From 150 To 500,000 Monthly Spotify Listeners Without Playlists
Ari Herstand for Ari's Take

Three years ago the northern Virginia conscious hip hop artist, Lucidious, was struggling to get listeners to his music. He had about 150 monthly listeners on Spotify (no I didn’t forget a zero) with merely 45 followers, about 1,500 followers on Instagram and Facebook. And was making less than $100 a month from his music.

Today, he has 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify (no my finger didn’t get stuck on the zero key), over 50,000 followers on Spotify, 245,000 Likes on Facebook, 100,000 followers on Instagram, he’s getting around 5 million streams a month, has over 100 million total streams across all platforms and is making around $20,000 a month just from his recorded music. 

So how did he do this?

He utilized direct marketing strategies on Facebook and Instagram to find his audience and get them into his world. Specifically, he mastered the Facebook Business and Ads Manager and ran all different kinds of video ads targeting fans of similar artists.

They came pouring into his world and eventually he was getting fans to click his ads at around $.02 per click - putting every marketing expert to shame. Spending about $10 a day, he was pulling in around 500 new fans per day. And because his music is great and his Instagram is engaging, these people who started off as passive observers turned into die hard fans.