 Okay, I wanted to make a quick video because Spotify has released one of their most powerful tools for music promotion that we've touched on in the past. The marquee feature is finally available to people with any distribution, not just the high tier ones. So in this video, I'm going to have a quick discussion of the marquee tool and if you should consider it for your next release. Hi, I'm Jesse Kennan, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fanbase from 0 to 10,000 fans and this is Muse Formation. Okay, so for those of you who haven't been following, Spotify's marquee feature is probably something you've seen before. You open up Spotify and all of a sudden you're hit with a pop-up that looks like this and it's usually for an artist who you rinsed a record of or a song of at some point. So the reason people are excited about this being rolled out is when you put out that single EP or LP, well, there's never been a more effective way to tell all your fans that you have new music than this, catching them as they go to find some new music to listen to and then this fan gets a button to listen to some music from an artist they already enjoy. I mean, I will say it's really impressive marketing and they have metrics to back it up. They say listeners who see a marquee are two times more likely to save or add your song to their playlist and it doesn't just get them into your new music. There's three times more likely to stream from your older releases too. Now, of course, one of the reasons this tool is a little objectionable to say the least is one would hope a streaming service that is pro artist would just from time to time do this and do you the favor of getting people engaged with their app to do so more for free by just saying, hey, you know that artist you listen to 600 songs of in 60 days two summers ago. Well, they're back with 12 more songs for you to make a questionable shaped stain on your pillowcase ready to alarm all your friends with your binge of their new record and skip tonight's party. Pretty good copy. If I do say so myself, well, you'd think they would do that because it would get people to use their app more. And you know, these apps love user retention, but this is Spotify, a company who would rather you listen to podcasts so they don't have to pay musicians royalties since they lose money when you listen to music and are actively trying to get you to not listen to music as much as possible. Quite the conflict of interest, but we'll be talking about that soon enough in a big way. And of course, they're a corporation who spends money recklessly never with paying artists more in mind and is instead pulled with Facebook pulled many years ago where if you remember, Facebook got users to their platform and they got them all engaging it by using musicians to bring them there. And then once they got them there, they decided to make everybody have to pay to reach the fans that they brought there. And that's what made them this irrelevant place that they are today unless you're trying to communicate with boomers. But here's the facts. A lot of you are on a by any means type mission for your music to get heard. And you just made the most important art of your life and you want the people who previously enjoyed your music to know it exists. And you can't resist this temptation. So if that's the case, let's go over who can use Marquis. First off, it's only launched for those who connect a US bank account to pay for it, and you need to have had over 15,000 streams over the past 28 days. You need a new release where more than 50% of the material is unreleased. And this is going to be an interesting part of this, since the Marquis cements itself as an important part of music marketing. It will limit the endless string of singles due to half the material having to be new. But there is hacks, of course, as you could label things interludes or make hidden tracks that are only available for a limited amount of time when the records first released. But this is also going to keep people from being able to promote that technique everyone's doing now, where when they release a song in a string of singles, they then add it to an album by the name of the latest singles name, and they keep adding all those singles up until they finally release an album. But let's also remember, you could just do it for your single and that negates all of this. There is a limited window where you can do the Marquis that doesn't last forever. You can create campaigns to last up to 18 days after your new release drops, which means you really need to act fact on your release as the window of freshness is small here. It seems like you'd really want to potentially start the day of release and get everything out of it you can by doing it until that 18th day. An interesting detail, and this is one I quote from Spotify. This excludes remixes, compilations, karaoke, sound likes, remasters or re-recordings, which means those of you who are thinking about doing this nonstop to push your songs are out of luck, as they know this will do you value this tool, so they're nipping that in the bud. The other interesting detail is they only allow the main artist on a track to do this and the release can't have more than three main artists. This does mean, though, if there's three main artists on the track, then all three of you could do it to blow up the collaboration. Yet again, this makes collaboration tracks even more powerful. And I know I've been talking about that a lot lately. So you're, of course, wondering what's the cost? According to digital music news, Spotify is charging up to 50 cents per click in order to drive these streams. And it's entirely possible that that's not even the highest rate. This is not great news since Spotify pays artists anywhere between point zero zero three to point zero zero five cents per stream with typically point zero zero five on the higher end. In this payout range, it would take artists anywhere from 100 to 167 streams to break even on just one sponsored click. So the way I see this is only my top, let's say, five to ten songs a year may get that many listens. So you got to see this as a money losing endeavor, for sure, since the odds are totally against you that you're ever going to have those type of metrics for this to pay it back and see this as part of your marketing budget. But there's one thing I've learned from doing this for so long is that so many people will pay thousands of dollars for like Facebook ads that do nothing to build a real fan base. So I'm sure many people will be willing to do this to engage fans who enjoyed their music before in hopes of driving up streams and having them recommended to friends when their relationship becomes reignited with their music. If you do, I'd love to hear from you in the comments on what the results are. Also, I should say you can always dip your toe in this. They have analytics which will show you how much people are clicking through and you could bail out if it's not working for you. OK, on the screen now is a video on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans or one on how to blow up on Spotify or another one on how to blow up on TikTok. Click and keep learning. Thanks for watching.