Marquee, Showcase and Discovery Mode: Spotify's paid promotion options compared

Spotify sells promotion to artists in three ways, and they work differently. Marquee and Showcase are ads you pay for by the click. Discovery Mode costs nothing upfront and takes its fee out of your royalties instead. All three sit in the Campaigns tab of Spotify for Artists, and all three are measured by Spotify's own reports. You are trusting the seller to mark its own homework. Here is what each costs, who can use it, and which numbers tell you whether the money came back.

What are the three options?

• Marquee is a full-screen pop-up in the Spotify mobile app, for new releases only. It must start within 21 days of release and runs for 10 days or until the budget is spent.
• Showcase is a banner on Home (desktop and mobile) and Browse (mobile). It works for new or catalogue releases, can run at any time, and lasts 14 days or until the budget runs out.
• Discovery Mode lets you flag priority songs, and Spotify adds that signal to the algorithms behind personalised playlists. Spotify says this makes a recommendation more likely but does not guarantee one. The flag only works in what Spotify calls Discovery Mode contexts: Radio, Autoplay, and the Daily, Artist, Mood, Decade and Genre Mixes.

Spotify groups Marquee and Showcase as "display campaigns".

What does each one cost?

Display campaigns take a budget of $100 to $10,000, or the same in local currency. The minimum rises to $250 if you book Marquee through Spotify's local representatives. You pay per click, and saves count as clicks. Spotify publishes no rate card and says prices depend on audience and market. It also says it can't guarantee your whole budget will be spent, and you can't raise a budget once a campaign is live. Your card is charged daily as you reach a billing threshold. Since 23 February 2026, campaigns spread spend across the whole run by default ("standard pacing"), but you can still choose accelerated pacing.

Discovery Mode has no budget. Spotify applies a 30% commission to recording royalties from streams of the selected songs in Discovery Mode contexts. All other streams of those songs are commission-free. The cost comes out of future statements. Campaigns run month by month. You set them up between the 11th and midnight UTC on the last day of the month, and they start on the 1st. The default duration is "Ongoing", which renews every month until you change it.

Who is eligible?

Sources: display eligibility, Discovery Mode eligibility.

A few details are easy to miss:

• Marquee's window is shorter than it looks. The official window is 21 days, but Spotify's target-markets page says Marquee may be unavailable once a release has been live for 18 days or more in that market. Book it in release week.
• The Discovery Mode distributor list is fixed. Self-serve access needs one of 20 named licensors, including DistroKid, CD Baby, LANDR, UnitedMasters and Amuse. Songs by any artist with an AI Persona badge are excluded.
• India is missing from all three lists. None of the three country lists Spotify publishes included it when we checked: the display campaign team countries, the display target markets, and the Discovery Mode countries. A team registered in India can't buy these tools directly, and display campaigns also need a payment card issued in a listed country.

How do you tell whether it worked?

For display campaigns, go to Campaigns, then Display, then pick the campaign. Results appear 24 hours after launch, and final figures arrive two weeks after it ends. Spotify tracks each listener for 14 days after they see the campaign, and you can download a CSV. The four figures that matter:

1. Converted listeners: people who chose to stream the release after seeing the campaign.
2. Conversion rate: converted listeners as a share of people reached.
3. Active streams per listener: how many times converted listeners intentionally streamed the release.
4. Intent rate: the share of converted listeners who saved the release or added it to a playlist.

Divide spend by converted listeners to get a cost per converted listener. That is our metric, not Spotify's, but you can compare it across campaigns and against other ads. Match it to your audience goal as well. A "grow" campaign should be judged on new active listeners, a "deepen" campaign on amplified listeners (people already in your audience who streamed this release for the first time), and a "reactivate" campaign on reactivated listeners.

For Discovery Mode, the report starts on day 11 of each campaign. The key figure is campaign stream lift. Spotify estimates it with a machine learning model of how your songs would have performed without Discovery Mode, and it is available only for songs with at least 500 streams in Discovery Mode contexts the previous month. Historical lift compares against the 28 days before a song's first campaign. Spotify itself warns that organic trends and your other marketing can skew the results.

Here is the test we'd apply. Because you keep 70% of royalties on Discovery Mode streams, streams in those contexts must rise by about 43% (1 ÷ 0.7) before you earn more there than you did without it. If campaign stream lift is below that, you are paying Spotify to reach listeners Radio and Autoplay might have served you anyway. Any extra organic streams elsewhere, which Spotify says Discovery Mode can lead to, have to make up the gap.

A campaign log template

Release / song:
Tool: Marquee | Showcase | Discovery Mode
Goal: grow | deepen | reactivate
Market(s):
Dates:
Spend (or estimated commission):
Converted listeners / Discovery Mode listeners:
Cost per converted listener:
Intent rate:
Active streams per listener:
Campaign stream lift (DM only; break-even about +43%):
Other promotion running at the same time:
Keep / change / stop:

Checklist before you pay

• Check your team's billing country and card country against Spotify's lists.
• Book Marquee in release week, before day 18 in your target market.
• Set a budget you can afford to lose, since delivery isn't guaranteed.
• For Discovery Mode, set the duration to "1 month" unless you plan to review every month.
• Write down your baseline streams, saves and listeners before you start.
• Note any other promotion running at the same time, so you don't credit the wrong thing.

This guide explains platform terms. It is not financial advice.

What we think

These are useful tools, but the incentives are lopsided. Spotify sets the price, picks the audience, runs the attribution model and writes the report. Its headline numbers are averages it reports itself: +106% monthly listeners for Discovery Mode songs and 3.7x more likely to stream after seeing a display campaign. They also come from teams who chose to keep paying. Treat them as a sales pitch, and judge your own campaigns against your own baseline.

Display campaigns are the more honest deal. You see the price, the cap and the clicks. Discovery Mode is cheaper to start but harder to judge, because the cost is buried in your statement and the default renews every month. It also lowers the payout on streams that may have happened anyway. Its 25,000-listener floor means the artists it was pitched to, those who can't fund upfront marketing, mostly can't use it. Listeners have noticed too: a proposed class action filed in November 2025 called it "modern payola". Spotify called the claim "nonsense" and said Discovery Mode only affects Radio, Autoplay and some Mixes.

Before you spend, do the free work. Pitch to editors and set up your release-week assets. Then buy one small Showcase campaign and log it with the template above. If cost per converted listener and intent rate beat your other ads, scale up. If not, stop. Spotify's tools reward artists who already have an audience, and its reports are built to give you a reason to keep going.