How artist-friendly are music streaming platforms? Part 4: Fan marketing and e-commerce

This is Part 4 of our five-part series comparing For Artists features on streaming platforms. Browse our product feature matrix for the full breakdown, or catch up on previous installments in the series:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Listener experience and profile customization
• Part 3: Artist data analytics

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In Part 3 of our “For Artists” series comparing features on major music streaming platforms, we argued that one of the most compelling reasons for artists to utilize these features is to receive rich, first-party data about audience consumption behaviors and demographics, directly from the DSPs themselves.

But can artists utilize these FA platforms to drive further consumption of their music and reach their fans directly? And if streaming is a loss leader for most artists, are there features with FA platforms to make DSPs part of the listener conversion funnel from a stream to a purchase in other, potentially more lucrative revenue streams, such as touring and merchandise?

The answer is yes to both of these questions — though today, the on-platform marketing options for independent artists remain somewhat limited. While many industry commentators continue to cite royalty payout rates as a primary concern with DSPs, few conversations address the issue of DSPs gating direct listener connections, leaving potentially massive monetization opportunities on the table for artists. The IFPI estimates that a music fan spends 51% of their listening time on streaming services (across audio/video and paid/ad-supported options), so artists would do well to be as close to those listeners as possible from a data perspective, to best interact with and sell to fans on those services.

To assign DSP-specific numerical rankings for fan marketing and ecommerce features, we compared platforms across three primary focus areas:

1. Editorial features and paid advertising opportunities. FA features in this area range from the ability to submit tracks directly for inclusion in DSP-curated playlists, to the ability to set up ad campaigns directly within the DSP, with the aim of driving visibility and consumption of specific releases.

2. Direct-to-consumer (D2C) commerce. Features falling under D2C include the ability to display and link to concert ticket and merch offers directly from DSP artist profiles.

3. Fan engagement and CRM. Features in this category include the ability for an artist to identify and keep track of specific listeners, as well as message their fans or interact with them directly through other means, such as comments on songs or posts.

Spotify has the most on-platform artist advertising tools of any DSP, and was also the first DSP to add features for editorial playlist submission and placement of tour dates and merch on artist profiles. All in all, Spotify clearly aspires to capture marketing budgets that artists and their teams would otherwise spend on external platforms like Instagram and Facebook .

Apple Music and Amazon Music have not yet added any way for artists to advertise within their platform. SoundCloud, meanwhile, is leading in fan engagement features, adding a new direct fan messaging tool (aptly named “ Fans ”) in summer 2023.

At large, it’s still early days in the area of fan marketing and commerce features within FA platforms, and we will continue to watch this area and track feature updates.

• Spotify for Artists: 9
• YouTube Studio: 7.5
• Amazon Music for Artists: 5
• SoundCloud for Artists: 4
• Pandora AMP: 3
• Deezer for Creators: 3
• Apple Music for Artists: 2
• TIDAL for Artists: 1

View full, detailed feature breakdowns in our “For Artists” product matrix.

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Spotify gets a high rating due to the wide range of self-service marketing, advertising, and commerce features now available within its FA platform.

Touring: Artists should connect their Spotify FA accounts with tour date listing platforms like Songkick, Bandsintown, DICE, and Resident Advisor to promote their shows and sell tickets to their streaming audiences. The tour dates and ticket links they submit to these partners will appear on their Spotify artist profiles under a section titled “On Tour” within the desktop app.

Spotify recently updated their mobile app to prominently display both tour dates and merch prominently at the top of artist profiles. In testing the new tabs on the mobile app, Spotify said that 22% of fans that clicked on the merch tab on an artist profile made a purchase, and 70% of fans that clicked on the “Events” tab interacted with tour dates driving a 15% boost in ticket sales for those dates.

E-commerce: In late 2021, Spotify became the first music streaming service to allow artists to display merch on their profiles, through an integration with Shopify . While it costs artists a monthly fee to use Shopify ($5/month for a limited plan to use with Spotify), it costs nothing additional to list products available from their Shopify store on their artist profiles.

Editorial pitching and paid advertising: It is free for artists to submit their music for consideration in Spotify’s editorial playlists, a feature that has been available since 2018. To pitch, artists must provide descriptive metadata, focusing on upcoming releases and submitting pitches no later than seven days before the release date. The pitch program ultimately benefits Spotify by expanding its metadata library for independent music and enhancing algorithmic listening recommendations. The number of daily pitches remains unclear, but only a tiny percentage are likely ever reviewed by human ears.

On the advertising front, Spotify announced the expansion of their on-platform ad tools for select artists at their annual investor and user conference Stream On in March 2023. For instance, “ Discovery Mode ,” launched in 2020, places artists’ songs in a higher level of algorithmic rotation in Spotify’s autoplay and radio features in exchange for a 30% to 50% cut in per-stream payout rate — a tradeoff that has sparked controversy across the music industry. Other key marketing features include Showcase , which allows artists with over 1,000 monthly listeners to place sponsored release ads from their catalog in Spotify’s homepage feed, and Marquee , which lets artists send sponsored notifications about releases to both free and premium listeners.

