Spotify Marquee and Countdown Pages

Marquee and Countdown Pages both live in Spotify for Artists and both matter around release week, but they’re different tools. Marquee is a paid ad for a release that just came out. Countdown Pages are free pre-save pages for an album or EP that hasn’t. This covers what Spotify’s own help pages say about both, checked Sep 24, 2026, with prices in USD.

What is Spotify Marquee?

Spotify Marquee is a paid, full-screen pop-up in the Spotify mobile app that recommends an artist’s new release to listeners Spotify thinks are likely to stream it. It’s one of two display campaign formats; the other is Showcase, a banner. Marquee only works for new releases: a campaign has to start within 21 days of release and runs about 10 days, or until the budget is spent. You buy it in Spotify for Artists under Campaigns, and you pay per click. To use it, you need at least 5,000 monthly active listeners in the market you target. It isn’t the same thing as Countdown Pages, which are free and come before release.

Those rules come from Spotify’s display campaigns help page. In practice a listener opens Spotify on their phone and your cover art fills the screen, with a button to go play it. Spotify lists it as a mobile app format; Showcase is the one that also runs on desktop.

A few mechanics worth knowing before you open the tab:

• One campaign, many markets. Each campaign is tied to one release and can hold up to 15 sub-campaigns, one per market, audience or start date, per Spotify’s page on creating a display campaign.
• It spreads out now. Since Feb 23, 2026, campaigns deliver over the full period (about 10 days for Marquee) instead of burning the budget as fast as possible. Spotify calls this standard pacing, and accelerated pacing is still an option, per its forecasting and budget page.

The 5,000 line is what keeps most independent artists out, so check that before anything else.

Who can use Marquee (eligibility and countries)

To run a Marquee campaign, you need at least 1,000 streams in the last 28 days in a target market and at least 5,000 monthly active listeners in the market you choose. Your Spotify for Artists team also has to be based in one of 23 supported countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and much of Western Europe, and your payment card must be issued there. The release must be new to Spotify, not a remix, and the campaign has to start within 21 days of release. Showcase uses the same 1,000-stream rule but not the 5,000-listener one. Spotify lists all of this on its display campaigns help page.

Two lists get mixed up here. Where your team is based decides whether you can buy a campaign at all: 14 European countries, the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. Where the ad runs is a longer list. Spotify’s target markets page names 44 markets you can target, from South Africa and the Philippines to Poland and Peru. So a US-based artist can run a Marquee in Mexico, if they have 5,000 monthly active listeners there.

That per-market part is easy to miss. Your 5,000 has to be in one country, not worldwide. Check it in Spotify for Artists under Audience, then Segments, filter by the market, and select monthly active listeners. If you’re not sure how that number differs from the one on your profile, our guide to monthly listeners vs monthly active listeners covers it.

The release has rules too. Per Spotify’s campaign setup page, it has to be an album, EP or single with no more than 4 main artists, and it can’t be a compilation, karaoke version, soundalike, remaster or re-recording. For Marquee, more than half the tracks must be new. One timing wrinkle: the setup page says 21 days, but the target markets page warns you may lose Marquee once a release has been live 18 days or more in that market. Plan for the shorter number.

If there’s no Campaigns tab in Spotify for Artists at all, Spotify says that means your artist isn’t eligible or your team isn’t in a supported country.

If you clear all of that, the next question is money.

How much does Spotify Marquee cost?

Spotify Marquee is priced per click, with a campaign budget between $100 and $10,000 USD (or the local equivalent), and Spotify doesn’t publish a fixed price per click. Each market you add as a sub-campaign needs at least $100. Clicks are billable, including saves made straight from the Marquee, and prices vary with your audience and target market. You’re only charged for the clicks you get, so you can end up spending less than your budget. Booking through Spotify’s local representatives instead of Spotify for Artists raises the minimum to $250. The figures are on Spotify’s forecasting and budget page.

What that means in practice:

• You don’t know the click price up front. When you enter a budget, Spotify shows an estimated reach, an estimated number of clicks and how likely it is that you’ll spend it all. Divide the budget by the click estimate and you have a rough cost per click for your market. That estimate can change, and Spotify says it can’t guarantee your full budget gets delivered.
• You can’t top it up. Once a campaign starts, the budget is fixed. If it’s working, you create another campaign.
• Billing is daily. Spotify’s billing page says it charges your card each day you hit a billing threshold, in your local currency, with any leftover charged on the first day of the next month. You get one card per team, and taxes depend on whether you’ve given a valid business tax ID.

