Junglepussy’s Spotify through the eyes of a marketer
Best practices for optimizing Spotify for branding & communications
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This is a look at an artist’s Spotify profile through the eyes of a music marketer.
Hopefully, this gives you:
- Tips for optimizing your own Spotify page for improvements in branding, comms and sales
- Insight into a marketer’s mind when releasing records
It’s short and practical.
Artist: Junglepussy
Junglepussy is an American rapper and actress from NYC. She released her 4th LP, JP4 on October 23rd, 2020.
Disclaimer: I don’t work with Junglepussy, rather just a fan of her work.
Spotify scorecard 3/7
Scorecard optimizations →
1) INCREASE MEMORABILITY WITH UP TO 20 IMAGES
Humans’ visual memory is far more powerful than our audible one. It’s why the music video is such a powerful marketing driver — people’s ability to remember the artist/song is greater than purely hearing the track over the radio or in a playlist. It’s also why compelling visuals that stand out from contemporaries are so important.
Visuals help the memorability of an artist/song.
Spotify’s image gallery is a way to place visuals in front of a listener. You can upload up to 125 images in the image gallery.
An artist with such striking visuals as Junglepussy would benefit from building a bigger image gallery. I recommend clients do 15–20 to build their visual world.
Junglepussy has 2.
2) STRIKE “I NEED TO KNOW MORE” WITH A BIO THAT PEOPLE WANT TO READ
Junglepussy doesn’t include a proper bio. That said, the bio section is something most get wrong.
People read web pages differently than a writer receives bios. Most artists upload their official bio — all 200 words in paragraph slabs of text. The official bio is a tool for writers who cover you to ensure they’re quoting accurately.
Your Spotify audience scan web pages, rather than read them in detail like a writer would. Work with this rather than fight it.
The bio is a branding area to show your tone of voice. Write something that makes people want to click for more or stream.
For example, Cuco’s nonsensical bio uses humor to encourage people to read it.
Bhad Bhabie leans into her shtik to let people just discovering her what she’s about.
Keep bio’s short and employ line breaks to increase legibility. Inject your tone of voice to reinforce the aesthetic.
3) SOLIDIFY POSITIONING THROUGH ARTIST PLAYLISTS
Artist playlists are a branding touchpoint that guide new listeners to what world they associate you with. This is helpful when you’re making a change in sonic direction or feel people don’t understand what you’re about.
For example, If you make pop music however, early on in your career were doing folk-style covers on YouTube, booked a few folk festivals and now keep getting lump in the category of folk and miss opportunities to broaden your audience and opportunities Artist Playlists are a useful tool to correct positioning errors in industry and audience at large.
Another way to do this is by choosing the collaborators and features you work with, however, when that’s not an option building an artist playlist is far more accessible way to build associations.
French electronic artist, Petit Biscuit keeps “my late night jam” playlist of his inspirations/favorite songs. An indication to people just discovering him of his tastes, interests.
Compare that to Princess Nokia’s favorite songs list and you know without having to listen to any music, what you could expect from their music.
4) INCREASE REVENUE WITH MERCH
Spotify displays 3 products for sale through their partnership with Merchbar including vinyl. At the time of writing, Junglepussy does not have any products for sale, which may be an issue getting on Merchbar as there’s been reports of non-answer customer service and months waiting to get set up on platform.
Merch displays on Spotify profile like this:
5) GROW DIGITAL AUDIENCE BY CONNECTING SOCIALS
Encourage people discovering music to enter further into your audience funnel by connecting social media and wiki accounts. This shows up when people navigate to the “about” section.
At the time of writing, Junglepussy has not connected social accounts despite having a sizable social audience (IG: 155K and Twitter: 50K as of November 2020)
Strengths of Junglepussy’s Spotify profile
✔ INCREASES STREAMS BY BUILDING FOLLOWERS
Junglepussy’s follower to monthly listener ratio is 1:5, which is very healthy for an artist her size. I wrote about this in a previous post.
Spotify encourages artists to get their social media followers and fans follow their Spotify artist page to participate in algorithmically generated playlists, i.e.: Release Radar.
From Spotify’s blog…
Encourage your listeners to follow you on Spotify so they can hear your new release on their personalized Release Radar playlist. The way our playlist system works means that if you have 100,000 followers on Spotify, you’ll automatically be featured on 100,000 playlists the week of your release. Not bad, right?
Further, followers unlocks other marketing tools from Spotify like the emails or home screen notifications they send for concert recommendations.
Spotify sends concert recommendations to the following.
- Followers: People who follow you on Spotify.
- Listeners: People who have played your music in the past 30 days.
- People we think might like you: People who listen to similar artists.
According to Spotify…
Guess what: We’ve found that these emails really work. Clickthrough rates are about five times higher than the music industry average. Not bad.
Also, your followers get special treatment. In addition to the emails, we send your upcoming concerts to the homescreen of their Spotify app. Your tour dates also show up in their concerts page, which features a list of upcoming concerts in their area. Everyone has their own personalized concerts page, based on listener behavior.
✔ DRIVES INTEREST IN PRIORITY PROJECTS VIA ARTIST PICK
Artists picks provide a channel to focus promotions. For Junglepussy, she’s promoting her new album, JP4 therefore is the artist pick.
Since the same content occupies the same real estate on the profile, in the ‘Latest Release’ slot, she could use Artist Pick slate to push other marketing priorities, i.e.: playlist to grow or merch to buy.
✔ INCREASES MEMORABILITY THROUGH CANVAS ART
Spotify has been pushing this feature for a while — gifs in place of static artwork claiming it aids streaming results.
So far, data indicates that with the right, compelling content, Canvas has the potential to significantly increase track streams, track shares, and artist page visits.
Adding a high-quality Canvas to a track has increased streams by up to 120% and saves by up to 114%, in addition to lifts in artist profile visits and shares.
From Spotify
I’m not totally convinced by it.
For starters, are they comparing priority single that get Canvas art to album tracks with static art to get those save/stream numbers? Is that’s the case, surely playlisting received for single team is pushing would account for that difference?
Considering most people use Spotify in headphones with their phone in their pocket, it’s hard to imagine a feature requiring you to stare at the screen would increase streams.
Anyhoo. Canvas’ are another medium to help push visuals, which as stated about aids in memorability. Junglepussy uses Canvases for the albums singles, ‘Main Attraction’ and ‘Arugula’.
To summarize, Junglepussy scores 3/7, which is encouraging as there’s many quick fixes to make her profile work harder for branding and communications.
I’d encourage any artist before releasing any new music to audit your own page to ensure it’s completely maximized for your goals.
