The Secret Behind My Cheapest Music Ads: Put Your Song Under an Emotional Scene

My two most unconventional ways of discovering new music are shopping for clothes and rewatching old TV shows.

I know.

When I walk into H&M, I stop and listen before I even look at the shelves. Their playlists are some of the best pop curation you'll hear anywhere, and at some point I caught myself going back more for the music than for anything I needed to buy.

I eventually found their official Spotify playlist and followed it. I still love how differently it hits through the store speakers compared to my headphones, and I can't fully explain why.

The TV thing is less glamorous to admit.

I rewatch shows I've already finished, sometimes seasons I've seen three or four times. And sometimes the music is my main reason for deciding a show is worth my time.

One of the most underrated shows for this is How I Met Your Mother. It has a better ear for song placement than most shows that cost three times as much to make.

I was back in season 5 recently. There's an episode where Ted watches the love of his life marry someone else, with a montage of how she met her husband while Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear plays.

I already knew that song. But that scene and that moment in the song hit me in a way it never had before, and I looked it up the second the episode ended.

Emotion does the heavy lifting

Emotion is what makes everything else work harder than it should.

In politics, in advertising, in cinema and in music, the words and the production don't always move people. The feeling does.

A song you've heard twenty times can become the song of your life the first time it plays at exactly the right moment.

How I use this in music ads

The secret behind the cheapest, most effective ads I've ever run is simple. I attach the music to an emotional scene, and I do it in one of two ways.

1. A scene people already know.

I take a clip from a popular movie or TV show that carries exactly the right emotion, and put the artist's song underneath it. The scene already has the audience's trust, and people already connect it to a feeling. Your music steps into that feeling and takes it on.

2. A scene you film yourself.

I direct the musician to film their own scene. It can be cheap and simple, as long as it's specific and true to what the song is about.

For a breakup song, skip the two people arguing. Film one person sitting in a car who can't bring themselves to start the engine.

For a song about hope, skip the smile. Film someone finally opening a door they've been standing outside of for a long time.

When you get it right, the saves and streams come cheap, and that's exactly what musicians and labels are looking for.

Why most music ads underperform

Most music ads ask people to pay attention to a song they've never heard. The scene makes them feel something first, and then they notice the song is the thing doing it.

How I Met Your Mother figured that out years ago, and it's what the best music supervisors in the world do for a living. You can do the same thing with a phone.

You can see what my campaigns cost on the case studies page. Every person who tapped one of those ads and landed on the song cost between 9 and 65 cents.

If you want to build ads like this yourself, I teach my whole system in Label Level Ads. And if you'd rather hand it over, I can run the ads for your song.

A content idea to try: your friends' reactions

Send a snippet of your new song to your friends and screenshot their reactions. The funnier or more honest, the better.

Then post the screenshots with the song playing in the background. Your audience made the content for you, it shows people connecting with your music, and it promotes the song without feeling like a promotion.