How Hayes & The Heathens brought two fan bases to one record with Digital Star

1.85M+Spotify streams of the album
700limited-edition vinyl sold in the store by early November
10xreturn on the first pre-order ads

“They’re family to us. Over our last 5 albums, they’ve created exceptional promotional websites and shattered sales records for us every time. Our investments with them have been invaluable in elevating our career.”

Gordy Quist · The Band Of Heathens

Pre-orders for the Hayes & The Heathens vinyl opened in August 2024. By September 17, the first $500 of Facebook and Instagram ads had brought back ten times that, and the album’s new store had passed $11,000 in sales.

The album paired Hayes Carll with The Band of Heathens, and each act had its own fans and its own accounts. We built the record its own store, made the videos and designed the emails. The ads ran on Facebook, Instagram, Google and Spotify. On Spotify they ran on both acts’ accounts, so each act’s fans would hear the other.

The marketing plan

A $500 test came first

The band’s management at Gold Mountain Entertainment wanted to see results before they set a budget. So we started with $500 in Facebook and Instagram ads for the vinyl pre-order. By mid-September it was returning ten times its cost, and the store’s sign-up pop-up and customer list had added 376 subscribers to the band’s email list.

On September 17 we sent management a plan for the rest of the release, in two phases.

The single. Separate Spotify Marquee campaigns for “Any Other Way” on Hayes Carll’s account and on The Band of Heathens’ account, so each act’s listeners heard the other. Google display and YouTube ads in the tour cities.
Release week. A Spotify Showcase campaign for the full album on the shared Hayes & The Heathens account. Facebook and Instagram ads moved to streams and vinyl, aimed at a wider Americana audience.

The plan came to $4,500. Management said yes the next day and asked us to double the Spotify budget for the single to $500 for each act.

Videos from footage the band already had

The band had studio clips nobody had used: boots stomping, big smiles, slide guitar. We cut them to the album’s brown and tan look, and they became the official video for “Any Other Way.” It has more than 25,000 views on YouTube.

Hayes & The Heathens: Any Other Way (Official Music Video), edited by Digital Star.

We also cut the band’s studio footage into short vertical ads for the release, the tour dates and Spotify. On YouTube, the video ads for “Any Other Way” and “Nobody Dies From Weed” cost about 2 cents a view.

Emails that reached both sets of fans

Every email used the album art and its colors. They went to fans of both acts, and the footer told each reader why they got it: they had given Hayes or The Heathens their email.

Four email designs in the album’s orange and brown: a pre-order announcement, a last chance to pre-order, an out now email and a holiday bundle. — Four of the launch emails: the pre-order, the last chance to pre-order, out now, and the holiday bundle.

The ads carried the same art on Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube, from the single to the vinyl and the merch.

The challenges

A record with two bands’ names on it

The record needed a page that belonged to neither band, so a Hayes fan and a Heathens fan could land in the same place and buy the same record.

So the album got its own store, hayesandheathens.com, built on Shopify. It carries the videos, the tour dates and the merch. The store feeds Google, the Facebook and Instagram shop, YouTube and Spotify, so the vinyl is listed on each of them.

The tour dates were the next snag. Bandsintown couldn’t show the combined act’s shows, so we set them up on Seated. Its widget takes our styling and keeps the VIP ticket links next to each date.

The vinyl ran late

Two weeks before release, the band was still waiting on the pressing. It might not arrive until release week, which put the pre-order delivery dates at risk.

The results

The store sold out of the whiskey smoke vinyl around release day

$5,962in sales from $600 of pre-order ads on Facebook and Instagram
92 of 100holiday bundles sold at $49.99
6,036listeners who played the songs after a Spotify ad, about 33 cents each

We switched off ads that were still making money because there was nothing left to sell. Fans kept writing in to ask for the vinyl, so the band put 140 more copies back in the store. By early November the store had sold 700 copies, and $19,666 in vinyl, shirts and bandanas.

The band pressed a second color, translucent orange, and we built a holiday bundle around it: the new vinyl, a wood ornament and a holiday print signed by everyone. We priced it at $49.99 and it sold 92 of 100. The holiday ads cost $100 and brought back $2,327.

The store grid: whiskey smoke vinyl, a black tee and a bandana on the first row, a yellow tee and the translucent orange vinyl below. — The store: the whiskey smoke vinyl, tees and bandana, and the translucent orange second pressing.

On Spotify, the album has passed 1.85 million streams, and “Nobody Dies From Weed” alone has more than 835,000. In the month around release, The Band of Heathens added 50,000 monthly listeners and passed 855,000. In the four weeks after release, Hayes Carll’s daily listeners averaged about a fifth higher than in late summer.

What came next

Red Rocks, then 1.6 million monthly listeners

In May 2025, Hayes & The Heathens opened for Turnpike Troubadours at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.

Hayes & The Heathens: Any Other Way, live at Red Rocks, May 2025.

The Band of Heathens had set a goal of one million monthly listeners on Spotify. Across 2025, the year after the album, they reached 27% more listeners than in 2024, and their streams grew 28%. In October 2026 they had 1.6 million monthly listeners, up from 855,000 in the month around the album’s release.

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