At Monday’s Stream On event, we shared our vision for new and better marketing tools for artists around the world — including expanded access to Marquee, the promotional tool that has become key to many artists’ release strategies.

Over the past year, from top streaming artists like The Weeknd to indie rockers like Mt. Joy, artists and labels of all sizes have used Marquee to get fans engaged with their new releases. Every new release — be it an album, single, or EP — is an opportunity to deepen your relationship with listeners. The casual listener who may have stumbled across your music on a playlist or on Spotify radio has the potential to become a more engaged fan when presented with your newest music.

Marquee provides a full-screen, sponsored recommendation of your new release to Spotify Free and Premium listeners who have shown interest in your music and have the potential to listen to more of it. Listeners who click your Marquee are guided directly to your new release, allowing you to market your new music right at the moment listeners are deciding what to stream.

Marquee is the best way to get the right listeners to focus on your new release on Spotify, so we want to make it easier for artist teams to make Marquee part of their release strategies. In the coming months, we’ll launch a self-serve buying experience in Spotify for Artists, enabling U.S. teams to book campaigns as easily as they update their profile. We also want to make Marquee available to more artist teams globally — so in the coming months, we will expand Marquee outside of North America. Artists teams in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand will be the next to get access to this powerful marketing tool by booking campaigns through their local Spotify teams.

Since launching Marquee in beta, it has become an important part of release strategies for artists big and small — across genres and audience sizes. And with good reason, too. Our performance data shows that listeners who see a Marquee are more than twice (2.2x) as likely to save a track to their library or add it to their user-generated playlists than if they hadn’t.

As we work to get more artist teams access to Marquee, we wanted to share some stories of the different ways artists like Justin Bieber, beabadoobee, and Lyrica Anderson and their labels are using Marquee as part of their fan development strategies:

Using Marquee to Amplify Every New Release

Justin Bieber's "Changes" Marquee

Dropping a new release isn’t only about what happens on launch day — it’s about how each new project builds upon the past and towards the future. Global superstar Justin Bieber is a master of keeping fans engaged, but also eager for what’s next. As he and his team at Def Jam released new music over the last year, they’ve made Marquee a consistent part of their audience engagement approach. First was his highly-anticipated album, Changes. Since it had been five years since his last album, the team wanted to use Marquee to activate his U.S. fanbase. Marquee helped Bieber’s team capitalize on the excitement for the new album, driving an average of 15 streams per listener. More recently, off the momentum from Changes, Bieber has given his audience even more music to dive into. In preparation for his sixth studio album, he’s released a number of singles, including "Anyone," which the team promoted with Marquee. For Anyone, their goal was to reactivate Bieber’s lapsed listeners before his upcoming album. It paid off — 24% of listeners who streamed the single saved it in their libraries or added it to a personal playlist. "Anyone" went on to debut at No. 1 on Spotify's Global Song Debuts chart. As Bieber gets closer to his next album, it’s clear that fans are ready for it.

Maintaining Momentum With Marquee

beabadoobee's Marquee for 'Fake It Flowers'

In this era of viral hits, translating popularity on social media into streams is crucial. Alt-pop singer-songwriter sensation beabadoobee knows a thing or two about capitalizing on a viral moment. Released in February 2020, rapper Powfu’s “death bed (coffee for your head),” with its sample of her hit 2017 solo track “Coffee,” blew up on TikTok last year. The song soundtracked millions of video clips from cooking videos to make-up tutorials and as a result, surpassed 850 million streams on Spotify. The success of the track primed a legion of fans for beabadoobee’s much-anticipated debut album, Fake It Flowers, which was released in October 2020.

Her team at label Dirty Hit used Marquee to strategically target her casual, lapsed, and recently interested audiences and 40% of listeners who streamed the album saved a track to their library or added a track to a personal playlist, for a total of just over 100,000 saves and playlist adds.

“2020 was a huge year for beabadoobee and we wanted to capture that momentum and translate it into our campaign for her debut album, Fake it Flowers,” said Perdi Higgs, Digital Promotions Manager at Dirty Hit. “We were specifically seeking out listeners who had recently discovered her music but wouldn’t necessarily be familiar with her as an artist. Therefore, being able to segment our audience on Spotify was a hugely powerful tool. Marquee was a perfect way to introduce these more casual listeners to beabadoobee through her debut album. The results reflected an engaged audience who responded to the Marquee.”

Using Marquee to Reengage Fans

Lyrica Anderson's Marquee for 'Bad Hair Day'

Pop R&B singer Lyrica Anderson and her distributor, Beatroot Music, were gearing up to release Bad Hair Day, Anderson’s first album in two years in August 2020. Monique Williams, her Marketing Manager at Beatroot, had only started working at Beatroot in July, but she knew she wanted to reactivate fans who hadn’t heard from Anderson in a while and turned to Marquee to maximize the impact of the release moment. “I had to hit the ground running, Williams said. “For this specific release, we built up [momentum] a little bit and we definitely had a ‘loud’ release day, and then we savored the release [moment] as long as we could.”

Williams used a Marquee campaign on release day to bring listeners back to Anderson’s music and drive early success for the new album. Each listener who received a Marquee streamed an average of 14 tracks (Bad Hair Day is only 12 tracks long) from the new album. This immersion in her music also led to other desirable fan behaviors as converted listeners saved an average of four tracks per listener. “Saves are so important because they help me make a case for playlisting and more marketing opportunities,” Williams said.

How to connect with us

For more on Marquee, check out our site, which we’ll update with more news on how US teams can get ready for Marquee’s self-serve availability in Spotify for Artists. Until then, you can continue to submit information here to promote new releases to audiences in the US and Canada. If you're in the UK, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand, reach out to your local Spotify representative for more info. We also encourage you to visit our LinkedIn page for details on our tools for music marketers — as we continue to improve Marquee, we’re excited to share more updates, so follow along.

–Spotify for Artists