3,000+ followers from ToneDen in less then 2 weeks!

[J. Castell]

Hello Andrew, I've been following your content on YouTube for just under a month now and love what you do and thank you for all the insight and help. So, I started using ToneDen as I wasn't having too much luck with just running the ads on my own on facebook and thought I would give it a go. It really went off for me in like less then 2 weeks I got over 3,000 follows on Spotify! My Cost Per New follower was A$0.05 so I decided to test out the whole theory of having followers on Spotify for the algorithm to push a new song out for me, which would have been 3,692 followers waiting for my release (it has dropped to 3,606 now, don't know why) and so I didn't bother having to pay for any Playlist placement and just see how many people from the followers would get to stream the song. And it's now 2 days after release and have only had 219 live streams on the new song!

So, did I get all fake followers?? However, in saying that my overall Spotify algorithmic playlists has increased to 8% but that's pretty much from my previous releases so I guess the followers have helped me to start getting some Spotify algorithmic playlisting but I just don't get why the new release hasn't had much impact from my 3,606 new followers!?

Also, the Spotify follower growth has stopped drastically in the last 6 days and like I said before I have actually lost followers. I did tweak a few things on the campaign so maybe I stuffed it up but yeh I was hoping to have had more growth for my new release.

Keen to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks in advance.

This is my Spotify profile: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3xdA...QDufNu5XAoppIQ

EDIT: It has dropped again :/ It's 3,525 followers now

[shmig]

Hi J Castell. I'm interested to know Andrew's response to this as well, but was wondering if you could elaborate on how you got those 3000 Spotify follows on ToneDen? Are you setting up a social gate on your landing page, then driving traffic there through FB ads? Or are you using this is another way I am not familiar with? I have noticed ToneDen doesn't do the best job of filtering out bot traffic and other strange traffic from countries like India, so that could be part of your issue.

[J. Castell]

Hey, it was pretty much just running facebook ads on IG stories and what Andrew teaches but through ToneDen is automatic and sends people to the artist profile on Spotify not a specific song which then people tend to follow, I don't know how that happens cuz I rarely follow any big acts on Spotify and so why would I follow an unknown act just like that? So I may have a lot of fake followers then? Hmmmmm I guess it was starting to sound too good to be true

[Ghostown]

Just to chip in I've got about 2500 followers, grown over many years and a typical release seems to get around 300 plays on release radar Friday. My opinion on this is that although your song might (or will) go into all your followers release radar playlists, only a fraction of them will actually actively go and listen to their RR every Friday
In my case for example I used to listen to RR every Friday on the road to work, now I stay at home and I rarely check my RR anymore

[J. Castell]

Yeh good point. I rarely too go into RR. I usually tend to get my new music from Spotify curated playlists that are genre specific to what I like.

I was actually hoping I didn't have to spend any money on getting some playlist placements but here I am 2 days after release day and only 227 streams so now I have to try to hit up some playlist curators quick.

[EBCSM]

This site looks very good, and I have seen good comments about it. Here in my country the dollar is very high, so it is difficult to use this service.

But I wanted to make an observation, I have seen some artists that have grown a lot, but a lot. And they never used promotional services (of course, according to themselves ...), and got millions of listeners monthly, organically. I'm talking about independent artists.

But, I never heard of someone who got 1 million monthly listeners with these services, or am I uninformed?

The point is, how many of these people coming from promotional services are going to become real fans, go to concerts, buy merchandises?

Or is the intention just to give numbers and an initial traction?

[Cross]

J. Castell It might be because of the targeted location, even if you choose English countries you get India and a lot of African countries which = bots.
You have to switch to Advanced and edit them out. I've run a campaign straight on Facebook ads before targeting cheap countries and my clicks were in the thousands on Facebook end but on Spotify the play count was 5. If you want to mix cheaper countries I recommend the Pacific Islands.

[J. Castell]

That's what I don't get cuz Andrew has also said that about bots... So facebook uses bots also when you run ads with them to make it seem like the ads are working??

[AndrewSouthworth]

I very much doubt that the followers are bots. The way bots are written they wouldn't be able to jump from the FB/IG API's and then integrate with the Spotify API's, such a bot would have to be specifically written to do that task.

Honestly getting 200+ streams on a new song from just 3000 followers is quite a good number. If you think of your own listening habits, how often do you check your release radar? I never listen to my release radar, but obviously a good amount of people do. My guess is that less than 50% of people listen to release radar, and a lot of them probably only listen to a couple tracks or are looking for a particular track. Its very normal to not get 3k streams from 3k followers from release radar.

The only concerning factor to me is that things are dropping, but I still doubt its necessary bots. Spotify purges followers if people don't interact with you for more than a few weeks, or it might be 4 weeks. Its not consistent, but they do in fact un follow people for various reasons. I'm not super concerned since its only dropped by like 100 though.

[J. Castell]

Thanks for your input. I'm just finding it odd that I had such a good success at the start and leading up to my last release last Friday, growth just stopped at 3,700 and now it has actually dropped to 3,200! so that's 500 less followers!? I've been trying to replicate what I did at the start and it's been a whole week now and haven't been able to get any new followers no matter what I do, lucky it has only been a spend of $10 a day but still just weird. I have messaged them so will have to see, it's only been a week and I don't know why the big change or lack of.

However, my 2 previous releases both their Spotify algorithmic playlists are sitting at 11% and 8% and my new one at 3% but only 937 streams as I'm typing this but that is only because I went ahead and got some playlist placements! Discover Weekly has given me 2.9k streams in the last 2 weeks and Release Radar 1.1k so I think this has got to be because of the Spotify growth I achieved so it kinda has worked. I just honestly thought that I wasn't going to have to hit up playlist curators for this new song and let the algorithm do its thing. Another thing to note my Spotify popularity according to Chart Metric has increased to 28/100


EDIT: 846 lost followers now


This is what ToneDen has said...


