The popular TechCrunch podcast Equity this week launched a new series called Equity Dive, wherein a host interviews the writer of the latest edition of the Extra Crunch EC-1.

If you’ve ever wanted to know everything there is to know about Patreon, the platform that connects creators with fans and their wallets, then this is the show for you. TechCrunch Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos speaks with Eric Peckham who spent hours upon hours meeting with the Patreon team to learn its origin story and the ins and outs of its business practices to get the company to where it is today.

As Eric says:

The way to think about how Patreon has evolved is I see it in kind of three stages, which was this initial crowd funding platform, and then evolving beyond that to try and be a destination platform for consumers where there would be great content that you just go to Patreon to find and you go to discover creators, kind of a marketplace model. They moved away from that. That was somewhat of a gradual shift and essentially the decision was it’s not good to be stuck in this game of trying to be yet another destination platform for consumers competing with YouTube and Instagram and every single media site out there. Really the opportunity and mission underlies our work is about helping creators and enabling all these independent creators to sustain themselves and to build thriving businesses.

They shifted, they now describe themselves as a SaaS company actually, which is very different from framing yourself as kind of a consumer destination. The long and short of it is they see this opportunity, which is a growing market of independent creators around the world who are building fan bases, and for that particular type of SMB they want to provide essentially the full suite of tools and services that they need to run their businesses.

For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Connie Loizos: Hi, I’m Connie Loizos and I’d like to welcome you to our first Equity Dive. Once a month we’re going to be dedicating an entire episode to a deep dive into the life of one company. This month I’m joined by Eric Peckham, who has reported extensively on the crowd funding membership platform Patreon. Hi Eric.

Eric Peckham: Hey Connie, excited to be here for the first Equity Dive.

Connie Loizos: Same, so Eric you and I ran into each other first in Berlin but we don’t know each other very well. I’d love to hear more about you. You’re based in LA, and from what I understand you are a media industry analyst. Is that correct?

Eric Peckham: Yes, so I cover through both my own newsletter Monetizing Media, the happenings of the global media and entertainment industry. It’s kind of a very business minded lens on media and entertainment.

Connie Loizos: Well I read your extensive coverage on Patreon and it was really impressive, and I wondered considering how much you wrote, is this sort of a long interest of yours this company or how did you decide to settle on this for your first deep dive for TechCrunch?

Eric Peckham: Yes, it was an exciting process digging into this. We made a short list of exciting companies, a lot of unicorn companies or late stage startups we thought were about to become unicorns, and Patreon jumped out for a number of reasons. One is as someone who runs his own newsletter I have had subscribers to that newsletter suggest creating a Patreon. I’ve looked into it before, so I had a little bit of a creator perspective of just wanting to better understand Patreon and other options in the market. I think from a bigger picture, more of a Silicon Valley perspective, Patreon’s a really fascinating company. They’ve raised over $100 million from top PC firms like Index, CRV, they’re the dominant player in this space they’re targeting, but it’s kind of them versus just the big social media platforms. There isn’t the startup that’s comparable in size to it and it’s really trying to own this whole territory of independent content creators, surveying them with different business tools or services.

Connie Loizos: It is really interesting to think the David and Goliath story involves a $100 million venture backed startup versus, as you say, I know these big players Facebook, YouTube. Let’s start at the beginning, so you decided on Patreon for reasons that I can certainly understand now. How did you set about pitching them on this idea? Because obviously you were going to need a lot of access to them, a lot of their time.

Editor’s note: This post is a part of our latest initiative to demystify design and find the best brand designers and agencies in the world who work with early-stage companies — nominate a talented brand designer you’ve worked with.

During a decade as the manager of the in-house design team at open source technology company Red Hat, Chris Grams learned that brand design is best when informed by a company’s culture and community.

He felt a natural push toward an open, collaborative attitude, distinct from how many companies approached design at that time. It was the early 2000s, and most companies saw their interactions with customers as a one-way street. In open source, it was an intersection.

“You almost break down the company and the community of people who surround the brand,” says Grams, currently head of marketing at Tidelift, an open source software management firm, and author of The Ad-Free Brand. “Now it feels like pretty standard operating procedure for the best brands that have the best relationship with their communities.”

This shift has a large influence on the question of when you should hire an in-house designer versus a contractor to do your branding design.

Three reasons to go in-house

After leaving Red Hat in 2009, Grams helped start New Kind, a branding agency that provides contract design services mostly to tech companies. This new vantage point allowed him to see drawbacks and advantages for companies in outsourcing design versus bringing it in-house.

