Guide to spending first $500 to promote a new music release Dropping a stack on music promotion can be unnerving, so music marketer extraordinaire Amber Horsburgh shares how to best spend a $500 promotional budget. Guest post from 1. It’s difficult to ascertain ROI. In music, we spend dollars to make fractions of pennies in order to grow. Most other industries spend dollars to make more dollars on a product. 2. We don’t have access to the full consumer journey to know which marketing channel is most impactful. Once you spend money on ads to drive a stream on Apple Music, you have no idea what happens next. Do they stream once? Do they stream at all or do they go on to follow you and listen on repeat?