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I was at a bit of a loss as to how to actually get people to listen to my first release, Time will break all our hearts.

The day after I set up an artist Instagram page, half my Instagram feed was “Are you an artist trying to blow up on Spotify,” and “Here’s how to market yourself as an artist from a former Sony exec,” etc etc etc.

Most of them feel super shady and too get-rich-quick. I’m not interested in losing even more to the extremely not-profitable music business. I legitimately just want to share my music and have it heard. Money would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.

The ones that have seemed most legitimate so far are Jesse Cannon and Magic Nothing. I got targeted for Magic Nothing’s Meta Conversion Campaign post and decided to give it a try.

It was a frustrating day or two, but at least it was only a day or two.

1. Create your ad/s

Before you dive into the meta ad creation process, I’d recommend having your ad ready. It should be 15 seconds long and in the vertical format to target stories and reels. If you want to be more versatile for more placements, allow it to crop to square too.

Ideally, take your assets and create a couple variations. Use different arrangements or parts of the song.

2. Have a Facebook Page

To run your ad on Facebook, you also have to have a Facebook page for your account.

3. Have an Instagram Profile

You also need an Instagram profile. This is, probably naïvely, the only one I really care about. I want you to follow me on Instagram because that’s what I use.

4. Create a playlist for your track

Here’s the process:

1. Give your playlist a name that references your track and why it’s not weird you sent them to a playlist instead of a track. I went with, “Time will break all our hearts – maybe so – emotive indie folk inspo“. Feel free to steal the format: [song title] – [band name] [descriptor] [genre] inspo.
2. Upload your album cover as the playlist image.
3. Make a playlist of all the songs similar to yours that you want to be associated with. If you’re not sure what to pick, start with a few tracks you think are similar. Go to the radio for the track and look for more. It’s no longer updated as of a year or two ago, but everynoise is also helpful for finding similar artists and genres.

5. Create your landing page

1. Create an account with SubmitHub
2. Go to their Free Tools
3. Click Links
4. Add a Link
5. Use your Spotify Playlist link
6. Edit your landing page title and description if you want. I used my song title for the title and a little blurb that mentioned my band name in the description and the reason for the playlist.
7. Change the landing page image to your album/track image if you didn’t use it as your playlist image.

6. Set-up your Meta Ads Manager account

This one was the most annoying part for me. I ran into so many roadblocks of accounts not being able to be linked, not being allowed to use one account as an admin for another, not having the right pages or permissions, being flagged as a bot, credit card decline issues. It was a huge mess.

What ended up working in the end was creating a new Business for my project then assigning my personal Facebook page as an admin for it. Then creating the ads on my personal account. This was probably a bad idea, but I tried several things and they kept not working. Using my personal account was the only one that did. Now the ads are assigned to my personal account and not at all with the Business account for maybe so. *deep shrug*

This is the instructions for creating a Spotify Campaign, but you can adjust as you see fit.

Set-up your Meta Ads account and Pixel Tracking

1. Go to Meta Ads Manager
2. Somehow create an account and be allowed to use your Facebook page and Instagram page for ads. Godspeed.
3. Create your Meta Ad Pixel. It’s a bit detailed. Use SubmitHub’s instructions under the title Meta Pixel Creation. There’s a bunch of helpful info on that page. It’s a great resource!
4. Link the Pixel to your SubmitHub landing page.

Create a Custom Conversion Event

It’s helpful to have the Meta Ad Pixel extension for this.

1. Go to the Events Manager > Custom Conversions
2. Create Custom Conversion
3. Name it Spotify Open
4. Event: View Content
5. Rules: Event Parameter content_type contains open.spotify.com

Anytime someone clicks a Spotify link from your landing page, that event should get counted.

Now, test it to make sure it works and gets activated:

1. Go to Events Manager > Data Sources
2. Select the event you just created
3. Select the Test Event tab
4. In the Test Browser events section, add your landing page link
5. Click the Test Events button
6. Click your playlist Spotify link on the landing page
7. Go make coffee or do something else for 15 minutes because it takes forever to read the event
8. Hope the event you’re after fired and logged correctly
9. If it worked, you can go back to the Events Manager > Custom Conversions page and see if the Custom Conversion you created is reported as Active. If it is, go on to create your campaign.

Create your campaign

1. Create a new campaign and call it your track name.
2. Set the Campaign Objective as “Engagement”

Create the first

1. Create your ad set. What I saw was to have Tiered ad sets based on location which equates to cost to serve the ad.
2. Name the first one “Tier 1: Spotify, Exclude Interactors”
3. Set your Performance Goal as Maximize Conversions
4. Set the Dataset as your Pixel name
5. Set the Conversion Event as your now activated Custom Conversion event.
6. Create your audience set using the Tier 1 list below with the bulk add option in the Audience location section.
7. Add an exclusion for anyone who has interacted with your account, if you want. I was getting annoyed that it kept showing me and my partner my ad. I wanted to expand my reach, not target people who already knew me.
8. Add your targeted interests. Mine were Folk Rock, Indie Folk, Emo, and Sufjan Stevens. I’m not sure if this was a good idea or how to best target. Hopefully Facebook will figure that one out for me.
9. Add another inclusion for must also match Spotify. We only want Spotify users for this ad.
10. Select your Placements. I just wanted Instagram, so I selected the ones on Instagram that matched the video format I wanted. I just did Instagram feed, Explore, stories and reels. Maybe I should have done Facebook too, but I was tired of the initial ad campaigns targeting Facebook over 65 users. For real, it was like 90% targeting that for some reason.

