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T-Pain · DJ DIESEL · NGHTMRE · San Holo · Kompany · SampliFire · IVORY
A $24,000 program across six budget lines: a custom bass creator program, Meta ad amplification driving to Spotify, rap and IG seeding, Tier 1 third party Spotify playlisting, and SoundCloud engagement. Every line below is tracked to a live source.
Rap Seeding and IG Seeding are two budget lines, $7,600 together, that deliver through one seeding tracker, so their views and engagements are reported once as a combined figure rather than split across both rows. SoundCloud closed at 42M of follower reach on $910 of its original $1,300, and Spotify was rebalanced to $1,720 against an 80,000 stream target. The $390 and $380 those two lines freed up were reallocated into Paid Ad Amplification, which had already over-delivered against its original $5,700 allocation. The program total is unchanged at $24,000.
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 placed $4,823.37 in media and finished 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 $1,720 third party Tier 1 placement against an 80,000 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, the daily rate is speeding up, and Tier 1 runs on our standard 90 day delivery window, completing Oct 4.
Delivered figures run through Aug 10. Tier 1 placements run on a 90 day delivery window, so this flight completes Oct 4. Closing the remaining 33,792 streams needs about 614 a day and current delivery is running 1,000 a day, 1,429 across the past week, so the campaign is tracking well ahead of the pace it needs.
A SoundCloud engagement campaign scheduled in two waves: one on release day to carry the launch, one on Jul 20 to re-light the record mid-cycle. It closed at 42M of follower reach on $910, and the remaining $390 of the line was reallocated into Meta ads. 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 programs ran in parallel: a $7,300 custom bass creator program producing original content on TikTok and Instagram, and a $7,600 seeding buy across rap and EDM pages placing the record on large aggregator and culture accounts.
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%.
Two budget lines, Rap Seeding at $4,000 and IG Seeding at $3,600, placed across rap and EDM aggregator pages and reported together. 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.
One channel is still working. Spotify playlisting is at 46,208 of its 80,000 stream target with dailies accelerating, inside a 90 day window that completes Oct 4. The SoundCloud repost waves closed out at 42M followers across two drops, and the unused balance on that line was reallocated into the Meta flight.
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 at 58% of its 80,000 stream target and completes Oct 4. Closing the remainder needs about 614 a day and we are currently running 1,000, so no action is needed. We are running point on the close-out.