Marquee and Showcase are Spotify’s internal advertising tools. Artists can activate campaigns from within their Spotify for Artists accounts and target them to their current listeners and an audience of potential listeners. The ads are shown to users both free and paid. Marquee ads are for promoting new releases. Showcase ads are for past releases. Effectively, Showcase ads and Marquee do the same thing. The only difference is the songs you can advertise.
Spotify’s Ad Studio is a self-serve advertising platform similar to Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager. One of the key differences between Spotify Ad Studio ads and Marquee/Showcase ads is that Ad Studio ads exclusively show to users on the ad-supported tier.
Here we’ll compare Spotify’s advertising options to what artists commonly use to drive traffic to their music on Spotify; Facebook ads.
Objectives & Optimization
Objective
You have objectives and optimization. The Objective is your goal. It’s what you want the ad to do.
Optimization
Optimization is the ad improving its ability to achieve the Objective — or to find people likely to achieve it. If the goal is getting people to stream your music on Spotify, optimization means the ad finds people likely to stream the music on Spotify.
You can set a Spotify campaign to drive streams as your objective. The ads will be optimized to find users most likely to click through and stream your music.
Facebook Ads, on the other hand, can only have an Objective of clicks. That’s it—a click to a Release link or Smart Link (whatever you want to call it), or a click to a streaming platform. That’s all Facebook understands. That’s all it knows is happening.
Spotify knows when somebody streams your music, saves it to their library, or playlists it. The ad can be optimized to drive those actions.
Facebook can only be optimized for clicks because Facebook does not know what a user does once they get to Spotify. It doesn’t know if they listened to the music or skipped the song within the first 30 seconds. It doesn’t know if they saved the song to their library. It has no idea.
You could advertise on Facebook and get a whole bunch of people who click the link to stream your song, but skip it in the first 30 seconds — A Negative action that will have Negative impacts on your song on Spotify. Facebook will look at it and see, “Oh, these are the people that are clicking. We need to find more people like them” and show your ad to more users the ones skipping. Consequently, your song will get a steady stream of listeners skipping within the first 30 seconds reinforcing poor performance.
Spotify wants users to value the platform—and that’s measured by how long users stay. Skips are a red flag. They signal a poor experience, and if too many users aren’t enjoying what they hear, they’re more likely to bounce. That hurts Spotify’s bottom line—less time on-platform means fewer ads served and more canceled subscriptions. So, songs that get skipped quickly don’t just get ignored by the algorithm... they get actively suppressed. Spotify has no reason to promote music that drives users away.
Traffic to Spotify from Facebook is far more likely to result in skips than internal traffic from a Spotify ad.
Attention
On Spotify, you have a captive audience. There isn’t anything that your ad is competing with. Somebody’s listening to music, the music stops, and then your ad plays. The only thing the user hears is your song.
On Facebook, you're competing with other content in the feed. You have to fight and create visually appealing content that draws attention away from everything else and toward your media to get people to notice. Note, that we’re not talking about getting users to take action, but just to get noticed. It’s more of a fight on Facebook because you’re dealing with a distracted audience. Getting attention is harder.
Spotify has a captive audience, you already have their attention. With Spotify, it’s about how the person feels about what they’re hearing.
How You’re Charged
On both platforms, you get charged every time the ad appears. Every time somebody sees the ad or it appears in their feed, you’re charged. And that means that attention becomes critical. If people are scrolling past your content on Facebook, you're getting charged every time they do. You’re paying to be ignored.
Your song is heard anytime your ad appears on Spotify using Ad Studio. This means you waste less money because even if you don’t get what would count as streams, your song still gets exposure. Marquee and Showcase ads are PPC (Pay-Per-Click) formats. You only pay when users click to listen.
Targeting
Spotify Ads allow you to target a niche. You could drill down and target Underground artists with small but significant followings. If you’ve got a niche market like Nerdcore or something similar, you can target the artists in that niche on Spotify. Marquee and Showcase ads have predetermined targeting. The ads are shown to your current listeners and those Spotify has identified as likely to enjoy your music.
Artists that haven’t reached the level where they’ve performed at the Grammys, likely can’t be targeted on Facebook. You can only target broad—massively popular artists that essentially blend into Pop Music.
With Facebook, you’re always targeting the Pop audience, no matter the genre, because you can only target artists if they’ve achieved critical mass and become Popstars. Consequently, you don’t reach listeners who are fans of your genre. They won’t have the artists in their library that would lead to recommendations and impactful algorithmic infiltration.
Engagement
Engagement is about the user’s ability to take action: to like, share, comment, or do whatever your desired action is. If your goal is to get people to stream your music, how likely is that to happen?
On Spotify, you may have a captive audience in terms of attention, but engagement is another story. Spotify is passive listening. The user might be sleeping, driving, working out—doing things where they aren’t actively engaging with their phone. When your ad comes on, they’re less likely to be able to respond. They can’t click the link to stream your song because they’re on a treadmill or doing something else.
