Early accessCreative intelligence for independent artists
Your audience,
written down.
SonicPush runs always-on Meta ads that grow your Spotify audience — and emails you a plain-English brief every Monday: who's responding, what's working, and what each new follower cost. You make music; the system runs the growth.
The BriefTasteLibraryVariant LabPatternsMapLive
ExampleJune Marlow · ACCT 00428JM
Week 47 · Nov 18–24
The brief.
Written by the system at 06:00, in your timezone. Read in three minutes.
Sources synthesized43 variants · 12 cells · 8 patterns
ConfidenceHigh
PreviousWK46 · WK45 · Archive →
This week the system got clearer on who you're for. Your bedroom-indie listeners in the UK started behaving like your US fans did six weeks ago — same listening habits, same saves. So we leaned in.
Variants tested
23
+8 vs last week
Winners
6
+2 vs last week
New audience
UK
growing fast
Cost / click
$0.42
↓ from $0.51
Audience added
+11.4K
compounding
02
Where you're becoming known
Your UK fans (sad-girl pop · 18–26) are growing 11.4% a week. We tested three new ads on Tuesday — by Thursday one was reaching them at 31¢ a click. They want what your US fans want: nighttime visuals, slow intros, captions that feel rather than instruct.
New audienceSad-girl pop · UK · 18–26+11.4%/wk
Illustrative weekly brief · numbers shown are example projections, not guaranteed outcomes
Mechanic
The five inputs the algorithm actually wants.
Meta's optimizer isn't a black box — it's a learning system with known appetites. Volume of creative. Fast signal. Conversion-event clarity. Compounding audiences. A fast feedback loop. SonicPush feeds all five. That's the entire mechanic.
01
Creative library
Variants generated from your assets.
We pull artwork, reels, lyric snippets, performance clips. The system composes 50+ creative variants per week — different hooks, copy, and aspect ratios.
02
Variants compete
One budget. Many variants.
Your variants run together inside one shared Advantage+ ad-set budget — Meta routes spend toward whatever performs. We measure cost-per-Spotify-click and pre-saves, not vanity reach.
03
Winners surface
Budget concentrates on winners.
Inside the Advantage+ ad-set, Meta leans spend toward the variants beating your cost-per-Spotify-click target. SonicPush surfaces which ones are winning, and why — so you can back them further.
04
Losers paused
No sentimentality.
Variants that miss your threshold surface for one-click pause. Their learnings feed back into the next creative batch — what hook patterns worked, which audiences responded, which formats didn't.
05
Audience compounds
Each test makes the next one cheaper.
As your campaigns run, custom audiences (engagers, video-viewers, Spotify-clickers) build in your ad account — audiences you own. Lookalikes get sharper, CPM drops, and cost-per-Spotify-click trends down the longer you run.
Variants / wk
50+
system capacity · [illustrative]
Daily ad spend
$10–30
you set it · card goes to Meta
Signal cadence
24h
fresh recommendations daily — you decide
Cost / Spotify click
$0.40
illustrative target · [validating]
Premise
What the algorithm rewards. And what it punishes.
Most artists who run their own Meta ads optimize the wrong thing. They tune audiences, sweat targeting, agonize over interest categories. The algorithm doesn't care. Here's what it actually responds to.
i.
Rewards: creative diversity.
The optimizer tests creative against many audience slices in parallel. With one ad, it has nothing to compare. With fifty, it builds a signal map of what works for whom. The audience finds the artist through the creative — not the other way around. This is the single most under-fed input in indie music ads.
VARIANT 001VARIANT 050
ii.
Rewards: compounding custom audiences.
Campaign-based ad management resets the optimizer every launch — it has to re-learn your audience from cold. Always-on lets engagers, video-viewers, and link-clickers grow continuously. Each becomes a lookalike seed; each new test starts warm. Six months in, your reach is cheaper because the algorithm already knows who responds.
MONTH 1MONTH 12
iii.
Rewards: a clean conversion event.
Reach, impressions, CTR — all proxies. Meta's optimizer gets sharper the closer your conversion event sits to actual value. We fire the pixel on the Spotify destination and optimize on cost-per-Spotify-click directly. The algorithm stops chasing scrollers and starts hunting listeners. Everything else is noise we ignore on your behalf.
iv.
Rewards: decisions in 24 hours.
Manual ad management runs on a weekly review cadence. The algorithm learns much faster than that — and starves between reviews. We surface variants that miss your cost-per-Spotify-click threshold within a day, so you can pause them before they waste spend. Budget moves on Meta's optimization rhythm — fast enough that the algorithm never goes cold between checks. By the time a human would write up a “let's optimize” memo, you've already acted on a day's worth of signal.