Create your ad

• Set your identities as your Facebook and instagram pages.
• Under Ad setup, choose Create ad
• Creative source: Manual upload
• Format: Single image or video
• De-select Multi-advertiser ads
• In Destination,put your submithub landing page URL in the Website URL field
• If you have a website, you can set your display link as your website. It doesn’t seem to matter, and looks better than it saying “submithub.com.” This is only relevant for some ad formats.
• Upload your media.
• Set some variations of your text and titles.
• Call to action: Listen now
• Under Tracking, choose Website events and select the Pixel you created earlier.
• Publish it!

Create more Ads

Create a few more Ad variations under your Tier 1 ad. Mix it up! Do something different and see what works. Or don’t. I honestly don’t know if it’s worth it. Facebook will choose whichever one seems to perform better, I guess.

Create your Tier 2 and 3 Ad Sets

• Duplicate your Tier 1 Ad set using one of the various ways they provide
• Rename one to Tier 2 and one to Tier 3
• Change out the audience for the Ad set to those countries. I couldn’t find a good way to do this other than one-by-one deleting the countries then bulk adding. Maybe there’s a page to create and name them? Probably!

Publish it!

I think that’s it. Then wait like 2 – 5 hours for Facebook to review and activate it. Hopefully it’ll all work! It took me like 8 tries over several days to arrive at this process, so, best of luck!

Appendix: Country Tiers

These are not rankings of countries by better or worse. These are tiered by cost to serve ads. Tier 1 countries cost more to serve ads than Tier 3, I guess.

Tier 1

Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, United States

Tier 2

Brazil, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Iceland, Luxembourg, Latvia, Monaco, Malta, Mexico, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Italy, South Africa

Tier 3

Andorra, United Arab Emirates, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Belarus, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Israel, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Macedonia, Panama, Qatar, Romania, Serbia, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Thailand

I tried both Groover.co and SubmitHub for playlist submissions to promote my first maybe so release, Time will break all our hearts.

Groover

I initially chose Groover just because I had seen a paid endorsement from Jesse Cannon‘s newsletter. He seems very legit in the music promotion landscape and I’ve learned a lot from his content.

Submission process

I paid $50 (it seemed to be their lowest tier) to submit my song to 18 playlists. It was difficult to filter or narrow down the playlists to something I wanted. For example, I wanted to be able to filter by playlists that include X artist or is looking for artists that sound like X. It took quite awhile of clicking through to find any playlists that sounded like an aesthetic that matched mine.

Responses

They give curators one week to respond. So far I’ve received 2 shares and 3 rejections. One was a playlist, and one was a generic blog post that felt pretty AI written.

I’ve received a few plays so far from their playlist New Acoustic and Indie Folk 2025. It’s mostly unheard-of-to-me bands (like mine!) but there are a few bigger names near the end like Phoebe Bridgers and Deathcab for Cutie.

The rejections I got were generic and unhelpful. No actionable feedback. Mostly just a template like, “[nice thing to say], but [reason why it doesn’t fit the aesthetic of their playlist].”

To be fair, I did get lazy by the end because I was tired of looking through playlists that weren’t a good match. The sorting system is non-specific enough it makes it difficult to find a good match. If none of these playlists respond, my submissions credits will probably sit unused til another release.

SubmitHub

I arrived at SubmitHub after being very frustrated with Facebook’s Meta Pixel WordPress connection. It was one roadblock after another to get everything set-up, and I eventually abandoned it after finding SubmitHub’s free link tool where you can add an auto-generated list of links to your track, playlist, etc.

It’s an old-school form and easy to use. I love it. It does what it needs to, and does it easily. There’s basic analytics like visitor location and what they clicked on. You can edit the title, description, and image. There’s a place to copy/paste your meta pixel ad tracking. And it looks good! It’s everything I needed for promotion. I’ll definitely be using it more.

They also had detailed set-up instructions for custom conversions with meta ads. So much of the content for meta ad set-up is in YouTube, but I’d soooo much rather skim text than search through a 40 minute on 2x speed for the info I want.

Submission process

After seeing how nice their free link tool was, I figured I should pay them and try out their submission process.

They allowed me to sort by playlists with a certain artist, and seem to vet their playlist curators more. SubmitHub’s site is a bit more antiquated, but it feels like it was created by someone with a lot of knowledge who genuinely cares about making it easy for artists to connect to the resources they need to promote their songs.

They allow you to start submitting for $10, have higher quality vetting, and the response times are lower. I’ve been accepted to one playlist, Indie Nights/Sleep Well, and it’s of much higher quality and includes a lot more big name artists. I thought I’d get put on the Indie Folk playlist if I got accepted, but I’ll take it.

Next time

I’m going to rely on SubmitHub from now on. Their product is easier to use and more tailored to a small artist trying to get promotions for their work. It feels more authentic and less predatory/trying to make a buck than Groover.