Engagement is less of a problem with Marquee and Showcase ads because they’re optimized to be shown to users when they’re engaging with the screen. These are visual ads, banners of your cover art, programmed to appear when users pause the music, skip, etc. Voice activations make this less effective because users can shout commands to Siri without engaging with the screen.
Facebook, users are actively staring at the screen. If you get their attention, they can click and stream your music. You’re more likely to get an immediate response because their thumb is right there.
On Spotify, someone would have to stop, get off the treadmill, walk over to their phone, and act within 30 seconds before the ad ends. Ad Studio ads in this instance could become really expensive. Marquee and Showcase ads aren’t impacted because they’re PPC. You only pay when the user clicks.
Who you reach
With Spotify Ad Studio, your ad only shows to Ad-supported users. Ad-supported users cannot stream music on demand—even if they love it.
Advertising through Spotify Ad Studio an Ad-supported user hears your ad and clicks to stream your song—they’ll be forced to sit through ads and may end up hearing someone else’s song instead of yours. This means you could be paying to advertise someone else’s music.
Ad-supported users cannot stream music on-demand only playlists on shuffle. Sending an Ad-supported user to stream a single is likely to result in Spotify redirecting them to an algorithmic playlist in shuffle mode. Recently, Spotify has permitted Ad-supported users who reach a track’s page through an external link to stream once on-demand, great in the short term but doesn’t change the long-term outcome. Ad-supported users still don’t have the same flexibility to listen to your music repeatedly as premium users would.
Facebook ads expose you to all users—not just Spotify users, but people in general. You reach the users of all streaming platforms, including those that don’t use any platform, Ad-supported users, Premium users, etc.
If someone clicks your ad and they’re a Premium user on Spotify, they can stream your music whenever they want—as many times as they want. You'll get more streams from a Premium user than an Ad-supported user. This gives Facebook ads the appearance of outperforming Spotify Ad Studio ads.
Facebook has no advantage over Marquee and Showcase ads because they’re shown to both Ad-Supported and Premium subscribers.
Exposure
With Spotify Ad Studio ads, if your ad is shown to 10,000 people, 10,000 people hear a clip of your song. If it’s a Marquee or Showcase ad, they see your cover artwork, and if they don’t click to listen, no harm no foul because you’re not charged anything.
With Facebook, if your ad is shown to 10,000 people, maybe 50% (or even just 10%) might have had your video play for at least 3 seconds, which doesn’t mean they heard your song. Facebook ads auto-play on mute. When it comes to Facebook users listening to a full 30-second clip, you might be talking about 20% of viewers on the high end and lower than 5% on the low end.
Impact - Spotify Ads
Long Term Streaming activity
Free users are likely to Playlist and save your song to their Library because that’s the only way they’ll be allowed to engage with it. You won’t get immediate streams but it may result in sustained streaming activity from your song periodically popping up in their rotations.
Marquee and Showcase ads are highly targeted and can be profoundly impactful. Everyone you reach is a Spotify user and the ads are optimized to find those that repeatedly stream, save, and playlist. Spotify tracks users who have engaged with your ad long-term and informs you of their level of engagement. You can see they became Super Listeners or fell off a cliff.
Spotify’s Free to Paid User Conversion
Free users become paid users. Spotify is very effective at converting free users to Premium users. Just because someone is on the free tier now, doesn’t mean they always will be.
Reach Passionate Music Fans
Spotify has users with a high level of passion for music. Everybody listens to music, but everybody isn’t a music fan. That’s why most people don’t use any streaming platform, free or paid. Someone who uses Spotify is far more likely to be an active music fan.
A Spotify playlist owned by the creator of Napster, Sean Parker, played a significant role in popularizing the song Royals by the artist Lord. After being placed on the playlist, the song hit Spotify’s Viral charts and became ubiquitous. Radio stations had it in heavy rotation. I could sit on my stoop and hear the song 20 times from cars passing by.
Ability to Micro Target
Micro-targeting means reaching the type of fans you need to reach to give your music its best chance at success.
Being able to target niche audiences means being able to reconnect with listeners through ads. Smaller audiences mean greater frequency where they’ll likely see the same ad multiple times. If you advertise a new song to the same artist’s fanbase, you’d likely reach the same people and build familiarity with that audience.
Impact - Facebook Ads
Greater Potential For Virality
Facebook is a mixed-media platform. There’s more for users to respond to: visuals, messaging, video/audio, and social proof - seeing that others have Liked, watched, and Shared. An artist isn’t entirely dependent on how users feel about the song. Sharing is native to the platform and far more likely to happen than on a platform like Spotify.
Bottom Line
An argument can be made for using Facebook ads over Spotify Ad Studio, but not Marquee and Showcase. In the case of Spotify Ad Studio, despite the lack of engagement, artists would get more exposure. An artist’s music would get heard by more people. I can see an artist not being happy with the result of that if listeners aren’t moved by the song enough to take any further action. At the same time, if a song doesn’t inspire listeners it’s an uphill battle.
There is no argument for Facebook ads over Marquee and Showcase outside of the ability to promote multi-media content. If an artist wants to showcase visuals that’s not something suited for Marquee and Showcase. If it’s about getting the music heard, Facebook doesn’t compare.
