Understanding The Ladders Method

How many streams would it take to generate $1,000 in Spotify royalties per month?

Answer: 222,222. 

Does that seem like a lot? 

If you had 5K Monthly Listeners generating 222K streams, it breaks down to: 

• 44 streams per Listener each month. 
• 11 streams per Listener each week. 
• 1.5 streams per Listener each day. 

The average American spends over 2 hours per day listening to music. When you isolate music fans, that number shoots up to almost 5 hours per day.  

Humans are creatures of habit. We all have a routine and our routines have a soundtrack. Our morning shower, commute, work, dinner, and romantic time all have soundtracks. Every day people hear the same songs multiple times and multiple songs by the same artists through what I like to call their “Routine Rotation.” 

The Routine Rotation is dictated by a Feedback Loop where the songs users stream most often are fed back to them. To break into a user’s Routine Rotation, an artist must first break into their Feedback Loop. 

For example, my “Liked Songs” playlist is the soundtrack to my routine. It is a master list of all the songs I like. I shower to it, I work to it, I run errands to it. It’s not crazy to say it’s the soundtrack to my life. I have 155 songs on that playlist, but I might spend no more than an hour streaming music during each activity. That makes out to 20 songs a session with 155 songs competing for a slot. When I hit the “Shuffle” button, what decides which one of those 155 songs gets a slot? The Feedback Loop. 

When I stream a song, it establishes a preference for that song. The more often I stream the song, the stronger my preference. The stronger my preference, the more the song is fed back to me by being prioritized in the rotation when I hit “Shuffle” on my Liked Songs playlist. This causes me to stream the song more often resulting in more prioritization. That’s the Feedback Loop. The songs that get recommended to users are the songs from the feedback loops of other users. 

When I add your song to my library, it gets listed but doesn't enter the rotation. To make it into the rotation, the song has to generate streaming activity similar to the tracks already being played regularly.

What I’ve developed is a system that instructs artists on how to drive new listeners and break into the Feedback Loop resulting in cracking listeners’ routine rotation. I call it The Ladders Method where we turn Cold Leads to Warm Leads, and Warm Leads to Hot. 

Here’s how it works and what you can expect to spend to get it to work for you. 

Cold Leads - Music fans with no knowledge of your music 

Warm Leads - Music fans with awareness of your music 

Hot Leads - Music fans that like your music

Here’s our Ad campaign cost breakdown - Note, these are numbers from real campaigns:

• Advertising to Cold Leads: $0.95 per visit to Spotify  | It would cost us $950 for 1,000 Listeners 
• Advertising to Warm Leads - Engaged Audience: $0.40 | It would cost us $400 for 1,000 Listeners 
• Advertising to Hot Leads - Converted Audience: $0.03 | It would cost us $30 for 1,000 Listeners  

By advertising to Hot Leads, a number of things happen. 

1. We dramatically lower our costs 
2. We get the same listeners streaming our songs multiple times 
3. We break into their Feedback Loops
4. We crack their Routine Rotations. 

Here’s what that means for us: 

1,000 Listeners x 40 streams per month = 40K streams. 

That earns us: $180 

2 songs = 80K streams

Earns us: $360 

3 songs = 120K streams

Earns us: $540 

You earn $180 per month per song you push through the system at a one-time cost of $30 for each song. 

Total Budget 

The cost of building an audience of 1,000 Hot Leads ranges from: $700 - $900.

Once you have an audience of Hot Leads, it’ll cost $30 - $60 to drive 1,000 Listeners per song. 

Managed Campaigns Available

Want us to set up and manage the campaign for you? Purchase a Managed Campaign

If you’ve got quality music and a budget of at least $1,500 to invest in advertising, we can help you recoup your investment and put you on a path to earning $1K/Month from streams. 

We'll help you secure funding for your initial investment. Thanks to our partnership with Affirm, you can access a $1,000 advertising budget immediately and pay it off in interest-free monthly installments over a period of up to 24 months with a managed campaign. Learn more