One of the key benefits of in-housing is the designer’s intimacy with the deeply held values and culture of the company, which makes their branding work feel more authentic.

“The internal agency’s power really reveals itself when people are deeply part of the mission of the company,” says Grams. “It comes through in the work. You get an amazing work product.”

The second benefit, especially for tech companies, is the depth of understanding in-house designers can develop about the company’s products and services. And the third is that a dedicated in-house designer can be directed as needed to respond to pressing priorities.

“You can have them stop on a dime,” says Grams. “Say a competitor comes out with a big launch and you need to have something out within 24 hours. You can work on it right away.”

These are real benefits, but they may not outweigh the advantages of contracting out your design to a high-quality agency

The benefits of using an agency

A major benefit of an agency is that you can hire people with a level of expertise and variety of skills that would be out of reach for an in-house team. When Grams was at New Kind, for example, “we had a combined 30 years of experience with open source branding work,” he says

An agency can also provide the bandwidth to take on non-priority tasks such as a rebrand or a special series that in-house teams are often too work-strapped to take on.

Hiring an agency also has advantages in terms of flexibility and cost. The ability to customize the timing and amount of design work to your needs can be less expensive over time, even if each working hour is more expensive.

“You can ramp down and ramp up with an agency,” says Grams. “It’s impossible to do that with people… You’re paying that extra margin to have that flexibility.”

There’s a lot to think about, but Grams advises prioritizing the need for your design to be authentic to your culture… or not.

“I think the biggest thing is the power of your culture, frankly,” says Grams. “If you have a company where culture is not an asset, I would not build an in-house design team… But if you’re building a mission-driven organization or an organization where culture is super important, that’s where I would take an extra-long look at building an internal agency.”

Zoom, the only profitable unicorn in line to go public, priced its initial public offering at between $28 and $32 per share Monday morning. The video conferencing business plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “ZM.”

Zoom, valued at $1 billion in 2017, initially filed to go public in March. According to its amended IPO filing, the company will raise up to $348.1 million by selling 10.9 million Class A shares. The offering will grant Zoom a fully diluted market value of $8.7 billion, a more than 8x increase to its latest private market valuation.

Although the company has garnered praise for its stellar financials — Zoom posted $330 million in revenue in the year ending January 31, 2019, a remarkable 2x increase year-over-year, with a gross profit of $269.5 million — the road to IPO hasn’t been without hiccups.

The company’s founder and chief executive officer Eric Yuan last night published an open letter concerning the conduct of Zoom’s chief financial officer Kelley Steckelberg. According to the letter, Zoom was recently informed by an anonymous source that Steckelberg had an “undisclosed, consensual relationship” during her tenure at a previous employer.

Steckelberg was most recently the CEO of the online dating site Zoosk; before that, she was a senior director in consumer finance at Cisco . The letter does not specify where the relationship took place, when or with whom.

Losing a CFO mere days before an IPO would have been a major loss for Zoom. CFOs often become the face of the IPO, handling the grueling tasks associated with crafting an IPO prospectus, leading the roadshow and more, while also maintaining day-to-day financial operations.

Yuan writes that the Zoom’s board of directors conducted a full investigation into the matter and determined that Steckelberg would stay on as Zoom’s CFO: “Kelly expressed regret for what transpired at her former employer, took ownership for the situation, and made clear to us that she had learned valuable lessons from the experience,” he wrote.

“We appreciated Kelly’s openness and candor during this process,” he continued. “It is clear that this matter related only to circumstances at her former employer. During Kelly’s tenure at Zoom, she has been an incredible contributor, as well as a model steward of our culture, values, and high standards since joining the Company.”

We reached out to Zoosk for comment. Zoom declined to comment further.

Zoom, expected to make the final call on its IPO price next Wednesday, will likely price at the top of range and see a clean pop on its first day on the markets given its clean track record and positive financials. The business was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, an early engineer at WebEx, which sold to Cisco for $3.2 billion in 2007. Before launching Zoom, he spent four years at Cisco as its vice president of engineering.

Zoom has raised $145 million to date from investors including Emergence Capital, which owns a 12.2 percent pre-IPO stake, Sequoia Capital (11.1 percent pre-IPO stake); Digital Mobile Venture (8.5 percent), a fund affiliated with former Zoom board member Samuel Chen; and Bucantini Enterprises Limited (5.9 percent), a fund owned by Li Ka-shing, a Chinese billionaire and among the richest people in the world.

Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are leading its offering.

Boston University grad students analyzed more than four million pitches from 11 seasons of Major League Baseball (2008-2018), and the findings aren’t great for human umpires. According to the study, umps made 34,294 incorrect ball and strike calls in 2018. That works out to 14 blown calls per game and 1.6 per inning.

It’s not a huge number, compared to the 162 games each of the league’s 30 teams play in a given regular season, but it’s enough to give pause — and to confirm the suspicions that many irate spectators have had for years.

The study notes that the average age of MLB umps is 46, with with an average of 13 years’ experience. Each season, umps call around 4,200 pitches behind the plate. Interestingly, the findings suggest that younger, less experienced umpires tend to outperform vets.

The frequency of incorrect calls, perhaps unsurprisingly, tends to vary based on the nature of the play. Again, anyone who’s followed the game with any sort of frequency likely already had their suspicion that umps favor either the pitcher or batter, based on who’s leading in a count.

“Research results demonstrate that umpires in certain circumstances overwhelmingly favored the pitcher over the batter,” according to the study. “For a batter with a two-strike count, umpires were twice as likely to call a true ball a strike (29 percent of the time) than when the count was lower (15 percent).”

Notably, the news comes a month after the MLB announced that it would be exploring the use of robotic umps Atlantic League minors, with an eye on potentially implementing the technology in the majors at some point. The subject has gained prominence in recent years as baseball broadcasts now include a visualization of the strike zone.

Twitter just took another big step to help boot spammers off its platform: it’s cutting the number of accounts Twitter users can follow, from 1,000 per day to just 400. The idea with the new limits is that it helps prevent spammers from rapidly growing their networks by following then unfollowing Twitter accounts in a “bulk, aggressive or indiscriminate manner” – something that’s a violation of the Twitter Rules.

A number of services were recently banned from Twitter’s API for doing this same thing.

Several companies had been offering tools that allowed their customers to automatically follow a large number of users with little effort. This works as a growth tactic because some people will follow back out of courtesy, without realizing they’ve followed a bot.

The companies also offered tools to mass unfollow the Twitter accounts of those who didn’t return the favor by following the bot back. Other automated tools were often provided, as well –  like ones for creating those annoying auto-DMs, for example.

Twitter at the beginning of the year suspended a good handful of apps for violating its rules around “following and follow churn.” But booting the companies only addressed those that aimed profit by providing spammy automations as a service that others could use.

To really take on the spammers, the limits around how many people Twitter users can follow also had to be changed at the API level.

However, some people believe Twitter hasn’t gone far enough with today’s move.

In response to Twitter’s tweet about the new limits, several have responded to ask why the number “400” was chosen, as that still far more than a regular Twitter user would need to follow in a single day. Some users said it took years to get to the point of following hundreds of people. Meanwhile, the business use case for following 400 people is somewhat debatable, since DMs can be left open and companies can tweet a special URL to send customers to their inbox to continue a conversation – no following or unfollowing needed on either side.

While smaller businesses may still employ mass following techniques to attract customers, this at least puts more of a cap on those efforts.

These new limits and the spam dealer crackdown aren’t the only changes Twitter has taken in recent months to tackle the spam problem on its platform.

The company also updated its reporting tools to allow users to report spam, like fake accounts; and it introduced new security measures around account verification and sign-up, alongside other changes focused on more proactively identifying spammers. Last summer, Twitter also purged accounts it had previously locked for being spammy from people’s follower metrics.

Combined, the series of actions is designed to make spamming Twitter less attractive and considerably more difficult to scale. This impacts not only those who use spam for capital gain but also the new wave of fake news peddlers looking to topple democracies and disrupt elections – something that now has the U.S. government considering increased regulations for social media.

The short-term impact of these changes could be a drop in Twitter’s monthly user growth (a number Twitter recently stopped sharing), but it’s a bet on the long-term health of the platform instead.

The San Francisco-based startup Branch International, which makes small personal loans in emerging markets, has raised $170 million and announced a partnership with Visa to offer virtual, pre-paid debit cards to Branch client networks in Africa, South-Asia, and Latin America. 

Branch—which has 150 employees in San Francisco, Lagos, Nairobi, Mexico City and Mumbai—makes loans starting at $2 to individuals in emerging and frontier markets. The company also uses an algorithmic model to determine credit worthiness, build credit profiles, and offer liquidity via mobile phones.

“We’ll use [the money] to deepen existing business in Africa. Later this year we’ll announce high-yield savings accounts…in Africa,” says Branch co-founder and chief executive Matt Flannery.

