Means Management

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Means Management

Assisting with 500+ Million Streams & 7+ Figures in Royalties since 2017. MeansMGMT is a music marketing agency. We do one thing well, and we measure everything.

Founded by Benjamin Means in 2017, we run paid ad campaigns on Meta, Google, and TikTok for artists, labels, distributors, and managers. We are Meta Agency Partner and Google Ads certified. We connect musicians directly with their fans: Our data-driven approach bypasses traditional gatekeepers and empowers you to build a loyal, engaged audience. We believe that an artists network should be more th

an just a social media page. Since 2017, we’ve helped structure publishing and distribution deals, facilitate collaborations, and execute extensive ad campaigns, projects, and release strategies alongside artists such as:

By.Alexander, Ani Difranco, Chaka Demus & Pliers, Rett Smith, Frankie Ballard, Zoe Levert, Eery, Eli Filosov, Blocktane, Ward Wills, Devon Rea, Mahaji, Cliffe, HM Surf, Alek Olsen, Ivri, Naveih, Sadboy Prolific, The Bootleg Boy, Eevee, Dosey & many more. Working one-on-one with A&R teams, founders, and label and distribution partners such as:

Feature.FM, Vydia, Warner, Alchemy Artist Services, Promoting Sounds, Catch Point Rights, Ambiqo Records, Deep Rest Records, Righteous Babe Records, KidInaKorner, Downtown Music, SoundCloud, Too Lost, MSYHF, Conduction Live, New Tomorrow Music Group, AWAL, RX Music, Lofi Girl, 11:11 Music, Effortless Audio, College Music, Purple Crunch Records, Ryan Celsius, Kindbrew Records, Etymology Records, Autumn Theory, Fresh Goodies, Lofi Cafe

We’ve focused on empowering a self-sustaining ecosystem that strengthens the direct-to-fan experience. Connecting artists, labels, and industry partners with engaged listeners while capturing first-party data and building lasting fan relationships.

08/17/2026

Is streaming the storefront, or a paycheck?
We broke it all down across a 3-part series (Link in bio).

A $36 tour tee nets an artist $15 to $30. Matching that on Spotify takes 5,000 to 10,000 streams.

Los Campesinos! sold out an 11-date run, lost money on tickets, and only cleared a profit after merch.

atVenu’s average small-room merch night runs $6,342. Netted out, that’s on the order of a million streams.
Meanwhile 106,000 new tracks land every day, and over half of Deezer’s daily uploads are now AI.

Adjusted for inflation, the US market is only about 17% bigger than it was in 1976. The walls just got lower.

The money lives where it always has: the rooms, the merch, and the audience you own.

touringlife

08/09/2026

[Link in bio to full write up] 35 listeners. That’s the median entry bar for a small artist’s #5 Spotify city. Small enough that almost any city on earth can show up, without a single bot.

We pulled the top-city maps of ~7,000 Spotify artists to answer three questions about listener geography:

Where do top cities actually sit? (Two of the three most common #1 cities are Mexico City and Sao Paulo. At scale, a global map is what normal looks like.)
Does an unfamiliar city mean fraud? (No. Artists with “wrong” geography show statistically identical fan-to-listener ratios. Bots are real, but your map isn’t the evidence.)

Is targeting Tier 2 worth the ad spend? (It’s a trade. Clicks cost less, streams pay less. Match the geography to the campaign’s goal.)

Swipe for the numbers. The full three-part study is on the blog, link in bio.

independentartist musicdata streaming

04/15/2026

If AI is trained on art, artists should control the terms.

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have been leading this conversation, and their DLD 24 talk is one of the clearest breakdowns of what’s at stake for creators.

The shift from extraction to collaboration isn’t optional. It’s the foundation of how progressive labels and artists should be thinking about their catalogs right now.

04/13/2026

Jaron Lanier said music was the first industry broken by the internet. He wasn’t wrong. Free music didn’t free artists. It built platforms.

Now AI is doing the same thing with your catalog. The economics haven’t changed, just the scale.

Thoughts?

04/09/2026

We just wrapped a 10-week ads campaign for Alex Jude an Americana/Pop artist running her first-ever paid streaming campaign for .

Find the full case study on our site.

The results from $7,000 in ad spend:
2.3K to 19,394 monthly listeners (8.4x growth)
127,429 Spotify streams
8,651 song saves (6.8% save rate)
9,032 playlist adds
879,600 video views

For context, a 6.8% save rate is well above the 2-4% average we see across independent artist campaigns.

That number tells you listeners aren’t just clicking through, they’re connecting with the music.

The strategy: run two singles simultaneously through Meta Ads to create overlapping audience pools.

“Leaving Egypt” became the best performer at $0.22 CPC, while “To The Edge” built the initial foundation.

Together they fed Spotify’s algorithm enough engagement signals to trigger organic amplification.

This was a debut paid campaign.
No prior ad history, no retargeting pools to lean on.

If you’re an artist, manager, or label thinking about paid streaming campaigns, this is what a transparent, data-backed approach looks like.

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Pittsburgh, PA

Website

https://www.meansmgmt.com/

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