In this article, Chris Robley walks us through his recent experience setting up a campaign with Feature.fm to promote sponsored songs in Deezer, what sort of results he saw through the process, and what steps he might take in future to make similar campaigns even more successful.
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Guest post by Chris Robley of DIY Musician
Last month Feature.fm offered me a $100 credit to run a promo campaign for my newest single. CD Baby was thinking about a deal where our clients would have exclusive access to promote sponsored songs in Deezer, and also get 500 free spins. We wanted to take the service for a test drive, and I happily accepted the $100 credit. One of the perks of editing this here blog!
I’ll give you the spoiler now: the campaign was simple to set up, I thought the results were impressive, and I was provided helpful performance insights to make any future campaigns stronger. Whether you have a budget for this kind of promotion is another question, of course, but we’ll get to that at the end of this article.
What does Feature.fm do?
Feature.fm promotes songs to users of Deezer’s free non-interactive streaming service (think Pandora Radio). You choose the song and the parameters for your campaign; they serve that track to a targeted group of listeners. These are guaranteed plays to your ideal audience, and they count as “real streams” in Deezer, boosting your stream count and increasing your chances of connecting with new fans.
Note: Feature.fm can also promote songs to 8tracks, but my campaign was focused specifically on Deezer.
When you create an account, you will list sounds-like artists (Some of mine: Paul Simon, John Vanderslice, Tame Impala, Elvis Costello….) and Feature.fm will promote tracks to Deezer users based on their listening habits, favorite artists, moods, etc.
Your promoted song will play on Deezer in the exact same way that any other track would in the non-interactive service, except for the fact that there is a “Sponsored” banner that appears at the top of the album artwork. That way if anyone is really curious they’ll know it’s a promoted track.
Another note: Feature.fm also allows you to run multi-song campaigns where their algorithm makes real-time adjustments to optimize for your better performing songs, but that kind of campaign requires a bigger spend.
What results can you expect?
Here’s what Feature.fm says about itself:
feature.fm is an online ad platform that only promotes songs, so you are able to achieve much better results than traditional online ad platforms. Here is a table that shows some of our average results compared to what you might see across traditional ad platforms with a $1,000 budget to help provide benchmarks for what you can expect to see with your own campaigns.
Show me the money.
First, all promoted plays on Deezer are monetized and royalties for non-interactive streams can be collected through SoundExchange.
Also, Feature.fm advertises on their site that “You only pay if your song is heard for at least 30 seconds, and your budget is completely up to you with no commitments.”
I’m not sure how that played out exactly in my campaign (math isn’t my strong suit), but it’s an attractive hook if you’re worried that you’ll spend big money only to have your song skipped a bunch of times.
The results of my Feature.fm campaign.
For $100, my song was streamed 5100 times and added to 200 playlists, with 134 people adding my track to their “favorites” playlist and another 66 people adding it to some other playlist in Deezer.
When you include another 51 people who checked out either my artist page or album page on Deezer, I saw a 4.92% engagement rate and an average CPP of $0.020. Not bad at all.
After running this first campaign, I now have actionable data (especially geographic information) with which to run an even more successful campaign.
Some of the analytics provided by Feature.fm:
- Play sources (Android, iOS, website)
- Streams, sponsored plays, and engagement on a timeline
- Engagement breakdown
- Reaction to song (you can see when during the track people skipped or engaged)
- Gender and ages of listeners (for both sponsored plays and engagements)
- Geographic map for streams
- Geographic information for engagement
This last one was the most interesting to me, as I could see the breakdown of where songs were promoted, where engagement happened, and the engagement % by country. Apparently I should be living in Germany.
Some thoughts about promoting a song through Feature.fm.
This blog has all types of readers, from artists spending thousands a month to promote a new release, to those who might not spend $100 in an entire year to promote their music. I don’t want to make assumptions about your budgets or what’s “worth” spending money on.
So I’ll say IF.
If you have a promo budget that allows for it, Feature.fm is worth looking into, especially if you consider the deal they’re giving CD Baby artists for 500 free streams (given as a $10 credit when you sign up for a sponsored song package).
Since Deezer is big internationally, I would particularly recommend Feature.fm to any artist trying to reach a targeted audience outside the United States. If you’re building a presence in another country or about to embark on an international tour, Feature.fm could be a great way to get your music to fans of your genre in that region.
And, while I wouldn’t earn back the cost of my campaign in non-interactive royalties, it does make it feel like less of a risky expense when you know all the promoted plays are monetized, tallied with your total stream count, and you don’t pay a thing unless the listener hears more than 30 seconds of the track.
And on a purely “I just want to get my music out there” level, it’s pretty cool to know that 200 new listeners have added my song to their playlists. Yes, I would’ve had to pay to make that happen had feature.fm not given me the credit — and you will have to pay for that engagement too — but it’s really not much to spend when you consider the overall reach to a targeted audience, plus the fact that out of the 200 who added my song to their playlists, some of them will become repeat listeners and, hopefully, fans.
To start your account with feature.fm and get a credit worth 500 free spins, go HERE.
If you have tips on using feature.fm to its fullest, holler in the comments below.