ads blocked
OK so you want to promote your music now ? You think that you have a bangin’ hit in the latest project of your DAW… Just like me. Unfortunately, after uploading your track on Bandcamp, nobody is really listening to it and that might be a little bit disappointing. Let’s try to put it in front of the world through a magic tool (or not) : facebook ads.
As you know, Facebook (FB) also owns Instagram and this social network is so trendy these days that everybody is on it. But not me, so let’s give it a try ! I realized you can link your FB account and your Instagram account. You can have a FB page and publish your latest post on both platforms at the same time. You also have a dedicated webpage to manage your business on both social networks : the facebook business suite, I was so ignorant.
20 youtube videos later, I was up to date. Now I understand the promise of FB ads. You can pay to put your content in front of people. You can target a specific type of audience, for example you can select people who have shown interest in Hip Hop music. You just have to create an ad campaign and then the holy algorithm of FB will do the job for you and it will find your next fan base.
You know what, FB is earning money, a lot of money. It looks like last year, FB ads generated 85 billions… Mmm, that’s a lot, really. After creating my Instagram account, I’ve realized that so many people promote their content on this platform. OK fine, FB ads look attractive but does it work ? Because I’m sure you get the point. You’ll have to pay for these ads.
I would like to focus on music so the idea behind FB ads is to promote your music through a short video clip on Instagram or your FB page and suggest people to click on your link to go to your spotify profile and listen to your music. These people might also like your profile and they will be notified when you’ll publish another new song. So you pay for ads then you’ll be paid for streams… but the bank always wins like the casinos in Las Vegas. The cost per click is way higher than the revenue per stream. Is it useless, maybe, or maybe not.
In fact, you have to promote your music on social networks, I mean in 2021, this is mandatory. At least to have a small fan base and pretend to exist in the game. I think FB ads can help to start (when you don’t have any audience at all) or it can help the bigger players to stay on top. For everybody else, I think it’s just a huge source of income for FB and a loss for content creators. First, you’ll pay more for ads than you can expect to earn with streams or views and 2nd, the audience you can have through ads is poor quality. It’s better to have your content shared by known people who can recommend your content as something great. That’s why I think FB ads can be useful only to start. There is a low probability that your ads can be seen by an influencer, be shared by this influencer and go viral… Who knows.
Do I use FB ads ? I’ve tried but I miserably failed. I was banned from advertising by FB for several reasons. I’ve created a business page instead of a personal page and FB didn’t recognize my work as a real business. Some of my ads were also rejected because I was promoting a song but I didn’t own the rights of the instrumental : it’s not allowed by FB policies. I've also tried to promote a video clip but I was smoking in this video and FB is not allowed to promote tobacco. I had a chat with FB support, they answered very quickly but they were also very useless. So I got banned.
Some music creators explained that advertising will always cost you money. That’s true. For example, they have a budget for ads of 1000 $ or 2000$. They set a campaign in FB ads (with many tweaks, audience targeting, cost per clicks… a real science) to push their content and hit 10k streams. I like the idea of having such a huge audience (in my point of view) but Spotify will generously pay you 50€ for this… mmm unfortunately, I can’t afford this kind of promotional budget and return on investment.
Youtube ads, Google adsense, amazon advertising, I can try other ads platforms. In the end, I think it’s good for me to be banned from FB ads. I don’t want to spend 50€ for 500 clicks. Maybe I can get one fan from this 500 clicks… I let you do the math to get 1000 fans. I can also try the follow/follow-me system, I mean, I can follow 200 accounts everyday and get about 20 followers as a reward… Will they like my music ? I don’t think so. I don’t want to spend time learning how the holy algorithm of FB and Instagram works, I don’t want to know how to properly configure a FB campaign, I don’t want to understand what audience targeting is. I don’t have enough time or in fact I don’t want to invest my time in this knowledge. Maybe one day I will hire a marketing manager and a team to advertise my content… or not.
For now, I let the word of mouth do the job. I don’t give my money to FB because they don’t need it. I don’t have an audience yet but I spend my time working on my content and I’m happy with this. It’s cool to be a misunderstood artist. My discography will be famous after my death (joke). I don’t consider my music as a source of income, I do it for me, if someone else likes it, great but that’s not a big deal if no one does. Regarding my brand new brand POSITIVE MUSIQUE, I’ll find a way to make it a real business. Impact millions to make millions (powerful quote), FB ads could be a way to this but it seems that it’s not for me. I would probably make my first million with another source of income. The journey for POSITIVE MUSIQUE in the digital business is far from the end, I’m just starting.