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T-Pain · DJ DIESEL · NGHTMRE · San Holo · Kompany · SampliFire · IVORY
Five channels ran against STFU: Meta ads driving to Spotify, Tier 1 Spotify playlisting, SoundCloud repost waves, a custom bass creator program, and rap-vertical Instagram seeding. Every line below is tracked to a live source.
The IG Seeding and Custom Creators lines were quoted together at $6,500 to $9,000 combined. They are broken out here at their booked amounts, $5,000 for bass creators and $4,000 for rap seeding, which lands at the top of that range.
A five week traffic campaign pointed at Spotify, run in two phases: a warmup set that proved the creative and the audience, then an optimized scale phase on that same proven set. It finished 100% delivered on Aug 3.
The flight sits at the line most music campaigns never reach: the ads roughly pay for themselves in streaming royalties alone. Total ad spend works out to about $0.0050 per stream. Because this campaign ran all-US traffic, which is the highest-payout streaming market and premium-subscriber heavy, each US stream returns in the neighborhood of $0.004 to $0.005 in recorded-music royalties.
Ad cost per stream sits right at the payout band, so every dollar in comes back in royalties before counting what the campaign is really buying: roughly 130,000 landing page views banked into the pixel, streams feeding the algorithm, and the saves and follows that keep paying after the ads stop. Deliberately targeting only the expensive but highest-value US audience is what makes the unit economics close. A cheap-reach international flight would show prettier click costs and worse economics.
Royalty figures are standard US per-stream estimates. The label's statements are the final word.
A $2,100 Tier 1 placement against a 100,000 stream target. The brief led with dubstep and heavy bass, and the delivered set pairs those core lists with high-volume workout and rap lists where the record's energy carries. Placements are live and the daily rate is speeding up.
Projection assumes the current 1.1K per day rate continuing and easing up toward 1.5K as placements mature. Delivered figures through Aug 10 are exact.
A $1,300 repost campaign scheduled in two waves: one on release day to carry the launch, one on Jul 20 to re-light the record mid-cycle. SoundCloud repost networks sell reach and placement in feeds, not streams.
Scheduled to land with the Monstercat release so the record hit the bass feeds the same day it went live.
Timed to the Meta phase switch on Jul 21, so paid scale and organic repost reach hit the same week.
Two separate creator programs ran in parallel: a custom bass creator program producing original content on TikTok and Instagram, and a rap-vertical Instagram seeding buy placing the record on large aggregator and culture pages.
31 creator accounts across TikTok and Instagram, briefed to make original content to the drop rather than repost the audio. Engagement rate landed at 5.38%.
Placed on rap and EDM aggregator pages, led by @rap at 553,589 views. Engagement rate landed at 6.85%, higher than the creator program, which is what you expect when the audience is already assembled.
A handful of seeding placements report zero views in the tracker because the page has view counts hidden. Their like and comment counts are live and are included in the engagement totals.
STFU is at 972,694 all-time Spotify streams and the paid flight delivered them at roughly half a cent of ad cost per stream. That is the rate at which a paid streaming push comes close to paying for itself in royalties alone, which is rare enough that we flag it every time it happens.
The Meta flight placed $4,823.37 and delivered roughly 130,000 landing page views at about four cents each, 138,954 link clicks across 608,459 people reached, at a 17.64% click-through rate. That is close to eighteen times what music campaigns typically achieve, sustained across five weeks rather than for a few days at small scale.
The campaign also went out on its best day. Its final day of delivery posted an 18.50% click-through rate, the highest single figure of the entire flight, on the same creative that opened it. The set was still improving when it reached its budget, which is the clearest possible signal that the audience was nowhere near exhausted.
The run was built in two phases. A warmup traffic set proved the creative and the audience first, then on Jul 21 the flight moved into optimized scale on that same proven set and held a $170 to $186 per day band for nine consecutive days at peak. Sequencing it that way is why the scale phase never had to pay for a learning period, and it is the main reason the blended numbers held up as spend multiplied.
The daily stream rate held a 13,000 to 14,000 band through the close, well clear of the 10,805 low earlier in the run, so the record did not fall off when the money stopped. The music video sits at 98,120 YouTube views and is still climbing a week after the flight ended. T-Pain's audience has kept growing since the flight closed: 6,521,545 Spotify followers and 5,525,905 on Instagram, up 125,905 since we first tracked it on Jul 16, with the track holding a Spotify popularity score of 60.
Two channels are still working. Spotify playlisting is at 49,608 of its 100,000 stream target with dailies accelerating, and the SoundCloud repost waves have put the record in front of 42M followers across two scheduled drops.
608,459 reached people and roughly 130,000 landing page visitors are captured and available to retarget. A follow-up release can launch against a proven warm audience rather than building one from scratch.
The warmup then scale sequence let the scale phase run without paying for a learning period. That structure is directly repeatable on the next record, and the winning creative is identified.
Daily streams stayed in the 13,000 to 14,000 band through the close. A record still performing on its own after spend stops is the strongest case for a second flight.
Playlisting is half way to its target with dailies speeding up, projecting completion around Sep 20. No action needed, we are running point on the close-out and will report again when the target lands.