In general, when doing a marketing campaign, advertising results in more conversions per stream, and playlist pitching results in a higher count of total streams accumulated in association with your campaign.
Put more simply, ads are more effective at growing a fanbase, but they’re super expensive (over 5x more expensive than they were 3 years ago, inflation!!! Lol).
Because of this, playlist pitching can be a more cost effective way to hit greater exposure/streams because it is more of a passive listening /topical listening method (i.e. someone is listening to “happy indie pop music” rather than searching for your exact song on Spotify or clicking an ad that goes to your song on Spotify). If your music is conversions, AND you’re doing targeted playlist pitching campaigns, the conversions per dollar can be a good bit cheaper via playlisting than they are via ad campaigns.
However, it really varies per the song, the artist, the timing of the release (i.e. are you releasing a sad song during the summer or a fun one, which makes way more sense for the summer and will do better than a sad slow song?), as well as the market (i.e. are ads expensive right now?).
In general, if you have a smaller budget to market your music(<$500 per song), we recommend exclusively doing playlist pitching. Once you get to a higher budget range, we highly recommend incorporating advertising into your playlist pitching campaigns (which is why we offer this in addition to playlist pitching as part of our higher priced packages).