Spotify unveiled its ‘Countdown Pages’ feature in March 2023: individual pages on its service for upcoming albums where fans could pre-save, watch video clips, pre-order merch and browse tracklists. Since launching later in 2023, the feature has only been available to artists chosen by Spotify to test it out. Now it has opened up to a much broader swathe of musicians: anyone who’s had at least 5,000 active listeners in the last 28 days.
Spotify’s global head of Spotify for Artists, marketing and policy Sam Duboff said this expansion would make countdown pages available to “hundreds of thousands of artists”, with Spotify keen to encourage them to use the feature. It has published some stats to persuade them. According to Spotify, nearly 70% of people who pre-save an album go on to stream it in the first week after its release.
Meanwhile, artists who’ve uploaded short videos using the company’s ‘Clips’ feature to their countdown pages averaged double the pre-saves of artists who didn’t, according to a Spotify study of 500 musicians who got early access to the latter tool.
Secretly Group is one of the music companies that got early access to countdown pages on Spotify. In an interview with Music Ally, its global director of streaming and digital sales Emily Puterbaugh talked about the impact the tool has had on its artists. “On recent campaigns, countdown pages have generated anywhere from six to 30 times more Spotify pre-saves than our off-platform buy links,” she said. “On average, we’ve found 70% of pre-savers went on to stream the album in week one, which has been instrumental in helping us reach our charting goals.”
