1 Million Streams on New Album in 6 Months for Independent CHRISTIAN Artist
CLIENT:
OVERVIEW:
Zahna has been grinding for years, and before coming to us already had a very strong and passionate fanbase built. She and her team had released previous albums via labels that - in the end - only ended up letting them down. Confident in their ability to sell themselves, Zahna and her team needed help with planning and executing their release. More than just marketing, our team helped Zahna plan and strategize the release of her album “Stronger Than Death”, which included a little bit of everything that we offer as an agency.
DIFFICULTIES:
Zahna is a passionate artist… and even beyond passion, her faith is a large part of what inspires her music. Our largest difficulty was taking in all of the history Zahna had written on her journey, and wrapping it into a story that aligned with her beliefs, and could serve to propel the album forward once we began marketing the release. We wanted to target both religious and secular outlets, and as a result needed to ensure the story and meaning behind the album was something that could appeal to anyone.
OUR PROCESS:
Timeline Optimization: Knowing that we were working on a full-length album, the first step we took was to sit down with Zahna and plan out what the entirety of the campaign looked like. We started the campaign right around the end of the year, and knowing that the “industry break” (from mid December to mid January) would impact results, we were able to plan a series of singles leading into the overall album announcement.
Audience Organization & Segmentation: Because of Zahna’s long history of developing her brand and fanbase, we didn’t have to put a lot of time into researching her ideal audience… instead we focused our efforts on organizing the wealth of data that was already available to us. That included segmenting her email list, and creating various audiences of differing engagement levels within the Meta Ads platform.
Campaign - New Single: Our first campaign to lead up to the full album was a new single. We started by marketing the release heavily both to Spotify, and to Zahna’s existing fanbase, and began the slow and steady process of spiking the algorithm with positive engagement signals.
Campaign - Album Pre-Order: The second phase in our campaign was launching the pre-order campaign. We took a dual paid & organic approach to pushing the pre-orders; Zahna created tons of content on her end to push sales, and we utilized a mix of paid conversions on the content she made with content of our own to push sales directly on the website.
Campaign - Press Outreach: For this campaign, we also added on a PR component where we took Zahna’s story, and the strong story behind the album as a whole, and spread it to our press contacts, landing multiple interviews and reviews over the course of the entire campaign.
RESULTS:
Zahna’s album “Stronger Than Death” released on February 10th, 2023, landing multiple Spotify Editorial placements, in addition to dozens of press reactions and shares, and playlist adds. The positive growth from single to single combined with the overall impact of the full album launch pushed both single and non-single tracks heavily into Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Radio algorithmic playlists…. where they remain even a year later.
Writing this now, a year after we first started our campaign, Zahna has seen:
Listeners up 159% (started at 12k > currently ~35k)
Streams up 221%
Streams Per Listeners up 23%
Saves up 312%
Playlist Adds up 224%
Over 1 Million streams on the album
That’s not to mention the more tangible results: festivals, tours, radio airplay, and enough ROI (return on investment) to fund another album in the not-too-distant future.
READY TO GET STARTED ON YOUR CAMPAIGN?
Send us an email and let’s get to work!