So a $100 test in one market is the smallest bet on the table. What that $100 buys depends on who Spotify shows it to.

Who sees a Marquee?

A Marquee is shown to listeners in one target market who Spotify predicts will stream the promoted release after seeing it, grouped by the audience goal you choose: grow your audience, deepen fan engagement or reactivate listeners. Spotify skips anyone who already actively streamed the release in the last 21 days, and each listener gets only one Marquee per release. You can’t pick individual listeners. Premium subscribers can opt out of seeing campaigns. The goals and segments are described on Spotify’s audience goals page.

Here’s who each goal reaches:

Spotify pre-selects segments for your goal and you can add or remove them. If a segment is too small to spend your minimum budget, you won’t be able to target it. On a release with more than one main artist, you can also target your collaborator’s audience, the listeners of the other artist who aren’t in yours.

Notice what’s missing: strangers who have never heard of you and have no reason to. Even the “grow” goal leans on people Spotify already sees near your music. That’s by design, and it’s the main thing to understand before deciding whether to pay.

Once it runs, Spotify reports back in a lot of detail.

How Marquee results are reported

Spotify reports Marquee results in Spotify for Artists under Campaigns, then Display. It tracks each listener for 14 days after they see the campaign, shows first numbers 24 hours after launch and final results 2 weeks after the campaign ends. The report has three parts: delivery (reach and clicks), audience development (how your monthly active listeners changed) and performance details, including converted listeners, conversion rate, active streams per listener and intent rate. Intent rate is the share of converted listeners who saved the release or added it to a playlist. The metrics are defined on Spotify’s campaign results page.

The number to care about is intent rate. Spotify says its research links saves and playlist adds to a 2.5x increase in streaming of an artist 6 months later. A click is a moment; a save is someone who plans to come back.

Audience development splits converted listeners by where they started:

• New active listeners joined your monthly active listeners for the first time.
• Reactivated listeners came back after dropping out.
• Amplified listeners were already active and played this release for the first time.

Judge the campaign against the goal you picked. A reactivation campaign full of amplified listeners mostly reached people who’d have found the release anyway. You can download everything as a CSV.

Spotify also publishes its own averages on the display campaigns page: people who see a display campaign are over 3.7x more likely to stream the promoted release and over 2.2x more likely to save or playlist a track. Those are Spotify’s figures about its own product, averaged across artists of every size. Your report is the one that counts.

Marquee isn’t the only format in that report, and it isn’t the only paid tool Spotify sells.

Marquee vs Showcase in the Campaign Kit

Marquee is the format for a brand-new release, and Showcase is the one you can use anytime. Both are Spotify display campaigns in the Campaign Kit. Marquee is a full-screen pop-up in the mobile app, limited to releases in their first 21 days, and needs 5,000 monthly active listeners in the target market. Showcase is a banner on Home (desktop and mobile) and Browse (mobile) for new or catalog releases, runs 14 days, and only needs the shared 1,000-stream rule. Spotify’s Campaign Kit page groups display campaigns with Discovery Mode and playlist pitching. Countdown Pages aren’t part of it.

Budgets and click pricing work the same way for both, per the forecasting and budget page. Spotify’s display campaigns page says a Showcase for a catalog release generates 4.8x more active streams among people who see it.

For an artist under 5,000 monthly active listeners, Showcase is the paid option you can actually use, and it works for an older song that’s picking up again. The Campaign Kit page also says artists who combined display campaigns with Discovery Mode saw 2x greater growth in monthly active listeners than those using Discovery Mode alone. How the pieces fit is in our Campaign Kit guide.

So you can buy it. Should you?

Is Spotify Marquee worth it?

TheDebutRoom’s view: Marquee is worth paying for when you have a genuinely new release and a few thousand light, lapsed or casual listeners in one market who’d plausibly come back, and it isn’t worth it as a way to reach strangers. Spotify’s targeting is built around people already near your music, it skips anyone who has streamed the release, and it charges per click. That makes Marquee a reminder for people who half-know you. For an artist at the 5,000 minimum with a release they’ll keep promoting, a $100 test in one market is a fair bet. As a first ad for someone nobody has heard of, it’s the wrong tool.