"The only time I've seen a heavy decrease like this is when artists are using non-Spotify paid playlists to market their music. I think this is just a case of bad timing, unfortunately. Spotify has been cleaning up followers and removing "artificial user accounts" pretty often.

This is affecting artists across the board: at one point Drake lost 500,000 followers and Skrillex lost 11,000.
The good news is that this won't affect any new followers you're getting by running the playbook. Everyone who follows you from the ad is proactively clicking through an ad, then clicking to follow you, so there's basically zero chance they're a bot/"artificial user account". Hopefully that makes sense!"

[Filippo]

The guys at toneden are probably right, some fake playlisters have bots programmed to listen to their playlist and randomly follow and save at a lower rate, when spotify cleans up the fake accounts you’ll loose the followers you got from this type of services, simple as that...
regarding the follower to plays in RR ratio it’s pretty standard from my experience, i have around 2400 followers on spotify and i got around 150 plays yesterday. I notice spotify really likes consistency in results, i have a song that has been pulling 200 plays daily for a few months (below average save rate) and it got randomly pushed to discover weekly las t week generating 2k extra plays in 2 days

[J. Castell]

Hey man, thanks for commenting. This is what Spotify had to say "We recently found and removed a small number of follows from deactivated user accounts.

We're investing in building reliable, powerful ways for you to reach your followers. It's really important that the follower metric is representative of real fans, so you understand the true breadth of your follower base.

I'm down again to 1,314 from 3,700 followers!!! So I have lost 2,386 followers! I don't what to believe anymore, is really disheartening and so much money lost via ads and sub to ToneDen. So this people that followed only recently all of a sudden deactivate their accounts or? Interesting take about fake playlisters having bots though... However they usually just provide you with streams and not followers to my understanding, could be wrong. Losing 2,386 follows though, WOW!

[Ghostown]

The guys at toneden are probably right, some fake playlisters have bots programmed to listen to their playlist and randomly follow and save at a lower rate, when spotify cleans up the fake accounts you’ll loose the followers you got from this type of services, simple as that...
regarding the follower to plays in RR ratio it’s pretty standard from my experience, i have around 2400 followers on spotify and i got around 150 plays yesterday. I notice spotify really likes consistency in results, i have a song that has been pulling 200 plays daily for a few months (below average save rate) and it got randomly pushed to discover weekly las t week generating 2k extra plays in 2 days

Your story makes me really distrust Toneden, if all of your followers came from the Toneden campaign then they must have used fake accounts
I already found their claim that they could guarantee X amount of followers highly suspicious, X amount of plays OK, but a follower is someone who really loved the music enough to subscribe

[Ghostown]

Edit, just checked your spotify profile and it looks really strange statistically to me, your top song has 25k streams, and you have 25k monthly listeners, that doesn't make sense unless you used paid playlists,
25k montly listeners is pretty big imo, also your followers have now dropped to 987, very fishy

[J. Castell]

Hey, yeh I have used some paid playlist. I think that's what the problem has been with messing up the algorithm but to take all the followers down that I got through ToneDen is just odd, so all of them were fake or? Release Radar is up to 10% overall and Spotify popularity is up to 28/100 on Chartmetric now so something is working right haha I guess I'm learning the hard way. So with the amount of streams I have what would be a right estimate of monthly listeners?

[Ghostown]

Personally I have
2.5k followers
6k monthly listeners (which varies and fluctuates)
25k monthly streams (which varies and fluctuates)

But that would mean on average each listener listens more than once (about 4 times)
and less than half of the people who listen bother to follow

[J. Castell]

Oh okay, I have 3 released 3 new songs in the last couple of months, that's probably why my high monthly listeners, maybe? But how many are fake though? Because I don't trust all the numbers now and am down to 297 followers currently

[AndrewSouthworth]

This whole situation does seem very sketchy, but unfortunately I don't have much actionable advice. The only time I lost followers is from a company I hired in 2019 to run a song promotion (this was before I was big into using Facebook ads, and was trying every service I possibly could) - basically they gained me a bunch of followers and streams overnight, I was SUPER pissed because it was obviously something non-legitimate, and then 6 months later all those followers vanished overnight. As much as i'd love to make videos calling them out to tell everyone to avoid them, I don't want to open up a legal dispute.

What I will say is that my experience using the ToneDen service was fine. It wasn't nearly as effective as yours was up-front, but it also didn't cause problems later. Everything I have to say about ToneDen's service is pretty much in the video I made, where I point out that it does work but its only for specific types of people since at the end of the day its just automated FB ads.

There are a few things you could do on your next release: A: try ToneDen again, but don't use any other type of promotion (assuming the problems were something else), or B: try regular FB ads the manual way and assume the problem was ToneDen.

[J. Castell]

Yeh I kinda was hoping you had a magic solution to all this haha but yeh I think I messed it up with running paid playlists and ToneDen at the same time but did ToneDen get me the 3,700 followers alone or was it a combination of both!? If so how many were real and how many fake? I'm down to 297 followers now by the way so I lost everything pretty much. Hmmmm I have stopped ToneDen and now I'll just let these paid playlist run out and start from scratch again, at least my streams are up but no followers haha

[EDM Beats]

I have the feeling toneden is adding fake followers especially to artists who promote toneden on youtube after given them a subscribtion, i tried toned playbook for followers after i saw a youtube video from someone who got 700 followers in 1 week with $100, i got zero followers with the playbook but with a landingpage to my profile i get a few followers every few days, i really think toneden is adding fake followers to some artists

[J. Castell]

Yeh, either them or the playlists placements but then again those placements are just for streams not followers like Toneden's Playbook