The $170 million round from Foundation Capital and its new debit card partner, Visa, will support Branch’s international expansion, which could include Brazil and Indonesia, according to Flannery. Branch launched in Mexico and India within the last year. In Africa, it offers its services in Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

A potential Branch customer

The Branch-Visa partnership will allow individuals to obtain virtual Visa accounts with which to create accounts on Branch’s app. This gives Branch larger reach in countries such as Nigeria — Africa’s most populous with 190 million people — where cards have factored more prominently than mobile money in connecting unbanked and underbanked populations to finance.

Founded in 2015, Branch started operating in Kenya, where mobile money payment products such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa (which does not require a card or bank account to use), have scaled significantly. M-Pesa now has 25 million users, according to sector stats released by the Communications Authority of Kenya. Branch has over 3 million customers, has processed 13 million loans, and disbursed over 350 million, according to company stats.

Branch has one of the most downloaded fintech apps in Africa, per Google Play app numbers combined for Nigeria and Kenya, according to Branch CEO Matt Flannery.

Already profitable, Branch International expects to reach $100 million in revenues this year, with roughly 70 percent of that generated in Africa, according to Flannery.

In addition to Visa and Foundation Capital the $170 Series C round included participation from Branch’s existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Trinity Ventures, Formation 8, the IFC, CreditEase, and Victory Park, while adding new investors Greenspring, Foxhaven, and B Capital.

Branch last raised $70 million in 2018. The company’s overall VC haul and $100 million revenue peg register as pretty big numbers for a startup focused primarily on Africa. Pan-African e-commerce startup Jumia, who also announced its NYSE IPO last month, generated $140 million in revenue (without profitability) in 2018.

Startups building financial technologies for Africa’s 1.2 billion population have gained the attention of investors. As a sector, fintech (or financial inclusion) attracted 50 percent of the estimated $1.1 billion funding to African startups in 2018, according to Partech

Branch’s recent round and plans to add countries internationally also tracks a trend of fintech related products growing in Africa, then expanding outward. This includes M-Pesa, which generated big numbers in Kenya before operating in 10 countries around the world. Nigerian payments startup Paga announced its pending expansion in Asia and Mexico late last year. And payment services, such as Kenya’s SimbaPay, have also connected to global networks like China’s WeChat.

Spotify is launching new analytics tools to help artists and their teams better understand how well their ads are working. The company today says it’s rolling out new streaming conversion metrics that will show how Spotify listeners reacted to a particular ad campaign – whether they clicked through to listen, saved the music, or added it to a playlist for example.

The new tools can also detail whether they campaign did better with existing fans who have been streaming the music already, or if an ad worked to hook new fans.

The conversation metrics are being introduced to the Spotify Ad Studio. First launched in 2017, the ad studio is a self-serve platform allows artists and their labels to share their music by way of short, 30-second or less audio ads that are played for the free users on the Spotify app. These ads are served during ad breaks between songs, and offer an image and URL for a single of the artist’s choosing.

Artists can also use the platform to create ads for concerts, merchandise, and other non-music content.

Before, the Ad Studio’s metrics offered general insights – like the age, gender or genre preferences of the audience being served the ad, for example, and how many clicks the ad was seeing.

But labels and their artist teams have been asking for more.

They didn’t want to just see who was clicking and how many clicks, but also what happened next – including whether ads were working to turn listeners into fans who take some action, like saving a song or adding it to a playlist. Those sorts of actions indicate the user plans to listen again. This is particularly important to emerging artists who are trying to grow their fan base, and rely on ads to get the word out.

“This is the reporting we’ve been wanting to see,” said Jimmy Brunetti, VP of Marketing at independent label services company Croshal Entertainment Group, in a release. “I really like how it gives us an indication about how our ads drive deeper actions. That’s promising for an artist, especially newer artists with room to grow.”

“With Spotify’s new advertising capabilities, we’re getting insight into not just how our campaign is resulting in streams, but deeper actions for an artist like how those listeners are turning into fans and adding a song to their playlist or hearting a song. Those are the holy grail of metrics for an artist to know,” added Conor Clarke, CEO and co-founder of Wavo, a music marketing agency that worked with Rich the Kid.

Using the new tools, the agency said they were able to see that 38 percent of people who heard the ad went on to listen to the artist, and nearly 20 percent of those listeners streamed his music for the first time that month.

