The challenge
When the partnership began in May 2025, NASH had roughly 37,000 monthly Spotify listeners and 820 followers. He is an independent electronic dance producer with real pedigree, releases on Garuda, Armada and FSOE, a feature on Armin van Buuren’s A State of Trance, and composing credits on primetime BBC One and the Formula E soundtrack, but none of that was translating into a growing, discoverable audience on streaming.
The brief was the one every independent artist faces: turn individual releases into compounding listener growth, without a major-label budget behind them. The catch is that Spotify rewards momentum, so a release that lands flat stays flat, and paid promotion that does not feed the algorithm just rents a spike that disappears when the spend stops.
The approach
We ran every release through the same multi-channel model, on independent budgets but a shared release calendar, so each launch reinforced the last.
Conversion-optimised Facebook and Instagram ads pointed straight to Spotify and became the main new-listener engine, held at roughly £0.06 to £0.08 per click. Independent playlisting pitched to curators we already have relationships with, landing acceptance rates of 44 to 60%. Native Spotify in-feed video ads added discovery placement, a plugger campaign put NASH on BBC Introducing Manchester, BBC Merseyside, R1 Future Dance, Capital Xtra and over 2,000 international stations, and TikTok seeding generated 218,000 views in the first three weeks of the flagship release. Radio coverage was then reused as social proof in later ad creative.
The flagship paid campaign, run across three ad sets in parallel, is a good illustration of the method. Once the data was in, the trance ad set was clearly carrying it, returning 5,853 of the 6,984 results at the lowest cost per result, so the weaker sets were paused and budget doubled down on the winner. When a campaign worked, it was renewed and extended rather than cut for the next experiment.
The results
Over twelve months, NASH’s monthly Spotify listeners grew from 37,000 to 190,000, a 414% rise. Total streams went from 7.8 million to 21.3 million, up 175%, and followers grew from 820 to 3,828, up 367%, all on a low four-figure total ad spend, with paid social sustained at around £0.07 per result and £0.06 per link click.
The anchor release moved from 1,700 to 14,600 streams in its first 17 days, and a single Instagram clip of it later reached 5.2 million views overnight. Most importantly, by the third month the earned flywheel had caught: Discover Weekly and Spotify Radio were contributing measurable streams with no paid promotion behind them, which is the difference between renting an audience and building one.
