5 Top Music Marketing Strategies for 2024
In 2024, music marketing is getting even harder. Each year, more songs are released, competing for scarce resources: In 2023, for the first time, over 100,000 tracks were uploaded to streaming services per day — up from about 93,000 per day in 2022. As we all know, only an exceedingly tiny fraction of those tracks will hit even a million streams. But you know what’s really cool? A billion streams. And if you want to be one of those, well, first you’ll need a really great song — and then you’ll also need to be smarter, quicker, and more efficient than everyone else.
We surveyed a dozen of the smartest performance marketers we know, all of whom work directly with the industry’s biggest labels and artists on campaigns that move the needle on streams, purchases, chart positions, and even GRAMMY campaigns. (Spoiler: They all work for Gupta Media, the music industry’s secret weapon for over 20 years.) Here are the five themes that are driving the most success for music marketing in 2024.
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When an artist is shooting for chart position, you have to get fans excited before the release: Waiting until the track is already available is way too late to launch the campaign. Unfortunately, music marketers often get the assignment on short notice. But in 2024, social-media platforms are making it easier to reach fans and build urgency.
These Ad Types Are Built For Hype. How do you stoke demand and excitement before the product has even been released?
- TikTok Countdown Ads: In advance of your release, these ads include a countdown clock that ticks in real-time towards your release date—and users can also elect to set a reminder for release day.
- Instagram Reminder Ads: These opt-in ads allow us to send three push notifications to users, at one day before, 15 minutes before, and at the time of release.
- Pre-Save Campaigns: These campaigns allow users to pre-save or pre-add music that isn’t yet released to their Apple Music or Spotify libraries, driving and capturing pre-release awareness and excitement.
- Save-To-Library: Another recent advancement is the ability to save songs directly to your Spotify library from your TikTok account—closing the loop between TikTok’s ability to drive discovery and Spotify’s utility in nurturing fandom.
How To Boost Fan Engagement. Once an artist has posted video content to TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook, there’s a whole library of tools that marketers can use to juice engagement.
- Polls: Have an artist ask fans a specific question and then prompt with two responses to choose from.
- Instant Experience Ads (Instagram, Facebook): These ads allow us to use a variety of creative in a single ad. Once users click, they’ll enter an immersive scroll where the content can be anything we select, from music video clips, liners, press quotes, or audience reactions. We’ve found users spend more time in these than any other ad type.
- TikTok Display Cards: We’ve seen increased engagement by adding these boxed-overlay ads, which can showcase direct-to-consumer products like merch and physical albums.
- TikTok Stitching: When you’re thinking about ways for artists to natively interact directly with fans, it doesn’t get any better than a video duet. When artists stitch/duet their fans, it has a halo effect of getting the audience excited that their favorite artist is making an authentic connection with their own content and fan content in general.
You Can Now Retarget Organic Content on TikTok. The past few years have seen TikTok become a major new platform for organic music discovery. But until recently, its utility as an advertising platform has been restricted by its limited ability to retarget.
That’s changed: TikTok has unveiled a greatly expanded capability to retarget viewers of an artist’s organic content, and that’s a game changer. And it’s a big reason why marketers should be asking artists to post their own videos to the platform. The clips don’t have to be long: Artists like Tate McRae are posting 10-15 second clips to tease a new release—and then using some of the tactics we describe above to keep fans in-the-know throughout an album or song release cycle. We continue to see TikTok as a place where organic and paid have to work in harmony: Your organic feed works hard to promote the work even when you’re not.
"To have a hit in 2024, you'll need a really great song: And then you'll need to be smarter, quicker, and more efficient than everyone else."
In 2024, it’s no secret: Music is primarily a streaming media. Many of the artists we work with are streaming-only, and even the ones who offer some combination of physical media — vinyl albums, cassettes, CDs — often aren’t pushing those items to consumers. It feels very 20th century to be selling records — so why should you be paying attention to vinyl album and cassette sales? Physical album sales were up 9% in 2023, while digital album sales were down 9% — and physical albums (87 million) continue to far outpace digital album numbers (18 million).
The good news is that digital platforms are making it more efficient to drive physical sales.
Lean Into TikTok Shop: TikTok’s big investment in becoming a shopping platform is a boon to artists with big followings on the platform — and is another way to leverage the speed and passion of viral fandom into revenue and chart-position growth. In our recent tests, we’ve seen display cards on TikTok drive dramatic gains in ad efficiency and response.
Reward Your Superfans: In an age when even casual fans have access to deep cuts from every artist, physical media is returning as a differentiator for superfans. And smart artists are using time-tested tactics to drive FOMO, turning LPs and merchandise into exclusive, limited time, and high-value products. That can mean signed copies of albums and tour posters. Or multiple, limited-edition versions of an album, with different covers or vinyl color variations. Or releases that are only available during select time periods, like Record Store Day. Remember, too, that timing is everything: We’ve seen even some of our biggest and most successful artists struggle to get physical products released on time—if your pre-order push comes months after an album’s streaming release, you’re diluting most of the impact.
Sales Is Sales: Remember: According to the RIAA, one physical album sale is worth 1500 on-demand audio streams. When it comes to the charts, those physical sales can make a real difference: In tight chart races, a physical-albums push might help push an artist over the top.
