Fledgling musicians obsess over how to reach the widest audience – by playing live shows locally or going on tour, by releasing one song or a short EP or a full album on streaming platforms, or by paying playlist editors to include their song on a playlist with a huge listener base. There are countless opinions on which of these factors will generate the most success for a band, and not many can be backed up with evidence. I have been a part of this world for the past ten years, and I have received much of this advice, ranging from half-baked ramblings to seriously helpful tips. As a member of three indie bands with songs available for streaming on platforms like Spotify, I set out to understand what has worked and what hasn’t when attempting to grow my bands’ fanbases.

To answer these questions, I turned to the most robust music streaming dataset at my disposal: Spotify for Artists. The platform allows for exporting a limited amount of historical data for each song that a band has released, and for the band at large. For each band, there is a daily count of streams (aggregated and per song), listeners, and followers for every day of the past three calendar years. To give some context to this raw data, I merged it with a handwritten table of all of the live shows that each of these bands has played in the last three calendar years.

Let’s take a look at a few of the tactics that bands employ to gain the largest possible following: varying the release cadence for recorded material, getting songs placed on playlists, and going on tour.

Release Strategy

Releasing music on streaming platforms encourages more listening – of course it does. 

One common strategy for boosting the impact of a given release is to release a larger set of songs one at a time, ideally building anticipation over the course of several months. For a four song EP (or Extended Play – a package of songs longer than a single and shorter than an album), a band might release a single in January, a single in February, a single in March, and the whole EP (with only one unreleased song) in April. Such a spread theoretically allows bands to maximize the impact of each individual announcement – one more social media post, one more live show, one more email newsletter blast. But does it work?

Demeter attempted two different strategies on consecutive EPs: The Body Moves Parts I & II. On the first, we “dropped” the entire EP at once. For the second, we dropped three singles before releasing the four song EP. Each single that Demeter released attracted a wave of new Spotify followers, even after months of successive singles.

While there are numerous factors, not measured here, that could influence the variation in the successes of each of these EP releases, it is encouraging and helpful to see a prolonged acceleration in new followers during the extended release window of The Body Moves Part II.

Playlisting and Streaming Farm Scams

As a band releasing music on streaming services, you dream of seeing your song included on an editorial playlist. Spotify’s tastemakers curate these playlists to reflect pop charts (like “Today’s Top Hits”), to match moods or settings (like “Power Workout” or “Country Coffeehouse”), to match an abstract vibe (like “Chillin on a Dirt Road”), or to help open-minded listeners find their next favorite artist (like “Fresh Finds” or “undercurrents”). Getting your new song on the Fresh Finds playlist means that you could reach some fraction of its 1.2 million subscribers – an absolute gamechanger for small bands.

Less popular playlists can still help bands reach a wider audience, and there are even companies that sell spots on their playlists to enterprising bands with money to spend. But this industry has opened up the door for scams.

In one such scam, companies will add brand new songs from unknown bands to their scam playlists, unprompted. These companies have teams of people or bots who stream the songs on their playlists over and over, without triggering Spotify’s alarm bells. The song’s daily streams will jump from five on Monday, to a thousand on Tuesday, fifteen hundred on Wednesday, and then back to five on Thursday. The actual scam: artists will make note of the streams they got after being added to the playlist, and contact the company in advance of their next release, only to find that inclusion on the playlist now costs $100.

My band Demeter was the “victim” of such a scam in October 2024 – our song Your Oracle is Showing was listed on a scam playlist and saw streams skyrocket for a few days. Click play on the visualization below to see how this played out.

A telltale sign that your song is being streamed by a streaming farm is a spike in the number of streams without a corresponding spike in the number of listeners. Reading the chart below, try imagining what this scheme could look like on the ground – a call center full of reps, hitting play over and over on the same few Spotify tracks, listening to the same 15 seconds of the same song on repeat.

Ultimately, it has been a fairly ineffective scam on the bands involved in this report. In fact, Demeter and My Son the Doctor have both kept their artificially inflated streaming numbers from short-term scams, and have both had the good sense to ignore any temptation to pay for inflated streams.

The Impact of Live Shows

Playing your songs to a live audience encourages more Spotify streams – of course it does.

The streaming stats on “show days” (the calendar date on which a given band played a concert) are clearly not as compelling for Demeter, but this is not to say that the band sees less of a bump overall on a show day than the other bands: Demeter hasn’t played a live show since the summer of 2023 due to a serious illness in the band. In the intervening months, Demeter’s streaming statistics have continued to climb, raising the average daily stream count for “non-show days” solidly over the average daily stream count for show days.

My Son the Doctor, on the other hand, has played 67 shows since the beginning of 2022, including a number of short, self-booked tours through the Northeast, Midwest, and just over the border in Canada. The biggest tour was one week long in June 2023, and included a stop in Cleveland at a hot dog bar, two shows in Chicago, three shows at an indie festival in Toronto, and one night in Montreal. If fandom may be very roughly measured in the count of Spotify followers a band has, the tour had an obvious positive impact: My Son the Doctor gained nearly twice as many fans in the week of the tour than they gained in the other three weeks of June 2023.

So… How Can I Use This?

Frankly, there are far too many factors involved in growing a band’s popularity to attach significant value to any of the suggestions implied by the data summarized here. We haven’t measured factors like radio play, non-scam playlists, music journalism, or social media, never mind the quality of the music. That’s never stopped a friendly punk elder from shouting advice six inches from my ear, though, so here are the heavily caveated tips I would offer to a new indie artist with recordings ready to release:

• If you’re releasing an EP or an album, release singles first. Every time you release a single, you get a new opportunity to put your music in front of people who might like it. Caveat: your music should ideally be good, and if you wind up on an editorial playlist, your release strategy probably doesn’t matter as much.
• Play shows locally, and when you’re ready, go on tour. Caveat: Touring can be expensive and draining in ways that may negate the potential upside, but every show you play can help you build your base.
• Ignore and avoid streaming farm scam playlists. The upside is minimal – you’ll get a few streams, but no prolonged listenership – and the downside can be expensive. It’s also against Spotify’s rules.

Above all, though, my advice is to commit the most focus to writing songs you love. Music is a joy to make, and that remains true even in the age of trying to hack streaming algorithms to get famous. If you’d like to explore these factors even further, check out these self-guided filterable dashboards! Here’s one for My Son the Doctor, one for Moon Hound, and one for Demeter.