How to Run Meta Ads for a Single, an EP or an Album: What I'd Do in Each Case

Do you run one campaign for your whole album, or one for every song on it?

That question keeps showing up in my inbox lately, in four different shapes.

Some artists have one song coming out. Some have a full EP or album. Some want to release song by song first and put the album out at the end. And some aren't releasing anything at all, they just want more people listening to what's already up there.

The ads look different in every one of those cases, and I want to show you exactly what I'd run.

I'm talking only about ads here, so put the pitching and the content plan aside for a minute and follow the money.

1. One song coming out

Start with $500, and spend all of it in tier 2 countries.

Tier 2 is Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, places where a listener costs a fraction of what the same listener costs in the US or the UK.

With $500 you can buy a few expensive listeners or a lot of cheap ones, and Spotify looks at what those people do, not at where they're from.

If the song works for a Spanish speaking audience, run the same creative in English and in Spanish and let the ad account choose the winner.

Grayson started by running a $500 campaign on his song "Days Like This", and it's past 350,000 streams now, at 9 cents per conversion. You can see the whole campaign on my case studies page.

2. An EP or album coming out

Pick the song you're pitching through Spotify for Artists, because that's the one the algorithm will push.

That song gets treated exactly like a single release.

The rest of the songs don't need campaigns of their own. They need the people who found the pitched song to keep going past it.

And start a vibe playlist as early as you can.

A vibe playlist is one you own, built around the mood of your music, with your songs sitting next to artists that sound like you.

Grown with ads, it keeps sending streams to the whole album long after release week, and that repeat listening is what makes the algorithm help you. If you'd rather not build it yourself, I also build and grow the playlist for you.

3. Song by song, and then the album

This is where the waterfall comes in.

Song one goes out on its own. When song two comes out, you put song one on the same release, then song three comes with one and two, all the way to the album.

Every new release pulls the older songs back in front of new listeners instead of leaving them behind.

Each of those gets its own campaign, exactly like a single, and the album at the end gets the bigger push.

The playlist advice is the same here, and it matters even more, because you'll have months of releases feeding it.

Want to see what these budgets look like when the campaign works? Every one I've run is on the case studies page, with the budget, the streams and the cost per listener next to each one.

They go from $250 to $2,000. (And yes, those are my good ones. Nobody puts the average campaign on a page like that.)

4. Nothing coming out, you just want the catalog to grow

This is my favorite one, and the one almost nobody asks me about.

Build a "This Is [Your Name]" playlist and grow it with ads in tier 1 countries.

You'll pay more per follower in the US, UK, Canada or Australia, and you'll get someone who comes back instead of listening once.

Every song you already released gets played again, people get to know your name, and your next single starts with an audience instead of starting from zero.

For growing a catalog, that's the best return I know of.

So which one is you?

I can't give you your plan in an article, because it depends on your release date, your genre and what you're able to spend.

If you have something coming out in the next few months, that's the exact thing I do inside Release Like a Label. You tell me what's coming and when, and I tell you where every dollar goes.