Case Studies

The program budget by line, in the tracker's order. The measured platform media in the rest of this study is the advertising line alone.

Delivery by channel. Google's rate is a view-driven interaction rate, not a click-through rate; TikTok CTR and CPC are on real link clicks.

Each channel keeps the same color everywhere on this site, so the split reads the same way from one study to the next.

The two Spotify Marquee and Showcase flights are left out of this axis and kept in the table above: Marquee and Showcase are priced on listeners by design, at $12.25 across the push, so their CPMs are not comparable with a video or traffic buy.

Platform dashboards as of May 22, 2025; Instagram measured March 21 to April 20 against the prior period, YouTube against the previous 28 days, TikTok and Spotify all-time.

Streams (Luminate, to May 22)

Western Feels 1.4M: first week 215,115, day peak 49,962 on May 10. Wild Horses 118.4K: first week 42,474, day peak 11,981 on release day

Monthly listeners

134.8K against a 100K goal, from a 69.1K base

Playlist adds

Spotify Fresh Finds R&B (Cowboys + Indians, peak 14, 266.4K followers); 7,032 playlist adds attributed to Marquee and Showcase

Spotify Marquee and Showcase

49,317 converted listeners, 43,598 new active listeners, 63,280 saves on $20.3K

TikTok

8.6M video views and 13.3K new followers from 44 posts, led by a 3.7M-view cowboy-life clip

Vinyl

$1,900 of D2C revenue on a $3,000 merch line

Three rates as the store reported them, each against the denominator it was measured on, rather than one funnel recomputed from the other two.

Blended CPM

$0.84 across all paid media (Google $0.27, TikTok $0.63; Marquee and Showcase $12.25 by design, priced on listeners); Google video alone $0.29 to $0.42

Cost per paid video view

$0.0028 (benchmark $0.02 to $0.03)

Cost per click

TikTok $0.032 on a 1.98% CTR (benchmark $0.50 and 1%)

Cost per result

TikTok traffic $0.017; Demand Gen engagement $0.057

Cost per converted Spotify listener

$0.41 blended; $0.36 on Wild Horses, $0.44 on Western Feels; $0.46 per new active listener; $0.32 per save; $2.88 per playlist add

Cost per net new monthly listener

$0.51 on measured media ($33.7K against +65.7K), $0.76 on the full $50K program

Where the money went

60% Spotify Marquee and Showcase, 24% Google, 16% TikTok

• The goal was beaten by a third.

  134.8K monthly listeners against 100K, and the album's 215,115 first-week streams were five times the single's.

• Short flights per song kept Google cheap.

  Five video flights of two to twelve days each ran at $0.23 to $0.42 CPM with 16.7% to 21.6% interaction rates, because each song brought fresh creative into the auction.

• Marquee earned its 60% share.

  $20.3K bought 49,317 converted listeners at $0.41, 43,598 new active listeners and 63,280 saves. On Western Feels a save cost $0.22. For a streaming-first push with no app behind it, that is the right place for the majority of the budget.

• Wild Horses converted cheapest, Western Feels converted most.

  $0.36 per converted listener against $0.44, but the album produced 55% more listeners and fifteen times the saves on roughly twice the spend. The bigger release had the bigger audience to convert.

• TikTok organic did what TikTok paid could not.

  44 owned posts took the account from 13.7K to 8.6M views and one cowboy-life clip did 3.7M on its own, while the paid video-view flights at $2.17 to $4.39 CPM produced far less per dollar than the traffic flights at $0.017 per result.

• Demand Gen is the cheapest engagement in the stack.

  Four flights at a $0.18 blended CPM and $0.057 per engagement result.