Visual marketing: Spotify recently expanded its “Clips” feature, which allows artists to create and upload 30-second video clips of themselves promoting tour dates, current tracks or albums, or even customized behind-the-scenes moments to market an upcoming release.

Spotify offers some fan engagement or CRM features only to select artists, not to the wider FA artist user base. That said, the company is beta-testing a “Fans First” offering, where qualifying artists can set up email campaigns that target their top active Spotify fans with merch and ticketing offers. We will continue to monitor the status of these programs in the hopes that they will become more widely available to artists on the platform.

Artists should prioritize using their YouTube Official Artist Channels (OAC) to market their music and create a commerce channel. The latest estimate from the IFPI reports that 19% of all music listening is through video-oriented platforms like YouTube, so there is a sizable amount of potential listeners to reach here — and the FA back-end of YouTube Studio makes it easy.

E-commerce and touring: Artists who grow their OAC audience to over 1,000 subscribers have several marketing options available to them beyond advertising, including e-commerce. The Shopping on YouTube program integrates with Shopify and two dozen approved retailers to allow music channels to list merch on an OAC. Qualifying channels can also sell fan support badges and memberships that offer access to subscriber-only content. Artists with tickets for tour dates available through AXS, Eventbrite, SeeTickets, Ticketmaster, or DICE will also find their performances listed on their OAC via an automatic opt-in .

Visual marketing: Like Spotify’s “Clips” feature, artists can utilize YouTube’s “Shorts” to leave brief video messages and teasers for fans. More powerful is YouTube’s “Live” feature, which can be used to stream live video content or premiere pre-recorded videos with a real-time viewer chat box. Using “Live” allows an artist to notify their OAC subscribers in advance of a premiere, and again when the actual content goes live. Once the Live has concluded, the video will stay up with the corresponding chat on the OAC if the artist desires for that to be archived.

Fan engagement: YouTube is quite strong in the area of allowing artists to engage with and know their specific fans. The “Community” tab on OACs allows artists to make their own social posts containing text, video, images, and/or polls, and receive fan reactions to those posts.

While the platform killed off its direct messaging feature in 2019, artists can still directly respond to fan comments underneath any video (or audio with cover art). They should check with their music distributor to make sure comments are enabled on the official audio uploads on their OAC. While there may not be any way to contact fans directly within YouTube, these active fans are at least identifiable by username.

It is possible to advertise official audio on YouTube to drive views (streams) and put an artist’s music catalog in the feeds of YouTube users, but advertising isn’t a feature of YouTube Studio (FA), and instead is available as an option within Google’s Ads Creative Studio , which takes some expertise to use.

Editorial pitching: Amazon FA is the only other For Artists platform beyond Spotify FA that has a self-serve pitch tool to place independent artists’ songs on playlists within the music service. While it’s unclear how frequently consumed Amazon Music playlists are, especially with regards to new and independent music, it costs no money for artists to pitch. The track in question should be pitched as soon as the releases appear on the backend of Amazon FA, and no fewer than 7 days before the official release date, though Amazon allows for pitching to occur up to 14 days after the release date as well.

Fan engagement: Amazon Music FA allows artists to create audio messages known as “ Spotlights ” to introduce themselves to listeners or promote new releases. The focus is on audio and not video like Spotify Clips or YouTube Shorts.

It’s worth noting that we had a difficult time accessing these messages via the Alexa voice search or on the mobile or desktop Amazon Music app, so the fan experience has much room for improvement.

E-commerce and touring: Amazon Music added merch options from within FA in 2021, which allow artists to utilize Amazon’s “ Merch on Demand ” service to create and sell products from within the platform. With this option, Amazon will produce the products based on artist-created templates, and handle fulfillment and shipping to fans. Artists can also create their own Amazon store and either use Amazon’s fulfillment service (where Amazon keeps the products and ships them out) or handle the shipping themselves. Whatever method fits best for the artists, the merch will be displayed on the artist’s profile within the Amazon Music app, as well as on Bandsintown through a partnership first announced in August 2023.

Marketing on Amazon Music FA won’t require a lot of an artist’s time, so it makes sense that artists at least use the platform to pitch their music to Amazon Music editors and set up a few merch options. Advertising is not an available feature directly within Amazon FA, but Amazon’s Advertising platform allows artists and their teams to create audio advertising that will play between songs on Amazon Music’s ad-supported tier.

