Labels & Distributors
Your roster, run as one system. Label-owned playlists, per-artist campaigns on top, owned audience and commerce underneath, and a monthly report you can forward to your distributor.
Thirty minutes with Adam Barito, who manages every label engagement. Bring your roster and the two or three artists you would push first. You leave with a proposed playlist set for your catalog, a per-artist budget split, and a first-90-days plan, whether or not you hire us.
The label system
What we build for a label
- Meta ads (spark: reaches new fans) build the label-owned playlists and send cold traffic to the artist profile.
- Stan accounts (organic + paid, spark) send new fans to the artist profile.
- Label-owned playlists (cold, labelwide) feed the artist profile. Playlist listeners are collected into the Meta retargeting audience.
- Artist profile ("This Is", cold + warm) feeds the retargeting audience and receives retargeting traffic back.
- Meta retargeting (charge: retargets warm fans) pushes warm fans to the artist profile and to the small first sale.
- Small first sale: a low-ticket entry offer. Buyers join email nurturing.
- Email nurturing (charge, from the first sale) pushes buyers to the follow-up sale, physical merch and the live ticket sale.
- Follow-up sale: a larger upsell to buyers.
- Physical merch, shipped by Barely.
- Live ticket sale: the best-case end of the chain.
- Revenue: $22 → $2,897 monthly merch, The Now, 19 months.
- Everything feeds the monthly report and Distributor Summary. Results reset next month’s spend.
Playlist infrastructure
We build and grow a small set of genre and vibe playlists that your label owns. Ads drive followers to the playlists; the follower base keeps streaming your catalog month after month. The base is the asset, not the month’s new followers, and it works for the whole roster, not only the artists in the ads.
Artist campaigns
Promoted artists get pre-save, profile, and direct-to-Spotify campaigns on top of the playlist base, then retargeting into a single-artist playlist once a warm audience exists. Shared playlist spend is allocated to artists by their share of each playlist’s streams, so you see what each artist actually costs.
Owned audience and commerce
Stan fan accounts on TikTok posting three times a day from dedicated devices. Pre-save flows that hand off into an affinity playlist. Pre-order and merch funnels with post-purchase upsells, storefronts, and fulfillment if you need it.
Reporting you can forward
A monthly report with every paid line, cost per playlist follower, cost per tracked stream, and per-artist allocation. A one-page Distributor Summary built to be forwarded to your distributor when you want editorial consideration behind a release. A biweekly call. A spend guardrail so the month lands at or under budget.
The testing method
How we decide what gets spend
Every level of the system runs the same test. The current heroes keep most of the spend until a challenger beats them on total performance, and the next challenger is already queued.
- Heroes: the tracks, ads or products with the most pull. They get most of the spend, and there can be several, built up across release cycles.
- Challenger: the next candidate, on a small test budget.
- Head-to-head: both run and are judged on total performance (UGC, engagement, Spotify popularity, streams per listener).
- Challenger wins: it gets more spend to chase a new ceiling, and joins the heroes.
- Heroes hold: the challenger retires and the next challenger is queued.
- The same loop runs at every level: ad creative, track, product.
Who this is for
Three shapes of engagement
01
Deep roster, a few artists active
You have 15 to 20 artists and the bandwidth to push two or three at a time. We build the playlist infrastructure once, rotate promoted artists through it, and the rest of the catalog rides along. This is the shape the label layer was designed for.
02
Priority artist under a distributor
One artist, a real budget, and a distributor or label playlist team you want kept in the loop. We run the campaign, collaborate with your curators on playlist construction, and report in a format that goes straight up the chain.
03
Roster-wide TikTok presence
You want consistent fan-account activity across the roster without building the operation in-house. Stan roster packages, reported monthly.
How a month works
What a month looks like
- Step 01
Budget set, guardrail on
Daily budgets sit about 5% under the monthly target so the ad platform’s daily swing lands at or under the number, not over. Any deliberate overage (a release week, a sale window) is flagged first.
- Step 02
Campaigns run
Playlist growth ads, per-artist campaigns, Stan posting, and commerce flows, tracked daily so every call starts from numbers rather than impressions.
- Step 03
Biweekly call
Thirty minutes, decisions made together: budget splits, which artist rotates in next, what to test, and what to cut.
- Step 04
Monthly report + Distributor Summary
Full report for the label: every paid line, per-artist allocation, cost per follower and tracked stream. A one-page Distributor Summary for the distributor.
How we report
Every number traces to a source: ad platform spend, daily Spotify playlist tracking, Spotify for Artists. We report two kinds of results and label them. Directly attributable: ad clicks, playlist follows, and streams on tracked catalog, which we can measure precisely. Correlated: lifts on algorithmic surfaces like Spotify Radio and Discover Weekly that follow a campaign, which we take credit for with the uncertainty stated, not folded into the direct numbers. Cost per stream counts only tracked catalog, so the real figure is better than what we show.
Benchmarks
Benchmarks we hold ourselves to
These are the working ranges from our label work. They are the bands we manage to, not guarantees.
- Cost per playlist follower
- $0.90 to $1.60
- Genre/vibe playlists on Meta. Single-artist playlists run higher by nature.
