Your First 1,000 Followers: What They Mean and What to Do With Them
Spotify for Artists sends artists a notification when their profile reaches 1,000 followers. The message congratulates them, says that 1,000 people are waiting for the next release, and invites them to go into the tool to get to know their audience and see their progress. It's an automated email. What really matters is what you do after reading it.
A follower is not a listener, and all you see of your followers is the number
It's worth telling two things apart. Listeners are the people who play your songs or your music videos during the period you choose. Followers are the people who follow your artist profile. For the latter, you see how many there are in total, but not who they are. If someone tells you they follow you, you can't check it in the tool.
That's why 1,000 followers doesn't mean 1,000 streams per song. It's people who have said they want to hear about what you do, and nothing more.
Audience for the profile, Music for each song
The general stats for your profile are in the Audience tab. The stats for a specific song or release are in the Music tab. In both you can choose a date range or hover over the timeline to see the figures day by day. Stats are recorded in UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, and you can't change the time zone. So if you look at the chart for your release day, the day may not match yours.
Another useful screen is "Release engagement". It shows, day by day, how many monthly active listeners have listened to your new music during the 28 days after it came out. It helps you compare one release with another and see when interest cools off.
Followers get your new releases in their personalised lists
People who follow you discover your new music in several ways, from personalised lists such as Release Radar to the New Releases feed. In addition, on average, when someone starts following an artist, they are three times as likely to listen to that artist's music in the following six months.
That's an average, not a promise for your profile. Even so, it explains why it's in your interest for your followers to find something new before they forget about you, rather than letting a year go by between one song and the next.
What to prepare before your next release
With 1,000 followers you have a small audience, but it's yours. These steps follow from the above:
- Go to the Audience tab and note down how many followers and listeners you have before you release, so you can compare afterwards.
- Set the release date with plenty of lead time. If you publish at the last minute, there's no time to pitch the track to playlists or let your fans know.
- Share a pre-save link in the weeks beforehand. It's a link your fans use to save the song before it comes out, so on release day it's already in their library.
- Once it's out, open "Release engagement" and see how many monthly active listeners arrive in those 28 days.
Our view: at the start, consistency matters more than the number. A thousand people who get a song from you every few weeks are worth more than five thousand who haven't heard from you in a year.
How we do it
At MusicAdders we pitch all releases to the main playlists, at no extra cost, and we recommend you publish within standard industry lead times so that this work is possible. When you submit your release from Workstation you immediately get your pre-save link, and from the same platform you can check billing, streams and analytics and link your content to your Spotify profile.