In 2024, the mechanics of digital marketing are undergoing seismic shifts — last year’s tactics aren’t going to work the way you think. And marketers who don’t understand the coming changes will be left behind.
Creative Is the New Targeting: If you haven’t heard Meta’s new mantra, it’s time to get familiar with it — and with what it means for your campaigns. When Facebook and Instagram use machine learning to deliver your ads, the most important variable — the thing that is most significant in determining how many people see your ads, and how much it costs you — is no longer bid price or audience targeting. According to Meta, the “single most important factor in delivery optimization” is an ad’s creative qualities. Coupled with new data on ad fatigue, that’s pushing marketers to take a new approach towards creative: Artists should be delivering differentiated messages and styles. That means it’s not good enough to just share three clips of the same music video—instead, they should be putting more eggs in more baskets, from short, lo-fi videos to high-touch performance ads.
Goodbye Pixels: After threatening for years, Google has finally begun to deprecate pixels on Chrome, and Apple is expected to do the same for Safari. What does that mean for music? A renewed emphasis on owned, or first-party, data. That means prioritizing an artist’s direct connection to fans — whether that’s via their own websites, or using pre-saves via Spotify or Apple, since those formats provide first-party data to artists and labels.
In 2024, after many rounds of rigorous testing and optimization, here’s what’s trending in our campaigns with music clients:
Channel Diversification: With changes coming to Meta and Google, we’re seeing artists and labels getting more interested in Connected TV, Out of Home, programmatic digital ads, audio, and podcasts. We’re also seeing diminishing trust in influencers, which is driving labels and artists toward authentic user-generated content and reviews.
Contextual Advertising: With the decline of pixel-based advertising, there’s a renewed focus on inserting our ads into conversations and specific searches across different social platforms. And the platforms themselves are providing better targeting for those placements.
- Reddit conversation targeting: With the ability to bid on relevant terms, “Conversation Placement” allows our ads to be part of the conversation.
- TikTok Search: We can now showcase our ads within TikTok’s search results page.
- Twitter/X Search Results: Still the favored platform for fans responding in real-time to live events like the GRAMMYs and the Super Bowl, Twitter/X search ads offer contextual relevance at efficient rates.
Sound-On: Our campaign data shows that Facebook and Instagram Feed ads are sound-off for between 20% and 50% of impressions. Pair that with ever-increasing CPMs for Instagram Feed ads, and your recorded music budget might not be able to reach as many eyes (and ears) as it needs to. That’s why we’re seeing music clients experiment with immersive sound-on formats: Hulu CTV ads, YouTube, even out-of-home digital trucks. Meanwhile, placements like Instagram Reels (more than Stories) and especially TikTok continue to provide more efficient CPMs and higher sound-on rates. We’ve seen many clients pivot to making content only for those placements when media and creative budgets are tight.
Snapchat’s Back: You’ve probably heard mixed signals about Snapchat: Business-wise, the news hasn’t been great. But the platform just topped 800 million monthly active users, and we know that Gen Z is on the platform—59% of U.S. teens say they use Snapchat, nearly in-line with self-reported Instagram usage. More importantly, our data shows the platform is surging—with no signs that it’s slowing down. Thanks to a new Browser of Choice Beta, Snapchat is delivering strong performance in campaigns focused on driving music streams. We’re seeing this in post-click results, with Snapchat outperforming comparable channels like TikTok and Instagram in some recent instances.
For more than a hundred years, the best way to listen to music was to own it. At the dawn of the 21st century—between the launch of iTunes in 2001 and the U.S. launch of Spotify in 2011—the market peaked at a mix of 70% physical and 30% digital. Fans had to buy. Radio, television, and touring drove discovery; the job of advertising was to focus on nurturing the existing demand for an artist, then driving fans to purchase. The job that ads were meant to solve? We had too many fans and not enough customers.
Today, the challenge is vastly different: There is very little friction, if any, between someone being interested or excited about an artist and the ability to access their entire catalog. Consumers only have to be curious. The challenge now? We have too many subscribers, and not enough deeply engaged fans. So advertising’s job is different: We should be focused on creating primary demand.
What does that look like in 2024? Advertisers are finding that the most compelling and effective creative is the content that artists create themselves. You’ve heard it before, but even in paid campaigns—especially in paid campaigns—organic content is king.
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The smartest artists engage directly and authentically with fans on the platforms where the audience natively congregates. Teasing releases on an artist’s socials gets fans to feel like they’re part of the process. We’re still seeing labels roll out highly-produced assets—like clips from a professionally-shot music video. But our tests continue to show huge advantages in so-called lo-fi content — the selfie-styled video shot in the native style of a platform like TikTok or Instagram.
What’s more, as platforms like Instagram and Facebook lean on machine learning and artificial intelligence to connect fans with content, artists will need a variety of differentiated creative to break through the algorithms. That’s yet another reason Meta is telling marketers that “creative is the new targeting.”
In 2024, organic content has become even more powerful, thanks to the new tools that music marketers have at their fingertips.
Gupta Media music marketing veterans Joe Schlesinger, Billy Philhower, Jenn Castro, Phil Decoteau, Emma Foulkes, Brendan Curry, Ashley Antico, Lily Koenig, and Dale Nickerson contributed research and expertise to this report.
