How Much Do Meta Ads for Music Cost? What a Stream Cost Me Across 9 Campaigns

The question I get more than any other is "how much should I spend on ads?"

And right behind it: "what does a stream cost?"

When I first looked into ads myself, I could not find anyone who would show their numbers. Plenty of people had a guide, but nobody had a receipt.

So here are mine. Nine song campaigns and four playlist campaigns, with the budget, what I paid per click, and how many streams came out of it.

What I measure, and why it is not "cost per stream"

Meta cannot see what happens on Spotify. It knows someone tapped the ad and landed on the song, and that is where its tracking ends.

So the number I watch every day is the cost per conversion. One conversion is one person who tapped the ad and arrived on the song on Spotify. That person then streams it, saves it, or leaves, and Spotify for Artists shows me the result a day or two later.

The streams come from two places. The people the ads sent, and the algorithmic playlists Spotify puts the song on once enough of those people save it. The second part is where most of the big numbers below come from, and it is the part nobody can promise you.

The nine song campaigns

Each line is the ad budget, the genre, what I paid per conversion, and the streams the song had when I wrote this. The case studies page updates the stream counts every day, so the numbers there are higher by the time you read this.

• $250, Reggaeton: $0.10 per conversion, 13,000+ streams
• $300, Singer-Songwriter: $0.38 per conversion, 5,000+ streams
• $450, Adult Contemporary: $0.65 per conversion, 15,000+ streams, with more than 65% of them from algorithmic playlists
• $500, Progressive House: $0.09 per conversion, 350,000+ streams
• $500, Electro House: $0.32 per conversion, 135,000+ streams
• $500, Tech House: $0.15 per conversion, 72,000+ streams
• $1,000, Soul: $0.47 per conversion, 850,000+ streams, with playlist support from the band's label on top of the ads
• $1,000, Afrobeat: $0.35 per conversion, 95,000+ streams
• $2,000, Indie Pop: $0.33 per conversion, 65,000+ streams

Divide the budget by the streams and you get a cost per stream between a tenth of a cent and six cents. If I leave out the one with label support, the cheapest was the $500 progressive house campaign that ended above 350,000 streams. The most expensive was the $300 singer-songwriter campaign at about six cents a stream.

If I had to give you one number to plan with, it is under three cents a stream. Seven of the nine campaigns landed there, and four of them were under one cent.

Why the range is so wide

Same person running the ads, same setup, same platform, and the results are 50 times apart. Here is what made the difference.

The creative

The $500 progressive house campaign had the cheapest clicks I have ever seen, $0.09 each. The reason was the video. The artist had tested a few song clips on TikTok in the weeks before release, one of them went viral, and that video became the ad. When the ad already works organically, Meta only makes it cheaper.

Algorithmic playlists

The $450 adult contemporary campaign paid the most per click of the whole list, $0.65. It still ended with 15,000+ streams, because more than 65% of them came from Release Radar and Discover Weekly. The ads brought a smaller group of listeners, but enough of them saved the song that Spotify took over.

The genre

In my campaigns, electronic songs have been cheaper to promote than singer-songwriter songs. The three $500 house campaigns paid $0.09, $0.15 and $0.32 per click. The singer-songwriter and adult contemporary ones paid $0.38 and $0.65. I feel like this is partly the audience on Instagram and partly the fact that a drop makes an easy 15-second ad.

Extra support

The 850,000+ stream soul campaign is the outlier, and I want to be honest about why. The band's label had playlist support lined up, and my job was to run ads that complemented it. The first month alone brought over 500,000 streams and 15,000 saves, and almost half of those streams came from algorithmic playlists. Ads alone do not do that.

What to expect from $250, $500 and $1,000

The case studies above are the campaigns that went well. When someone orders a campaign from me, I do not quote them those numbers. I quote what the ads bring on their own, without the algorithm doing the heavy lifting.

• $250: possible, but tight. Meta needs a few days of data before it finds the right people, and $250 does not leave much room after that. The one $250 campaign above worked because the song was cheap to promote from day one. With this budget I would split it between playlist pitching and a small conversion campaign aimed at one cheaper country, the way I lay out in my budget guide.
• $500: around 4,000 to 8,000 streams from the ads, with 30 to 40% of the people who click saving the song. This is the budget most of my clients start with.
• $1,000: around 13,000 to 22,000 streams from the ads. The extra budget also means more creatives to test, which is usually where the cheaper clicks come from.
• $1,500: around 24,000 to 35,000 streams from the ads.

Anything above that comes from the algorithm, and I treat the algorithm as a bonus.

The playlist campaigns

Promoting a playlist instead of a single song is a different game, and honestly a cheaper one. You pay for followers instead of streams, and a follower keeps listening after the ads stop.

• $10 a day, running since October 2025: $0.19 per conversion, 16,500+ followers and 10,000+ email addresses
• $20 a day: $0.10 per conversion, 8,000+ followers and about 30 daily listeners
• $10 a day, running since March 2026: $0.06 per conversion, 5,000+ followers
• $10 a day, running since April 2026: $0.10 per conversion, 1,000+ followers

So a playlist follower has cost me between 6 and 19 cents. When I quote the service I say 15 to 55 cents, because genre changes it a lot and I would rather be surprised in the good direction.

How I run them, so you can compare

If you run your own ads and want to compare your numbers with mine, this is the setup behind every campaign above.

• A conversion campaign, so Meta optimises for people who reach Spotify, which is the only event I care about.
• Instagram only, in Stories, Reels and Feed.
• The ad sends people to Spotify and nowhere else. I want all the impact in one place so the algorithm notices.
• One month per song. The highest daily budget runs from day 3 to day 21.
• Several creatives from the start, and I turn off the ones that cost the most per click.

I recorded the whole system as a course called Label Level Ads. It is 10 lessons of screen shares for $47, and the longest lesson is 44 minutes of me building ad creatives from scratch, because that is where a campaign is won or lost.

And if you would rather hand it over, I run the campaign for you. The service fee starts at $500, the ad spend is separate, and every dollar of it goes to the ads.

Either way, now you have a receipt to compare against.