What Artists Should Know About Southworth Media

Southworth Media as in Andrew Southworth? Yes.

If you don’t already subscribe to Andrew’s YouTube channel, you definitely should. It’s basically what I do here but in video format, with new content every week instead of every… whenever I find the time.

When Andrew offered to let me kick the tires on his new service, I of course said yes. He gifted me a Spotify Growth Ads campaign with an ad spend of $1000 for the purpose of this review, to promote my new-at-the-time single “Where Tigers Are Said to Roam.”

Color Theory · Where Tigers Are Said to Roam

This isn’t a playlist pitching service, so we don’t have to worry about fake streams and bots and all that nonsense. There’s zero risk of streaming fraud.

Instead, Southworth Media runs Facebook and Instagram ads on your behalf, on their own ad accounts with their own pixels and smart links and landing pages.

Best of all, they create compelling ads specifically for your track, from scratch. I have to imagine that’s most of what we’re paying for.

To get started, select your budget and provide some basic info:

When your campaign gets approved, they’ll charge your credit card and you’ll get an email asking for read-only Spotify for Artists access, to help them optimize the campaign and provide accurate reporting.

You’re kept in the loop every step of the way. First, a “preparing creatives” email (above), then “your campaign is launching shortly,” and finally, “your campaign is live!”

You can track the minute-by-minute progress of your campaign in two places: your very own custom dashboard, and on Feature.fm.

Both of those links are live as of this writing, so feel free to explore my results for yourself! To see the full campaign, set the date range to January 9 through February 6, 2025.

Things got off to a slow start, with the cost per conversion (a click from the landing page to a streaming service) dipping below $0.40 before rising.

Out of the dozen(!) ads they created, this synthwave-themed one performed the best:

But when I saw the cost per conversion rise to $0.58, I knew I could beat that with the video I’d been using to promote my Vocal Synthwave Retrowave playlist:

I was right! I sent them the video and it sucked up most of the ad spend, getting us all the way down to $0.25 per conversion:

At nearly the halfway point, they could’ve easily just rode it out and left well enough alone. Instead, they made more videos!

Ultimately they were able to beat my video with this one, showcasing the similar artists I listed on the signup form, along with one I’m not sure I recognize. Is that George Micheal? Bono?

Andrew graciously sent me the video without text and I’ve since repurposed it for my playlist ads, with fantastic results!

When all was said and done, we ended up with 4110 conversions at an average cost of $0.24.

The cost per conversion got as low as $0.13 towards the end when they pivoted towards tier 2 countries, mainly Brazil and Mexico. Overall, 80% of the budget was devoted to tier 1 countries.

Here’s a more visually compelling take from Feature.fm, in case you don’t know your two-letter abbreviations:

Next up in my dashboard, we have a breakdown of all the ad sets. Their names tell you pretty much all you need to know.

For example:

HP – IG – Synthwave Group (Brian Visual) – $5 Min

HP = high-paying countries i.e. the ones that pay high royalty rates, mostly tier 1IG = InstagramSynthwave Group = targeting synthwave-ish artists/bandsBrian Visual = the video I provided$5 Min = $5 minimum ad spend to ensure that Meta actually runs the ad rather than relying on the previous winner

I bet you want to see that John Wick ad?

Next up is a gallery of all the ads:

When you click on one of them, it takes you to Meta’s ad sharing page, where you can right-click to download the video. Which is how I’m able to showcase them here!

Let’s see… dudes 45-54. Yep, that’s my audience! Placements were predominantly Instagram Reels and Instagram Feed.

If you’d rather leave the high-level analysis to them, you’re in luck. In addition to the data reported above, they also prepare a Week 2 Report and a Final Report, coupled with a detailed glossary.

Both reports include holistic explanations of data from both Meta and Spotify for Artists.

Final Report (click to enlarge)

If you want to read the whole thing, it’s easiest to just go to my dashboard.

Andrew always says that most streams occur after the campaign ends, and that will certainly be the case here:

At almost two months post-release, I’m at 42K streams, but of course I can’t attribute those streams entirely to this campaign.

And that’s just Spotify. A non-negligible percentage of conversions were to Apple Music:

Which generated some indeterminate portion of these results:

All in all, I’m very pleased with the results of my campaign and have already recommended the service to friends.

Could I have beat the average $0.24 cost per conversion myself? Probably not, because I would’ve stuck with the “good enough” performer I’d already created.

Until recently, I was convinced that my little cover art ads were “good enough.” After all, people were hearing the song, and that’s what’s important, right?

Now it’s beyond obvious that the quality of your creatives matters, a lot. I’ve gotten pretty good at making video ads in Canva these past few months, but I simply don’t have the editing chops to put together the concert footage video that ended up being the top performer.

If you’re in the same boat and running Facebook and Instagram ads anyway, it’s possible you could save money by enlisting a service like Southworth Media. Especially since you’re given the option to continue the campaign, presumably indefinitely.

If you’d like to try a Spotify Growth Ads campaign, or any campaign Southworth Media offers, you can get 5% off using discount code PassivePromotion here.

Be sure to share your thoughts on results in the comments!