Cutting through the noise in the highly competitive music streaming marketplace is no easy matter. Music streaming revenue is projected to reach US$33.59bn in 2024, and the number of users globally is expected to reach 1.2 billion by 2029.

Like many industries, performance marketing is essential for delivering growth in the music streaming sector. However, knowing where to focus in an ever-changing digital landscape can be complex. In this session, SoundCloud and M&C Saatchi Performance will showcase three key ways they have delivered growth through performance marketing and how their partnership has adapted and grown to meet ever-changing consumer needs.

Context: The M&C Saatchi Performance team has been working with SoundCloud since 2021, both on ‘Artist’ campaigns, which attract new creators and musicians to stream their music on the platform, and ‘Fan’ campaigns, which aim to acquire new subscribers and monetize the SoundCloud app. The business and agency objective is to help influence and drive continual growth for SoundCloud, and in this session, the presenters will cover:

Three essential strategies for growth:

• The power of harnessing SKAN, eg
  • Why harnessing SKAN was essential
  • How teams implemented this change and why iteration is essential. Results, e.g., after making changes, there was a 17% increase in conversions as the framework leveraged more upper funnel metrics, allowing for greater data fidelity within more granular conversion reporting.
• The challenge of a business with a two-sided marketplace
  • How Fan & Artist are opposite sides of the same growth coin
  • The power of subscriber models, steps for success, learnings, and impact
• The power of building lasting partnerships
  • How the teams changed the dynamic between client and agency based on needs (creative, strategy, and execution)
  • How priorities shift as a business matures into profitability and searches for seed funding

In this presentation, Katrina Nguyen, SoundCloud's Manager of Campaign Management, and Jonathan Yantz, M&C Saatchi Performance's managing partner, will examine how a test-and-learn approach ensures the delivery of KPIs across channels.

They will cover:

• How to prepare a SKAN conversion schema
• Requirements for setting up complex models, what data was needed, what were the timeframes, etc
• Why developing a test-and-learn approach is essential
• How to build powerful partnerships, the importance of trust, etc

In this panel presentation, attendees will learn:

• The importance of understanding your audience. For example, 50% of gamers listen to music for more than 11 hours weekly.
• The interplay of Artist and Fan Acquisition
• How to prepare a SKAN conversion schema