Genre: Country / Hip-Hop Fusion
Campaign Type: SourceAudience “Intent” Acquisition
Status: Active (April 2025 – Present)
In an industry obsessed with vanity metrics, the hardest challenge for any independent artist is moving beyond the “Cold Start.” Most marketing agencies sell the same solution: algorithmic bot traffic or playlist farms that deliver spikes today and zero listeners tomorrow.
Below, we break down exactly how Austin Martin—an emerging Country/Hip-Hop fusion artist—partnered with SourceAudience to bypass the “lookalike” guessing game. By leveraging our proprietary Intent Engine, we identified fans who were actively searching for his sound, resulting in a “sticky,” monetizable fanbase that continues to grow months after the initial ad spend.
The Result? Top 2% performance on Spotify, +13,000 active followers, and 11.7 million streams that didn’t disappear. Read the full analysis below.
Our data-driven ‘Intent Engine’ delivered +11.7 million Spotify streams and 13,000 new followers in just six months, achieving a top 2% performance ranking on Spotify for independent artists.
Despite a unique sound blending country grit with hip-hop energy, Austin Martin faced the universal independent artist struggle: The Cold Start.
He needed to scale his fanbase beyond vanity metrics. The goal was to identify and convert high-value “superfans” who would actually stream, save, and engage, rather than passive listeners or bot traffic.
In April 2025, Austin Martin and his management team became Early Adopters of SourceAudience.
We bypassed standard “lookalike” modeling and deployed our proprietary Intent Engine.
Targeting: 199,987 verified records of fans actively searching for “New Independent Country” and “Emerging Texas Artists.”
Strategy: Drive traffic to a curated listening page to verify intent before sending fans to DSPs.
Austin’s growth tracked perfectly with the evolution of the SourceAudience platform.
MARCH 2025: SourceAudience Debuts to the world with a new way to target fans.
APRIL 2025: Early Adoption. Austin Martin signs on as a foundational client.
SEPTEMBER 2025: Data Transparency. We introduced Reports v1, giving the team their first structured look at campaign data.
OCTOBER 2025: Deep Dive Analytics. We rolled out Reports v2, proving via granular data that the fans acquired in April were still listening in October.
The most impressive metric isn’t the volume—it’s the retention.
Unlike traditional campaigns where streams crash once the budget stops, Austin’s results remained “sticky.” Because we targeted Intent (what fans were looking for) rather than Identity (who fans looked like), the audience stayed.
Compounding Velocity: Weekly streams have consistently trended upward, currently sitting at 322,809 streams per week.
Catalog Activation: His lead single “Wrangler” has grown to 6.46M streams, while his April release “Burn It Up” still generates ~54K streams/week six months later.
Cost Efficiency: We achieved these results with a remarkably low $0.37 CPC, proving that high-quality fans don’t have to come at a high cost.
"Austin didn't just get numbers; he got a career-sustaining audience."