By Jonathan Estabrooks, Co-Founder of Emitha
The conversation around music streaming has changed. Independent artists are no longer asking only how to get more streams, they’re asking which streams actually matter.
As Spotify and other platforms become better at identifying artificial activity and rewarding authentic listener engagement, sustainable growth increasingly comes from understanding audiences rather than chasing shortcuts.
At Emitha Marketing, we've worked with more than 500 artists across opera, jazz, Broadway, indie rock, and pop, helping generate more than 1 billion verified, bot-free streams. The biggest lesson has been simple: long-term success comes from real listeners behaving naturally — not from gaming algorithms.
The music industry has long celebrated headline numbers: millions of streams, viral spikes, and massive playlists. Yet after hundreds of campaigns, we've seen that impressive totals often fail to translate into lasting careers.
Some releases generate enormous streaming numbers but little follower growth, few saves, and almost no long-term momentum. Others produce fewer streams while building loyal audiences that return again and again.
No one outside Spotify knows exactly how its recommendation systems work, but one pattern has remained remarkably consistent. Authentic engagement appears to matter far more than raw volume. A stream is only the beginning. What matters next is whether listeners finish the song, save it, explore the artist's catalog, follow the profile, and come back later.
Those actions signal genuine interest.
Ironically, Emitha was founded after co-founder John Riesen experienced the downside of artificial promotion firsthand. In 2020, a playlist promotion company used fraudulent tactics without his knowledge, ultimately leading to his music being removed from Spotify. That experience exposed how many artists were being sold inflated statistics instead of real audiences.
Rather than chasing shortcuts, we focused on connecting artists with listeners who were already likely to enjoy their music. Campaigns emphasized steady audience development instead of short-lived spikes.
Across genres, the campaigns that performed best weren't always attached to the biggest budgets. They were the ones where listeners behaved naturally: listening length, save rate, following artists, and returning days later.
+Read more: "The Label Model Is Training Artists Not to Need Labels"
The results looked remarkably similar across very different artists.
- Baritone and GRAMMY® winning baritone Will Liverman saw more than one million new streams alongside a 17-fold increase in listeners and a 19-fold increase in streams by reaching audiences already engaged with classical vocal music.
- EMMY® nominated concert pianist Marina Arsenijevic generated more than 6.5 million streams with a 48× increase in listeners and a 60× increase in streams through the same principle: relevance over reach.Jazz artists showed the same pattern.
- Actor and singer (The Office, Happy Days) Linda Purl's campaign focused on reconnecting with jazz and cabaret listeners rather than chasing viral exposure, resulting in an 18× increase in streams.
- Pianist and composer Ben Rosenblum's Nebula Project added nearly 900,000 streams and an 11× increase in streaming activity by reaching existing jazz audiences.
These campaigns reinforced an important lesson: sustainable growth comes from the right audience, not the biggest one. The metrics that consistently predicted long-term success weren't total streams but save rates, repeat listening, follower growth, and eventually increases in algorithmic recommendations such as Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Radio, and Autoplay.
The first stream is discovery. The second and third streams are the beginning of fandom.
After one billion verified, bot-free streams, the lesson isn't that there's a secret to Spotify. It's that there isn't one. Sustainable growth comes from putting great music in front of the right listeners and giving them a reason to come back.
As streaming platforms continue to evolve, artists who build lasting careers won't necessarily be the ones with the biggest launch week — they'll be the ones who earn the second listen, then the third.
Those are the signals no shortcut can manufacture, and they're the foundation of every enduring audience we've seen.
+Read more: "Streams Don’t Build Careers: Fans Do"
Jonathan Estabrooks is the Co-Founder of Emitha, a music marketing and production company dedicated to helping independent artists grow through ethical, data-driven promotion. A GRAMMY®-nominated producer, filmmaker, and graduate of The Juilliard School, Estabrooks has spent more than 20 years producing, mixing, and directing award-winning music projects while working with artists across classical, jazz, Broadway, and contemporary genres.
