The 2023 Spotify for Artists Recap

Another year in the books – 2023 was a big one. From new ways to promote your music, to learning from artists who have been there and done that, to new ways of connecting with your most devoted fans, it’s time to celebrate your success.

You Got Ready for Your Close-Up

With more videos being uploaded and watched across multiple platforms than ever before, it can be tough for artists to cut through the noise. So we launched Clips, under-30-second vertical videos designed to put your music front-and-center. While the goal of social videos is to get likes, Clips are meant to drive streams of your music. Your fans hear directly from you and can quickly access your music immediately after watching your video on Spotify.

And what better way for fans to view and engage with Clips than on your artist profile, album pages, or Countdown Pages – a destination to get your fans hyped for a new release. Here, fans can pre-save your upcoming albums, preview the tracklist, pre-order new merch, watch Clips you’ve shared, and countdown to the release moment.

The best part: We gave your top fans an extra special moment with personalized messages from their top artists. As soon as your top listeners opened Wrapped, they received an exclusive video message thanking them for their support (or, in the case of SZA hinting at new music in 2024). The gift that keeps on giving.

Your Campaigns Hit New High Notes

Your goal? Finding new listeners and turning them into lifelong fans. While using social media, billboards, and out-of-home ads can help you broadly reach listeners, these tools aren’t made for music, and they aren’t designed to reach your audience where they listen. So we’re always looking for ways to help you reach the right listeners, right when it counts.

That’s why we launched Showcase: our newest made-for-music campaign tool. With Showcase, you can promote your music – whether it’s your newest release, your deepest catalog cut, or anything in between – at any time to likely listeners across Spotify. Showcase appears as a mobile banner at the top of Spotify’s Home – the most visited place on the app, where millions of listeners come to decide what to listen to, resulting in billions of streams each day. On average, people who see a Showcase are six times more likely to stream the promoted release.

With the addition of Showcase, Spotify now offers artists and their teams a robust set of tools made for helping music marketers achieve the goals that matter most. And that’s why we launched Campaign Kit, to help bring together all of our campaign tools — playlist pitching, Discovery Mode, Showcase and Marquee — under one umbrella. We're excited to make it the single most effective toolkit to help you grow your audience. Each tool is designed to help you reach the right listeners, drive engagement when they're listening to music, and measure the impact on audience streaming. Just take it from independent artist thuy’s team (manager Anh Vu and Venice Music’s Isobel Kelly): after using Discovery Mode and Marquee over the course of 15 months and multiple releases, thuy’s monthly active listeners grew by over 300% and reached 178 countries.

You Put Merch in the Spotlight

Who doesn’t love a little retail therapy? And when it also supports an artist they love, fans just can’t resist. Enter: the personalized Merch hub. Spotify’s newest shoppable destination provides personalized recommendations based on your fans’ listening habits and allows them to browse, click, and purchase through Shopify. Plus, you can now tag merch to a release, which means your merch will appear on the corresponding release page and on the Now Playing view for every track included on the release. So when a fan is listening to your music, they can browse (and buy) your merch as well. And speaking of new, we also revamped your artist profile with new tabs for music, merch and events – putting an extra spotlight on your offers and helping you earn more revenue from Spotify.

You Got Personal(ized)

Understanding who your music is resonating with is one of the most crucial aspects of building your career as an artist. And when it comes to the data about your listeners, we believe that nuance matters. This year, we introduced new audience segments. We now offer a closer look at your unique listeners from the past two years, splitting out your active audience from your previously active and programmed audiences. That’s because understanding your total audience can help you identify growth areas and measure how effectively you’re converting more casual listeners into true fans over time. And because targeting the right audience is at the heart of any strong marketing strategy, we made these new segments available for targeting with Marquee and Showcase campaigns.

You Had a Way with Words

Whether you’re a performing artist, songwriter, or producer, you deserve recognition for your contributions to the music you’ve helped create. That’s where the songwriting hub comes in – for the people who make music happen. Our one-stop shop for resources, opportunities, and creative inspiration helps showcase your work and power your career. Take for instance, our new Songwriter Promo Cards: customizable graphics you can create to promote yourself as a songwriter and highlight the songs you’ve written, allowing for even more exposure of your written works than ever before.

We’ve also seen a significant increase in how often labels and distributors credit songwriters on their new releases – great news in terms of increased visibility for artists, songwriters, and producers alike. Our clickable, in-app song credits on Spotify enable fans, fellow creators, publishers, and music supervisors to dive deeper into the music they love, discovering those who have had a hand in its creation.

You Stayed Curious

On a final note, we have to give credit where credit is due: the fans. Because they’re the ones who make everything happen. We even defined a new segment made up of your very biggest fans: the super listeners. Making up 2% of an artist’s monthly listeners – and accounting for over 18% of monthly streams – these avid listeners couldn’t go unnoticed. In July, we released our newest edition of Fan Study centered around the habits of these diehards and their impact, from buying power (on average, that 2% of your monthly listeners accounts for more than half of your merch purchases), to whether or not they’re in it for the long haul (our sources say yes: over two-thirds of super listeners will still be streaming your music after a six-month stretch.) But super listeners have to start somewhere. We found that after an artist releases new music, artists saw their number of super listeners increase, on average, by over 20%.

Even rapper, singer, songwriter, and producer Russ shared his journey of getting to know his fans on a deeper level. “I’ve tried to dive deeper into my fanbase the bigger I’ve gotten,” he says. “Knowing I have 9% of my fans are super listeners on Spotify, I think it’s a testament to staying connected with my fans.”

Plus, because we believe you should know where your money is coming from (and where it’s going), we released the latest edition of Loud & Clear. One takeaway? In 2022, 10,000+ artists from 100+ countries generated $100,000+ in royalties on Spotify. We’re the only streaming service that makes this level of royalty data available to all artists, and we broke down all the details in our annual study.

We heard from even more of our artist friends throughout the year on season 2 of our Best Advice podcast, kicking things off with Grammy-nominated Maggie Rogers, who offered her thoughts on everything from writer’s block to the pressure to go viral, plus sage words from Mumford & Sons. The jam-packed season also included episodes with Rina Sawayama, Lykki Li, and the legend that is Nile Rodgers, to name a few. With so much incredible guidance from industry vets who graciously showed a more vulnerable side during our intimate episodes, we knew we wanted to share more. In observance of World Mental Health Day, we released a special episode highlighting two season’s worth of artists sharing their experiences and advice around mental health. From rituals to routines, external and internal pressure, and, of course, social media and the internet, we covered it all with guests like Diplo, Larry June, Kim Petras and more.

We sign off our newsletter notes the same way every time: “Thanks for joining us.” And we mean it. This journey is what it is because of what we accomplish together, and we can’t wait to see where we go next.

See you in 2024 — it’s gonna be great!