The new ad tools are the latest of several releases focused on giving artists more control. This, in turn, helps to keep artists using Spotify as their main platform for reaching music listeners, growing their fan base, and boosting their popularity – and more broadly, their revenues.

In September 2018, Spotify announced indie artists could upload their own tracks. It then launched a playlist submission feature that would help artist flag their songs for editorial consideration and took a stake in music distribution service DistroKid to make cross-platform uploads easier.

More recently, the company turned some of the programmed playlists over to its personalization algorithms – meaning, users would each see their own version of things like “Happy Hits” or “Dance Party,” for example. As a result, artists can now grab a custom URL pointing to these personalized versions of the playlist, in order to share the playlist on social media and elsewhere.

Spotify is launching new analytics tools to help artists and their teams better understand how well their ads are working. The company today says it’s rolling out new streaming conversion metrics that will show how Spotify listeners reacted to a particular ad campaign – whether they clicked through to listen, saved the music, or added it to a playlist for example.

The new tools can also detail whether they campaign did better with existing fans who have been streaming the music already, or if an ad worked to hook new fans.

The conversation metrics are being introduced to the Spotify Ad Studio. First launched in 2017, the ad studio is a self-serve platform allows artists and their labels to share their music by way of short, 30-second or less audio ads that are played for the free users on the Spotify app. These ads are served during ad breaks between songs, and offer an image and URL for a single of the artist’s choosing.

Artists can also use the platform to create ads for concerts, merchandise, and other non-music content.

Before, the Ad Studio’s metrics offered general insights – like the age, gender or genre preferences of the audience being served the ad, for example, and how many clicks the ad was seeing.

But labels and their artist teams have been asking for more.

They didn’t want to just see who was clicking and how many clicks, but also what happened next – including whether ads were working to turn listeners into fans who take some action, like saving a song or adding it to a playlist. Those sorts of actions indicate the user plans to listen again. This is particularly important to emerging artists who are trying to grow their fan base, and rely on ads to get the word out.

“This is the reporting we’ve been wanting to see,” said Jimmy Brunetti, VP of Marketing at independent label services company Croshal Entertainment Group, in a release. “I really like how it gives us an indication about how our ads drive deeper actions. That’s promising for an artist, especially newer artists with room to grow.”

“With Spotify’s new advertising capabilities, we’re getting insight into not just how our campaign is resulting in streams, but deeper actions for an artist like how those listeners are turning into fans and adding a song to their playlist or hearting a song. Those are the holy grail of metrics for an artist to know,” added Conor Clarke, CEO and co-founder of Wavo, a music marketing agency that worked with Rich the Kid.

Using the new tools, the agency said they were able to see that 38 percent of people who heard the ad went on to listen to the artist, and nearly 20 percent of those listeners streamed his music for the first time that month.

The new ad tools are the latest of several releases focused on giving artists more control. This, in turn, helps to keep artists using Spotify as their main platform for reaching music listeners, growing their fan base, and boosting their popularity – and more broadly, their revenues.

In September 2018, Spotify announced indie artists could upload their own tracks. It then launched a playlist submission feature that would help artist flag their songs for editorial consideration and took a stake in music distribution service DistroKid to make cross-platform uploads easier.

More recently, the company turned some of the programmed playlists over to its personalization algorithms – meaning, users would each see their own version of things like “Happy Hits” or “Dance Party,” for example. As a result, artists can now grab a custom URL pointing to these personalized versions of the playlist, in order to share the playlist on social media and elsewhere.

Spotify is launching new analytics tools to help artists and their teams better understand how well their ads are working. The company today says it’s rolling out new streaming conversion metrics that will show how Spotify listeners reacted to a particular ad campaign – whether they clicked through to listen, saved the music, or added it to a playlist for example.

The new tools can also detail whether they campaign did better with existing fans who have been streaming the music already, or if an ad worked to hook new fans.

The conversation metrics are being introduced to the Spotify Ad Studio. First launched in 2017, the ad studio is a self-serve platform allows artists and their labels to share their music by way of short, 30-second or less audio ads that are played for the free users on the Spotify app. These ads are served during ad breaks between songs, and offer an image and URL for a single of the artist’s choosing.

Artists can also use the platform to create ads for concerts, merchandise, and other non-music content.

Before, the Ad Studio’s metrics offered general insights – like the age, gender or genre preferences of the audience being served the ad, for example, and how many clicks the ad was seeing.

But labels and their artist teams have been asking for more.

