Hey Guys,

I've been gearing up to run some marketing ad campaigns for some singles I've got stored up, but while preparing my marketing plan, I did some number crunching based on some data I found online from various sources, and I've made some discouraging discoveries that simply don't add up, math wise and business model wise.

An average payout/stream in a low income region (SEA, Mexico, etc) is estimated to have a price floor of about .0008 per stream after averaging across all streaming platforms. This checks out with the streams I've accumulated vs the amount of money my tracks have earned according to my distributor.

This equates to about $800=1,000,000 streams

The next step I did was to look at the average CPA/CPC for social media ads. Based on my findings, I've found that for the USA it cost about $1.8, and goes as low as $0.1 for low income regions.

Now, lets say ones goal with their marketing budget would be to breakeven, meaning ad cost=stream profit.

This implies that your 800$ in ads would have to generate atleast 1,000,000 streams to breakeven. but according to the average CPA/CPCs, 800$ would only get you to about 445 streams in the USA and at most 80,000 streams in low income regions.

This calculation doesnt take into account any organic growth that could be indirectly caused by running ads, or the monthly listenership/passive income that one would then gain from the ads spent, but even then these are critical assumptions that may not even happen at all.

I understand that running ads is one of the most effective ways of getting your music infront of the right audience and building a loyal listenership, but

Im curious how you all are making sense of the math? or perhaps there are things missing in my calculations that are unaccounted for.

What also urks me is that one could theoretically invest x amount of money in ads and gain a decent listenership, but then you run the possibility of people not purchasing tickets to your show, which is definitely the way to really start getting a return on your advertisement investments.

If people dont come to an artist's show, and an artist doesnt make back their ad cost through streaming revenue, then that would probably be the worst case scenario, leaving the artist in a deficit.

So another question is what would be your strategy for booking and selling out an emerging artist's show after gaining that listenership on spotify?

Thank you for all your future feedback, suggestions, discussions and etc.