- Click-to-follow rate
- 40% to 60%
- Share of ad clicks that become playlist followers. Below 40% means the audience is wrong, not the playlist.
- Cost per tracked stream
- $0.11 to $0.25
- Counts only tracked catalog, 28-day window.
- Cost per click to Spotify
- $0.40 to $0.65
- Stan engagement rate
- ~10%
- Roughly 2.5x the TikTok platform average, at about $0.02 per organic view.
If a vendor is quoting you numbers better than these with no methodology attached, ask how they are counting.
Pricing
Pricing
Per-artist pricing is the same as our artist tiers. The label layer applies when more than one artist is in the engagement.
Per promoted artist
$1,000/month
Campaign management for one artist (our Rising+ tier): pre-save, profile, and direct-to-Spotify campaigns, retargeting, and the monthly report. Plus ad spend, typically $1,000 to $1,500 per artist per month, paid to the platform directly or invoiced at cost.
A larger per-artist tier (Breakout+) is available where the budget supports it. Compare the artist tiers
Label layer
$1,000/month
One flat monthly line covering 2 to 8 actively promoted artists, on top of the per-artist pricing above.
Rosters with more than 8 promoted artists are negotiated.
- Playlist infrastructure build and ongoing growth management
- Per-artist spend allocation and label-wide reporting
- Distributor Summary each month
- Release sequencing across the roster
- Biweekly label call
Stan roster packages
TikTok fan accounts across the roster, posting three times a day from dedicated devices, reported monthly.
One-time setup $250 to $1,000 per account, waived with Rising+. About Stan
| Accounts | Monthly |
|---|---|
| 1st account | $600$500 alongside Rising+ |
| 2nd account | $550 |
| 3rd+ accounts | $500 each |
| Label package, up to 8 | $4,000 |
Alongside Rising+: $500 per account at any account count.
Worked example
A three-artist engagement
3 x Rising+ at $1,000, the label layer at $1,000, and 2 Stan accounts at $500 each (the Rising+ rate). Retainer $5,000 a month, plus roughly $3,000 to $4,500 a month in ad spend.
Terms
- Three-month initial build, then month to month.
- Playlists, ad accounts, and Stan accounts are created in your name. We are admins, not owners.
- Ad spend is paid to the platform directly or invoiced at cost. Never marked up.
- If we are outside the benchmark bands by month three, we say so, and you are free to walk.
Distributors
For distributors
If you distribute labels that need marketing support, we can work a few ways. White-label is the usual shape.
White-label
We run the work under your name. Your labels get the same playlist infrastructure, campaigns, and monthly reporting, and your account team gets a Distributor Summary for every label every month without asking for it.
- The contract is with you, the distributor
- You pay a wholesale rate and set your own price to the label or artist
- We bill you; you bill the label or artist
- Three-month minimum initial engagement
- Reports and the Distributor Summary carry your name
Referral
Send us a label and we run the engagement directly under the Barely name. The label gets everything on this page, and you get a monthly Distributor Summary for it.
- $1,000 finder’s fee per signed label, no cap on the number of labels
- Paid once the label has completed its third month of work, as a credit on your account or a direct payment if you are not a client
Custom terms
Don't see what you're looking for? Event partnerships, roster-wide programs, and arrangements that don't fit either shape above are scoped on a call.
Straight talk
- No stream guarantees. Anyone offering them is buying streams or lying about attribution.
- No claiming lifts we did not cause. Correlated algorithmic lifts are labeled as correlated, never folded into direct results. Release, broadcast radio, and editorial effects are reported as context, not results.
- No AI in your artists’ creative. We use it for reporting and operations; the art stays human.
Questions labels ask
Who does the work, and for how many labels at once?
A team of music marketing engineers runs the campaigns, and Stan posting runs on a dedicated posting team with dedicated devices. Adam Barito, who founded Barely NYC, is the account manager on every label engagement and is on your biweekly call. We keep the label roster small enough that the people planning your spend are the people in the ad account.
How is this different from playlist payola?
Payola is paying a curator to place a track. Here the label owns the playlists, we spend on ads to bring real listeners to them, and the follower base stays yours. Nothing is paid to third-party curators and nothing breaks platform terms.
We already have a playlist team or an ad agency.
We work alongside them. Your curators keep editorial control of the playlists while we run the growth ads and the reporting. If an agency runs release-week campaigns, we coordinate so spend is not duplicated, and the Distributor Summary covers both.
Which genres?
Any genre with a real listening audience on Spotify. The playlists are built around the sound of your catalog, so a coherent roster matters more than the genre.
What if two artists share a release week?
Release sequencing is part of the label layer, so two priority singles do not compete for the same audience in the same week. When they have to, each gets its own budget line and the shared playlist spend is allocated by streams, as always.
The playlist base takes about two months to carry a release, so the right time to start is six to eight weeks before your next priority single.
Thirty minutes with Adam Barito, who manages every label engagement. Bring your roster and the two or three artists you would push first. You leave with a proposed playlist set for your catalog, a per-artist budget split, and a first-90-days plan, whether or not you hire us.