Learn how to use Campaign Kit, our set of tools specifically made to amplify your music and build lifelong fans — right where streaming happens.
Artists and their teams talk to us all the time about what success means to them: finding new listeners and turning them into lifelong fans.
While using social media, billboards, and out-of-home ads can help you broadly reach listeners, these tools aren’t made for music, and they aren’t designed to reach your audience where they listen. They're costly and often fall short when it comes to targeting the right listeners or capturing their attention — not to mention the guesswork of trying to measure the impact of these tools on streaming.
That’s why we’ve invested in building effective campaign tools that are made for music — playlist pitching, Discovery Mode, Marquee and, most recently, Showcase. Each tool is designed to help you reach the right listeners, drive engagement when they're listening to music, and measure the impact on audience streaming and engagement.
Now we're bringing together all these tools under one umbrella called Campaign Kit, with the goal of making it the single most effective toolkit to help you grow your audience, no matter where you are in your career or release cycle.
What is Campaign Kit?
As the world's biggest music platform, Spotify can uniquely help artists create lifelong fans. With Campaign Kit, you have the tools you need to amplify your music – reaching listeners in Spotify programming or when they’re actively deciding what to stream next.
Let’s learn a little more about each tool:
Playlist pitching makes it easier to share your new songs with the editors who curate playlists like Rap Caviar, Today’s Top Hits, and Fresh Finds. Submit upcoming, unreleased music to Spotify’s editors for playlist consideration — it’s 100% free and available to all artists.
Discovery Mode can help expand the reach of your songs in personalized playlists — with no upfront cost. Select the songs that are a priority for you, and we’ll use that signal to help you find new listeners who are going to love them.
Marquee captures listeners’ undivided attention with a full-screen, sponsored recommendation of your new release right when they open the app. When a listener clicks on a Marquee, they can save or go directly to your new release, where they can focus on your music.
Showcase, our newest sponsored recommendation, lets you promote your music to likely listeners at any time with a mobile banner at the top of Spotify’s Home – where millions of listeners look when they’re deciding what to listen to. You can spotlight both new releases and music from your catalog for any occasion, like if your song is going viral, you’re drumming up interest in a tour, or your album anniversary is coming up.
How Campaign Kit helps amplify your music
The tools within Campaign Kit are designed to be used together to meet your goals. Here are some examples of how artists and their teams used Campaign Kit – along with a few other Spotify for Artists tools – to successfully grow their audiences:
Independent R&B artist thuy and her team used Campaign Kit across multiple releases to grow her monthly active listeners by more than 300%. They started by using Discovery Mode to grow her audience in the run up to her debut EP. Once her release dropped, they capitalized on that momentum with Marquee, targeting light and moderate listeners to turn them into bigger fans.
“Once Discovery Mode started, we really began to notice that the save rate, the listenership, the playlist adds were going through the roof,” said Isobel Kelly, VP Global Head of Streaming at Venice Music and part of thuy’s team. “We had really connected with a new, wide range of potential fans.”
The campaigns helped thuy reach fans in 178 countries and had her music saved by 230,000 listeners with 210,000 user playlist adds. See more here.
Miami’s Magic City Hippies were able to prime listeners for their 2022 sophom*ore album, Water Your Garden, with a popular Campaign Kit strategy — promoting singles leading up to an album with Marquee, then turning on Discovery Mode for those same tracks.
The results were clear: Listeners who saw their Marquees were 4x more likely to stream pre-release singles. See more here.
When Nashville-based folktronica artist Conner Youngblood submitted his song “Pizza Body” for editorial playlist consideration, the song was added to the Mellow Morning playlist. It sparked significant growth in his monthly listeners and followers on Spotify, with an added bonus: a noticeable boost in fans at his live shows all over the world. Check out our series How They Made It, where Conner, Brooklyn hip-hop artist Wiki, and Chicago rapper Dreezy discuss the impact that pitching their music for playlist consideration has had on each of their careers.
Goth Babe’s team have used Campaign Kit for many of his new releases and catalog tracks, last year hyping four new releases by successfully pairing Marquee and Discovery Mode. Using Discovery Mode on catalog tracks helped Goth Babe expand his audience, and Marquee helped him notify listeners about his new release.
His 2019 single “Weekend Friend” was one of the catalog tracks added to Discovery Mode in 2022. This resulted in more streams than it had even during its initial release-week peak. To keep the momentum going, they then promoted “Weekend Friend” with Showcase, targeting his previously active audience to re-engage listeners who had dropped off.
What new features are coming to Campaign Kit?
We’re building Campaign Kit to be the most effective way for artists to reach listeners and develop lifelong fans. In the coming weeks, we’re rolling out some exciting new features to help more artists reach more potential fans at the right music moments:
- Launching new creative options for Marquee and Showcase: Artists and their teams have asked us for more ways to customize their sponsored recommendations, so next year we’re excited to introduce new creative options, like giving teams the ability to pick and choose the background color of their Marquee to match their release artwork. For Showcase, artists will soon be able to choose from four additional headlines — including “Your playlist finds” and “Try something new” — that give listeners even more of a reason to engage.
- Connecting with listeners in Mixes: Spotify Mixes are similar to Spotify Radio— both are personalized algorithmic playlists that listeners select when they’re open to discovery based on a specific input. However until now, despite their similarity to radio playlists, Discovery Mode hasn’t been available in Mixes. We’re updating that in early 2024: Discovery Mode campaigns will include Daily Mix starting January 3, and we’ll be expanding to artist, decade, mood, and genre mixes thereafter. (You can recognize Spotify Mixes with their signature cover design.) For artists and labels using Discovery Mode, this means more opportunities to connect with listeners when they’re most open to discovery — whether it’s a catalog artist reaching listeners in 80s Mix, an EDM artist reaching listeners in Dance/Electronic Mix, or an artist selecting just the right song to fit a listener’s Happy Mix.
- Expanding Marquee and Showcase to artists in more countries: This year, we expanded Marquee to the U.K., Canada, and Australia and introduced Showcase to eligible artist teams in the U.S. Early next year, we’re excited to expand Showcase to the markets where Marquee is already live and roll out both tools to artist teams in France. Stay tuned for more news on the global reach of our campaign tools over the course of 2024.
How to get started with Campaign Kit tools
While all artists have access to playlist pitching, we're still expanding access to Discovery Mode, Marquee, and Showcase. Eligible artists and their teams can navigate to the Campaigns tab on Spotify for Artists on desktop to start creating campaigns. (Learn more about eligibility for each tool: Discovery Mode, Marquee, and Showcase.)
On our new Campaign Kit website, you’ll find more details on how we can help you and your team reach your goals – whether you want to grow your audience with a new release, re-engage fans with your catalog, celebrate a release anniversary, develop new audiences around the world, and so much more. Keep an eye on that space over the next few months as we roll out webinars, insights, and more educational materials.
And make sure you don’t miss a beat, sign up for the Campaign Kit Masterclass on January 24, 2024. We'll share more details on how to best use the toolkit, including how marketers at mTheory and Venice Music are successfully pairing these tools for their artists.
Spotify for Artists helps you to develop the fanbase you need to reach your goals.