They didn’t want to just see who was clicking and how many clicks, but also what happened next – including whether ads were working to turn listeners into fans who take some action, like saving a song or adding it to a playlist. Those sorts of actions indicate the user plans to listen again. This is particularly important to emerging artists who are trying to grow their fan base, and rely on ads to get the word out.

“This is the reporting we’ve been wanting to see,” said Jimmy Brunetti, VP of Marketing at independent label services company Croshal Entertainment Group, in a release. “I really like how it gives us an indication about how our ads drive deeper actions. That’s promising for an artist, especially newer artists with room to grow.”

“With Spotify’s new advertising capabilities, we’re getting insight into not just how our campaign is resulting in streams, but deeper actions for an artist like how those listeners are turning into fans and adding a song to their playlist or hearting a song. Those are the holy grail of metrics for an artist to know,” added Conor Clarke, CEO and co-founder of Wavo, a music marketing agency that worked with Rich the Kid.

Using the new tools, the agency said they were able to see that 38 percent of people who heard the ad went on to listen to the artist, and nearly 20 percent of those listeners streamed his music for the first time that month.

The new ad tools are the latest of several releases focused on giving artists more control. This, in turn, helps to keep artists using Spotify as their main platform for reaching music listeners, growing their fan base, and boosting their popularity – and more broadly, their revenues.

In September 2018, Spotify announced indie artists could upload their own tracks. It then launched a playlist submission feature that would help artist flag their songs for editorial consideration and took a stake in music distribution service DistroKid to make cross-platform uploads easier.

More recently, the company turned some of the programmed playlists over to its personalization algorithms – meaning, users would each see their own version of things like “Happy Hits” or “Dance Party,” for example. As a result, artists can now grab a custom URL pointing to these personalized versions of the playlist, in order to share the playlist on social media and elsewhere.

Spotify is launching new analytics tools to help artists and their teams better understand how well their ads are working. The company today says it’s rolling out new streaming conversion metrics that will show how Spotify listeners reacted to a particular ad campaign – whether they clicked through to listen, saved the music, or added it to a playlist for example.

The new tools can also detail whether they campaign did better with existing fans who have been streaming the music already, or if an ad worked to hook new fans.

The conversation metrics are being introduced to the Spotify Ad Studio. First launched in 2017, the ad studio is a self-serve platform allows artists and their labels to share their music by way of short, 30-second or less audio ads that are played for the free users on the Spotify app. These ads are served during ad breaks between songs, and offer an image and URL for a single of the artist’s choosing.

Artists can also use the platform to create ads for concerts, merchandise, and other non-music content.

Before, the Ad Studio’s metrics offered general insights – like the age, gender or genre preferences of the audience being served the ad, for example, and how many clicks the ad was seeing.

But labels and their artist teams have been asking for more.

They didn’t want to just see who was clicking and how many clicks, but also what happened next – including whether ads were working to turn listeners into fans who take some action, like saving a song or adding it to a playlist. Those sorts of actions indicate the user plans to listen again. This is particularly important to emerging artists who are trying to grow their fan base, and rely on ads to get the word out.

“This is the reporting we’ve been wanting to see,” said Jimmy Brunetti, VP of Marketing at independent label services company Croshal Entertainment Group, in a release. “I really like how it gives us an indication about how our ads drive deeper actions. That’s promising for an artist, especially newer artists with room to grow.”

“With Spotify’s new advertising capabilities, we’re getting insight into not just how our campaign is resulting in streams, but deeper actions for an artist like how those listeners are turning into fans and adding a song to their playlist or hearting a song. Those are the holy grail of metrics for an artist to know,” added Conor Clarke, CEO and co-founder of Wavo, a music marketing agency that worked with Rich the Kid.

Using the new tools, the agency said they were able to see that 38 percent of people who heard the ad went on to listen to the artist, and nearly 20 percent of those listeners streamed his music for the first time that month.

The new ad tools are the latest of several releases focused on giving artists more control. This, in turn, helps to keep artists using Spotify as their main platform for reaching music listeners, growing their fan base, and boosting their popularity – and more broadly, their revenues.

In September 2018, Spotify announced indie artists could upload their own tracks. It then launched a playlist submission feature that would help artist flag their songs for editorial consideration and took a stake in music distribution service DistroKid to make cross-platform uploads easier.

More recently, the company turned some of the programmed playlists over to its personalization algorithms – meaning, users would each see their own version of things like “Happy Hits” or “Dance Party,” for example. As a result, artists can now grab a custom URL pointing to these personalized versions of the playlist, in order to share the playlist on social media and elsewhere.