Trigger
Why this triggers Spotify's algorithm — when playlist pitching doesn't.
Streams are an output. Spotify's recommendation engine is a behavioral system that watches what listeners doafter they click — save, follow, replay, finish, share. Paid placements buy the click. They don't buy the behavior. That's why the streams flatline the day the placement ends.
Pattern A · Playlist placement
Streams spike, then fall off a cliff.
WEEK 1DECAY → ALGORITHM IGNORESWEEK 12
Pattern B · SonicPush always-on
Listener behavior compounds. Algorithm picks up.
WEEK 1SAVES · FOLLOWS · REPLAYS → LIFTWEEK 12
i.
Spotify is a behavioral system, not an inventory.
Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and the personalized algorithmic mixes don't see “streams.” They see saves, follows, completion rates, repeat listens, share-clicks. Those are the signals that move you into recommendations — and they only fire when the listener arrived for you, not for a playlist.
ii.
Playlist placements deliver passive listens.
A listener on a curator playlist isn't choosing your track — they're listening to the playlist. Spotify reads that as low-intent. They don't save, don't follow, don't replay. The day the placement ends, the streams end. The algorithm files you under “played in passing.”
iii.
Meta ads deliver intentional arrivals.
Someone who saw your ad, scrolled past two others, came back, tapped through to Spotify and pressed play — that's the highest-intent signal Spotify can read. It's the listener telling the algorithm: “this is the kind of thing I want.” Stack thousands of those, daily, and the recommendation engine starts doing your distribution for you.
SetupSetup is fifteen minutes.
Setup is fifteen minutes.
Most of it is reading the screen.
You stay the owner of your Meta ad account. You stay the owner of your audience data. We build the system inside it.
01
Connect Meta
Grant SonicPush partner access to your Meta ad account. Don't have one? We walk you through the five-minute setup. Either way, the account stays in your name.
02
Drop your smart-link
Paste your Spotify track or smart-link URL — that's where every ad sends listeners. We fire the Meta pixel on that destination and optimize on cost-per-Spotify-click. No Spotify login required.
03
Upload your assets
Tracks, artwork, reels, performance clips, lyric snippets. Whatever you have. The Engine composes 50+ variants from your creative library — different hooks, formats, and aspect ratios.
04
We start testing
Your first variants go live within 24 hours, first read on winners and losers inside 48, first scaled winner by end of week one. You watch it all on the Live tab.
15 MIN · NO CALLS · NO CONTRACT · STAY THE OWNER
Focus
What we don't do. On purpose.
Most music marketing tools widen — more channels, more dashboards, more line items. We narrowed. Every channel below has a real argument for inclusion. We left them all out for the same reason.
Channel · 01
TikTok's optimizer rewards sound, not destination. The path from a paid TikTok view to a Spotify save is too long, with too many drop-offs, for our cost-per-Spotify-click model to work cleanly. Organic TikTok matters — paid TikTok doesn't, for what we're solving.
Channel · 02
Audio ads inside Spotify reach existing Spotify listeners — the audience you already have access to organically. They don't pull new listeners into the platform with intent. The math doesn't compete with Meta-to-Spotify on cost-per-Spotify-click.
Channel · 03
A dashboard running Meta + TikTok + YouTube + Snap simultaneously sounds powerful. In practice it splits creative attention four ways and starves each algorithm of the volume it needs to learn. We picked one channel and overfed it.
Channel · 04
Pay-to-play playlist services and submission marketplaces sell access to curators. The streams that result don't trigger Spotify's recommendation engine — see Section 03. We don't run pitching, integrate with pitching tools, or recommend it as a complement.
One channel. One metric.
One reason: it's the only thing that compounds.Most artists disappear between releases. SonicPush doesn't.
One reason: it's the only thing that compounds.Most artists disappear between releases. SonicPush doesn't.
SonicPush · product principle
Proof
See it in action.
One real campaign, exactly as it ran. The same engine that writes the brief generates the ad, ships it to Meta, and reports back a single number: what it costs to put a new listener on the track.
Bryn Ffrewyll
Sponsored
open.spotify.com
Eyes Like Fire
Cost / Spotify click
$0.136
$0.15–0.25 typical
Click-through rate
9.1%
On the link to Spotify
Creative
Held video
Generated by the system
A real SonicPush campaign — Bryn Ffrewyll, “Eyes Like Fire”. One campaign, not a guarantee: cost per click varies by artist, genre, creative, and budget. Both held-video and static variants ran under the $0.15–0.25 typical industry range.
Pricing
Two tiers. Same engine. The bigger one runs more variants.
Subscription buys the system. Ad spend goes from your card to Meta directly — typical artists run $10–30/day to start.
