential.

3. Platform-specific saturation curves

Minicucci highlighted how Immensity's marketing mix modeling reveals platform-specific saturation points that typical analytics miss.

"Budget amount is incredibly important. Companies are just throwing their finger up in the air and saying, 'We're gonna spend this much here,'” said Minicucci. “This tactic that we use has saturation parameters built into it, so we can really just tell you: You are overspending on this platform with diminishing returns, while you are underspending on this platform where if you can spend more, it's predicted to help you get more streams."

In one case study, an emerging UK hip-hop artist increased streams from 2.6M to 4.8M by reallocating budget to under-saturated platforms. Another case study saw metal band Underoath achieve their highest-ever streaming day after increasing YouTube spend by 162% based on a similar analysis.

4. Measurement beyond streaming revenue

Both speakers emphasized that while direct streaming ROI matters, music marketing must be evaluated holistically.

As Minicucci put it: "Streaming is central. It is something that every artist needs to be thinking about... but it plays into so many other things. I can speak firsthand as a performer — getting your streaming numbers up helps you get booked in better places, and then once you get booked in better places you start to make a whole lot more money."

This “halo effect” extends beyond touring to merchandise, publishing opportunities, and overall career sustainability. The strategic takeaway is to create unified campaign strategies across revenue streams — for example, timing catalog marketing pushes during tour periods to maximize the cross-channel amplification effect — rather than treating each revenue stream as an isolated marketing challenge.

AI's emerging role in ROI optimization

Both companies are leveraging AI to solve music marketing's unique challenges:

Pourshasb highlighted three key layers of deploying AI in this space: "One is the automation of campaign setup, optimization, and A/B testing... second is that we have an algorithmic booster model which is like our own proprietary algorithm on top as a context layer on top of the LLM... and third is artist vector data, which is more around images and audio."

Practical benchmarks

While the webinar reinforced that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to ROI, several concrete benchmarks emerged:

The comparative ROI across platforms can vary dramatically. In one example shown during the Immensity demo, Meta ads delivered 87 streams per dollar spent, while TikTok generated only 32.

Strategic implications for music professionals

For artists and managers

For labels and marketing teams

The path forward

As AI becomes more accessible to independent artists and labels, we'll likely see the industry standard shift from expecting marketing to lose money, to demanding measurable returns.

This represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Artists and teams who master algorithmic optimization will gain a significant competitive advantage, while those who continue with traditional “spray and pray” approaches will find it increasingly difficult to compete for attention in an oversaturated market.

The future of music marketing arguably belongs not to those with the biggest budgets, but to those who can most effectively bridge data and action.

Starting list of tools to check out for maximizing streaming ROI:

Stay tuned for upcoming events and reports where we'll continue exploring the intersection of music, technology, and business. For any questions or to share your thoughts, please reach out to our inbox at members@waterandmusic.com.