Fan engagement and CRM: Given its origins in social audio, SoundCloud excels in the area of fan engagement. Listeners can repost and comment on artists’ tracks, and artists can directly message anyone on SoundCloud by username. At the time we published this post, no other DSP beyond SoundCloud allowed for direct artist-to-fan messaging. An artist can click on “followers” on their artist profile and find out the username of every one of their followers, regardless of their audience size. That said, there’s currently no way to message all followers of an artist, so scaling the engagement to the larger fan base is difficult.

Artists using SoundCloud’s monetization program are promised a deeper review of their top fans, using a new tool called “ Fans ” within SoundCloud FA. We haven’t been able to test it because of some limitations of the beta version of “Fans,” which requires artists to subscribe to SoundCloud’s NextPro Plan for $12 a month. SoundCloud FA is the only “For Artists” service that requires a paid subscription to utilize most of its features, but “‘basic fan insights” are promised with the free membership tier.

Importantly, the “Fans” platform beta seems to be intended only for unsigned artists. Some artists who use a music distributor or record label to supply their music to SoundCloud may find their music is not eligible for the SoundCloud monetization program, as they are not the primary rightsholder and streaming revenues will be paid out to the label first.

E-commerce: SoundCloud artists can add commerce links to their profiles, to allow listeners to buy digital or physical music products or merch from external stores. Artists can point at any website they like with a “Buy” button on each individual track they upload to the platform (this button text can also be changed to read “Learn More” or similar).

SoundCloud does not offer playlist pitching or in-platform ad tools, though many artists use external advertising services to point listeners to their SoundCloud tracks on the platform.

All in all, even though their fan marketing and commerce features on paper are otherwise fairly solid, key accessibility issues — i.e. that some of SoundCloud’s artist marketing tools must be paid for as part of a subscription, that the tools are in beta, and that SoundCloud is not really viewed by most listeners as a paid subscription music service — knocked the platform down in our rankings by about a point.

Pandora is limited on artist marketing and commerce options, which are housed under Pandora AMP (standing for “Artist Marketing Playbook).

The platform has one free artist promotion feature, which allows artists to market themselves on their non-interactive radio streams via audio messages that precede the spin of a featured track. There are some restrictions with this feature: The track that will be promoted alongside the audio message must have already been released within the past year, needs to have registered at least 10 spins over the last 7 days, and cannot have been featured in a previous audio message.

There are no options to link to merch on artist profiles on Pandora, but tour dates can be listed on the artist profiles through partnerships with Eventbrite, Songkick, and Ticketmaster.

Given Deezer’s prominence in Europe, especially France, it’s disappointing that there are no playlist pitching tools, merch or tour date listing options within Deezer for Creators at the time this article was published.

That said, since 2016 , Deezer has partnered with the marketing platform Feature.fm to allow artists to promote their songs that are available on the music service. The paid track promotion campaigns must be executed on Feature.fm, and not from within Deezer for Creators. For artists wanting to reach European audiences, it might be worth testing out a Feature.fm campaign to promote their songs to Deezer subscribers.

Apple Music FA recently rolled out the ability for artists to make Apple Music branded images and videos that promote an artist’s profile page, releases, or individual tracks. These “promo cards” then can be posted to platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc.

As we covered in part 2 of this series, Apple Music FA is very limited with artist profile customization tools; the platform is even more limited with options for artists to engage with fans directly, integrate merch and tour dates, or advertise on the platform. Apple Music excels with artist data, but it seems like they are cautious about growing practically every other FA feature category.

TIDAL is so new to the world of FA, it remains to be seen what they will roll out in the area of artist marketing and commerce.

That said, one new TIDAL FA marketing feature is a B2B artist matchmaking service called “Artist Collabs” — reminiscent of SoundBetter , which was formerly owned by Spotify. Artists can opt into using it, and then will find a list of similar artists who have also opted in. The tool encourages artists to direct messages to each other from within the TIDAL FA platform to build relationships and potentially collaborate with each other. While it’s not a pure-play “market my music to listeners” option, it could help artists create awareness of their music in the industry behind the scenes.

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Spotify is the giant in fan marketing, advertising, and commerce features on DSPs. Perhaps more than any of its competitors, Spotify understands that artist marketing budgets are being spent on driving listeners to stream an artist’s music, so it makes sense for the DSP itself to capture some of this value.

Similar to some of the services we covered in Part 3 on data and analytics, several third-party companies across the music-tech landscape are working to streamline and simplify ad campaign development, such as Rise and un:hurd . That said, the tricky calculations around ROI on music marketing campaigns in general means that keeping ad campaigns financially sustainable is far from guaranteed.

Artists using “For Artists” platforms should focus on the free options they can utilize for converting listeners to fans, and furthermore into ticket and merch buyers — with a special eye for the myriad features already available on Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon Music . Other platforms that are lower-ranked would do well to study which marketing and commerce features offered by their rivals are driving commercial impact for artists, and build accordingly and proactively to help best equip artists for success.