This week Danny Garcia, co-founder and CEO of SongTools spoke on the Music Biz Weekly podcast about automated ads using SongFly and the overall state of digital marketing for independent artists. 

Music Biz Weekly is a weekly podcast hosted by industry veterans Michael Brandvold and Gene Simmons.

Check out the summarized interview transcript below, OR, check out the full the full Interview here.

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Music Biz Weekly: Danny thanks so much for joining us for those who have no prior knowledge of what your company does, or what the service is, lay it out for the novice: What do you guys do?

Danny Garcia: Thanks for having me! What we do at SongTools is we help music creators build a fanbase through our platform where we automate marketing for artists.  Our whole idea is to make it as easy as possible for an early stage creator to come in and start running campaigns, whether that be towards playlists  or run ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok.  We want to demystify or make it very, very easy to tap into these tactics that a lot of bigger artists and labels use, for the  early stage creators or someone that does not have a lot of  digital marketing knowledge.

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MBW: From a high level how do you attack playlisting in a way that the client has confidence that it's not Bots, it's not spin farms, and that you're not paying for placement– that it's a legit pitching service?

DG: With SongTools specifically we've been building out a curated or pre-vetted community of playlists since 2019.  We started by offering a curation platform long before we even had an artist or label offering. I've been in this playlisting space  since I was in college at NYU.  I was  doing marketing consulting and running  campaigns helping artists get on playlists. I saw how much that exact problem– not only people paying to get on fake playlists but also, even if they were real playlists, people were paying a lot of money to get on those playlists. There wasn't  a cost to benefit there, so we were like, "how do we  find a way that's first of all pre-vetted  and also cost effective for artists to get in front of curators?" 

So the first thing is that it's not guaranteed. You're going to get put in front of all the relevant curators, but it's real curation that determines whether you make it on a playlist. In terms of bots and the spin farms, we have what we call the A&R Program which is a closed-off ecosystem of curators. To work with our artists as a curator you need to apply to the A&R Program and you go through a multi-step verification process. It starts by looking at the classics–  Chartmetric,  Spotontrack, etc,  all of those backend tools that let us see if there is any weird data.  We're even looking at what cities these playlists are streaming in to detect anomalies. Taking it a step further at SongTools we actually talk to each one of the curators that we accept onto the platform, and that's really where we're able to catch anyone that might be a bad actor. We actually email with them and jump on calls with them if we need to ask them "how did you grow your playlist" asking for screenshots of Facebook ads manager and more. We have a pretty rigorous acceptance rate and it is done very much artisanally by myself plus three other people on the team that deal with this exclusively to ensure that it's above board and that these are real playlists. We also do weekly vetting on top of that.

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MBW: Let's move on to SongFly which is your new tool. Take us into how SongFly works as a one-click ad tool, understanding that "one-click ad tools" in itself is nothing new. There have been many services that have come and gone. Why are you different?

DG:  After operating our playlisting  system for two and a half years we got to meet a lot of artists and learn more about their problems. The first takeaway is that playlists sit at the top of the marketing funnel– it's awareness–  it gets you listeners but not necessarily better save rates or followers and we saw our users struggling to keep their metrics up months after running playlisting campaigns. So we really took a deep dive into the methods that the people that were achieving residual value from their campaigns and the common denominator was digital ads. We took a year to build out a one click ad solution that makes it easy for people to run ads on Instagram and Facebook and Tik Tok and it's very much tailored to streaming campaigns. We've made it very very simple to the point where all we need is the Spotify link for a song. We do not need to connect to your Meta ad account or Tik Tok account. We don't even need a creative from you because we're using the album cover for your song to make a creative that's high converting using AI-generated  backgrounds. It's very much tailored to early early stage creators even though we're seeing  labels also using it. 

We are different from other platforms because if you want to be hands-off you can just use all of our smart geography and smart creative that sets off like a chain of events in our system. We go into that artist's backend data to look at where similar artists have been streaming and take all these data points to create  lookalike audiences. We can see , okay, this is an indie pop artist in Brooklyn, we've run x  Indie pop campaigns in the past so we can  infer a pretty good starting place for this artist from a targeting perspective. The next step is creating a pixel. Our platform automatically does

that for each campaign. We create a landing page automatically for each campaign that looks like a Linktree  that you can edit as well. The pixel is placed on there and then it starts running conversion campaigns for that artist automatically.

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MBW: When an artist signs up, what kinds of things are they going to see on their dashboard? I imagine you have some data that you provide for people so they can track  the progress of their campaigns? 

DG: We have some really cool ones on the playlisting side that, aside from the basics in terms of like what playlists you've made it on and how many followers they have, we have a unique one that we call The Brand Engagement Index which is really cool because we show how your album cover performs against a bunch of other album covers vying for clicks. A  lot of the time we see Independent Artists not really thinking about the album cover that much without knowing that that actually plays into the discovery of the song. On the SongFly ad side it's what you would imagine– how many clicks, how many conversions, etc. You can see where they're coming from in the world as well as where they're going. So you can see you've sent  30 people to Apple, 25 people to Spotify, or  XYZ. It's  all tracked in real time as well so you can very easily check the dashboard and see what's happening. 

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MBW: Are there certain genres and moods or artists I mean are you really strong in, like EDM and Country but maybe weak in Hard Rock? Talk a little bit about how you're evolving as a platform. 

DG: Breaking it down from a playlisting perspective definitely electronic, EDM, and rap which are very commercial tend to do best on our system just because if you look at an EDM track not only do we have genre-specific playlists, and this is I think across the board for playlisting as a whole not just in our ecosystem,  those tracks tend to do well because playlists exist that are not only genre but also mood-oriented, like cooking, or cleaning or  running, which are  electronica focused. On the flip side, all  genres can do well in SongFly because you can go in and target really niche things like folk oriented stuff. A niche genre has a much better chance of picking up more people using ads than it would on playlists across the board.

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MBW: Final question before we wrap and this is always the the first question clients ask: how much money am I going to have to spend to use this? Because in the past some of these other self-service platforms have sounded great until you get in there and it's like, you got to start with a $500 minimum ad buy, and $500 can shut out a lot of DIY artists. 

DG: The  short answer is 30 bucks is the minimum ad buy to give it a whirl.

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MBW: But what's the sweet spot in terms of spend? 

DG:  I would say like giving it 10 to 15 days at the minimum daily budget of $10,  so in the $100 to $150 range, which I know is above what certain artists can spend but that's typically where we see a lot of good traction starting to happen.If you only have 50 bucks and under what I would suggest is more going the playlist route. On the playlisting side it's 48 bucks and that gives you 30 days of promo. It's a flat rate. You're not going to pay more if you get on a bunch of playlists. We have stuff for all price points. We even have free tools like that landing page tool that I talked about that is completely free unlimited usage for any number of artists and any number of releases. We have a blogging tool that lets you build out blogs for each song. That's also completely free. We're trying to  build out very very cost-effective tools that artists can use because  we know what it's like for Independent artists.