No setup fees · Cancel anytime · You own the audience
Tier 01
Indie
$39/ month
billed $471/yr
+25+ creative variants tested per week
+One Spotify artist profile
+Live dashboard · cost-per-Spotify-click optimization
+Custom audiences you own, built as you run
+Email support · <24h response
Most picked
Tier 02
Pro
$79/ month
billed $951/yr
+50+ creative variants tested per week
+Multi-track / multi-release support
+Lookalike expansion as your audience grows
+Monthly performance deep-dive report
+Priority support · <4h response
+Everything in Indie
What this replaces
Music marketing agency · typical
$1,500–3,000 / month retainer + 10–15% of ad spend. 2–3 weeks of onboarding calls. 3–8 creative variants tested per week. Reports every two weeks. Lock-in: 3–6 months minimum.
SonicPush · pro
$99/mo month-to-month, less on annual. 15-minute setup. 50+ variants tested per week. Live dashboard. Cancel any time.
Annual cost · agency vs. SonicPush: $27,000 avg vs $1,188.
FAQ
The questions artists actually ask.
Q · 01
How many ads will you actually run?
25–50+ creative variants per week, depending on tier. They run together against one shared Advantage+ ad-set budget. Variants that beat your threshold
cost-per-Spotify-click get more spend; the rest you pause in a click. Each track runs as its own campaign you activate — no agency-style “campaign cycles.”Q · 02
Do I need a budget for ad spend on top of the subscription?
Yes — and you set it. The subscription buys the engine. Ad spend goes from your Meta-connected card to Meta. You set a daily cap; we never exceed it. Most artists start at $10–30/day. Pause anytime without canceling SonicPush.
Q · 03
What happens if my ads don't convert?
You pause them in a click — we flag which to cut. Variants that miss your cost-per-Spotify-click threshold surface on the Live tab — which ones are underperforming, and why — so you can pause them before they burn budget. Nothing pauses without showing up there first. If your entireaccount isn't converting after 30 days, that's usually a creative-input problem — we'll tell you exactly what to change.
Q · 04
Can I see what's actually running?
Yes — every variant, every dollar, live. The Live tab in the dashboard shows every active ad with its current performance, the variants live right now, the ones that died this week, and where today's budget is going. You can also open the ad in Meta Business Manager directly from any row. Nothing is hidden.
Q · 05
Can I override the system if I want a specific variant to run?
Yes, but try not to. Pinning forces a variant to keep running even when the signal says cut it. We let you pin one or two for a specific reason (release date, tour announcement) — beyond that, the data usually beats intuition by a wide margin.
Q · 06
What does "always-on" really mean?
You run continuously — no between-release gaps. Each track runs as its own campaign you activate; nothing scales or pauses without showing up on your dashboard first. As your campaigns run, custom audiences keep building in your account. You can pause any time in one click.
Q · 07
Why no TikTok ads?
The conversion path is too noisy. Paid TikTok views to Spotify saves drops off at every step — sound discovery, profile click, link in bio, Spotify open, save. Our cost-per-Spotify-click model needs a tight optimization loop. Meta's pixel-on-Spotify path is the cleanest one we've found. Organic TikTok matters; we just don't run paid spend there.
Q · 08
Why no Spotify Ad Studio?
It reaches the audience you already have. Audio ads inside Spotify play to existing Spotify users — a closed loop. To grow, you need to pull new listeners intoSpotify with intent. That's a Meta job. We considered Ad Studio as a secondary channel and it didn't beat the focus tradeoff.
Q · 09
What about playlist pitching — should I still do it?
Editorial pitching, yes. Pay-to-play, no. A real editorial Spotify or Apple Music placement is a brand signal that compounds. Paid curator services deliver passive listens that don't trigger the algorithm (see Section 03). We don't run either; we just don't pretend the second category is doing what artists hope it's doing.
Q · 10
Will streams keep growing if I pause?
Some — then they decay. The custom audiences, any lookalikes you've built, the listeners who already saved you — those keep generating algorithmic streams for weeks. But the always-on flywheel needs ongoing creative volume. Pause for a month and the curve flattens. Pause for three and you're starting cold again.
Q · 11
How is this different from un:hurd / Linkfire / similar?
Different category. un:hurd is closer to a pitching marketplace; Linkfire is a smart-link / analytics layer. Both can sit alongside SonicPush — neither competes on cost-per-Spotify-click optimization with always-on creative testing. If you're already on Linkfire, keep it; we'll route Meta traffic through whatever destination URL you give us.
Feed the algorithm.
Every day.
We're opening access in waves while the system learns. Join the waitlist — we'll email you the moment your spot is ready.