Here’s how to decide with your own numbers. Start with one market, $100 and the reactivate or engagement goal. When final results land two weeks after the campaign ends, divide what you spent by converted listeners. That’s your cost per converted listener. Then look at intent rate: of those people, how many saved the release or added it to a playlist? A low cost per converted listener with a decent intent rate is a campaign worth repeating on the next release. A pile of clicks with almost no saves is a campaign that rented attention for ten days.

Skip Marquee when:

• The release is a one-off single with nothing behind it. The point is to move people deeper into your audience, and there’s no next step for them.
• You’re just over 5,000 because of one playlist. Those listeners are programmed, not active, and may not be in your segments by the time you launch.
• $100 is money you’d miss. A pitch to Spotify’s editors is free, and so are Countdown Pages if you have an album or EP.

That last one is the honest worry. Spending $100 you don’t really have, then watching the number drift back down, stings. Marquee doesn’t guarantee streams, and nothing legitimate does. Anyone who promises a set number of streams, saves or followers is selling the kind of thing Spotify’s artificial streaming page says can get royalties withheld and music removed.

Marquee covers release week. The free tool for the weeks before it is Countdown Pages.

Spotify Countdown Pages: what they are and who qualifies

Spotify Countdown Pages are free pre-save pages inside the Spotify app for upcoming albums and EPs, available to artists with at least 3,000 monthly active listeners. Fans can pre-save the release, preview the tracklist, watch countdown videos and shop merch. On release day, Spotify sends everyone who pre-saved a push notification and adds the release to their library. Singles don’t qualify, and neither do deluxe editions, reissues, remasters or compilations. The page shows up on your artist profile, in Search, on Home and in the Upcoming Releases hub, in every country where Spotify operates. The rules are on Spotify’s Countdown Pages help page.

Spotify says that on average, nearly 60% of people who pre-save an album stream it in the first week. That’s an album figure, so treat it as a sign of intent, not a forecast for yours.

The fine print from the same page:

• Monthly active listeners, not monthly listeners. Spotify’s own tip is to check the active number. An artist with 8,000 monthly listeners from one playlist can still be under 3,000 active.
• First-named artist only. On a release with several main artists, only the first one listed can create the page, and it only appears on that artist’s profile.
• Split rights are limited. Spotify supports only some split rights releases for now.
• The Upcoming Releases hub (Search, then Upcoming Releases in the mobile app) has two shelves: For You, with up to 10 personalized picks, and Top 10 Countdowns, the 10 most pre-saved pages worldwide, refreshed daily at 12 PM UTC.

You can track pre-saves in Spotify for Artists under Upcoming, then View Analytics.

If you’re releasing a single, or you’re under 3,000, you’re not stuck. A distributor pre-save link does a similar job for any release. DistroKid’s version is covered in our guide to HyperFollow and pre-save links.

If you qualify, setup is quick, but it depends on your distributor delivering early.

How to set up a Countdown Page

Setting up a Spotify Countdown Page takes five steps in Spotify for Artists: go to Music, then Upcoming; select the release; click Get started; add countdown videos and tag your merch; then review and publish. You need Admin or Editor access, and your distributor has to deliver the finished album or EP first. The option appears within 72 hours of that delivery, and you can create or edit the page anytime before release. The steps are on Spotify’s Countdown Pages help page.

The 72 hours is the part that decides your timeline. A pre-save campaign needs weeks, so deliver the album well ahead of release day, not the Friday before. If your current distributor makes an early release date hard, our list of the best music distribution services compares them.

Countdown videos are optional but Spotify recommends them. Per its countdown videos page, each one needs to be:

• vertical, with audio
• longer than 3 seconds and shorter than 30
• at least 1280 x 720 pixels

Don’t add watermarks from other apps, send people to outside websites or ask them to follow you elsewhere; Spotify may remove videos that do. The videos play in the mobile app in over 70 countries and regions, and they disappear, along with the Countdown Page, once the release is live.

Spotify’s own tips: add videos and merch, set the Countdown Page as your Artist Pick, and share it on your socials once it’s live.

For the rest of Spotify’s artist tools, browse the Spotify for Artists hub.