10,000 followers on Spotify will change your career. Getting followers and Spotify playlist promotion is on everybody’s mind. Just a few years ago most influencers, music promoters, venues, radio stations, and brands wanted to know how many social media followers an artist had. Now, they wanna know how many streams and followers they have on Spotify.
20 Spotify Playlist Promotion Tips for 2020:
1. Before You Submit Your Track - Do This! ✅
Verify and optimize your Spotify profile. Make sure you verify your Spotify profile by getting access to the Spotify For Artists portal.
2. The Right Song ✅
We’ll get into specifics on where to find curators and tips and tricks on how to land them. But let’s start with some basics. Listen to a couple songs on the playlist first to get a feel for the theme. Pitch the right song for each playlist, otherwise your song will get skips. Just because you’re a House Producer, doesn’t mean that your song fits every House Music playlist. Pay attention to the theme and sub-genres featured in the playlist. Don’t submit a Techno track to a Dance-Pop playlist. Also, don’t submit old music to a playlist that features “new” or “fresh” tracks.
3. Song Length And Flow ✅
Every artist is fighting a battle for attention. When submitting a track, consider the intro and outro of the song. If it’s too long, it could upset the flow of that playlist and be rejected. Curators like their playlists to flow, and they don’t want to lose listeners on long tracks. If a song takes too long to start, it might not be a good fit for their playlist. Don’t bore us, get to the chorus. In fact, tracks with a strong vocal hook within the first 8 seconds of a track are almost 100 times more likely to be added to a Spotify playlist.
4. Have A Track Development Plan ✅
Don’t be random about your focus tracks. Just because it’s your newest track doesn’t mean it has to be your focus track. Don’t move on from promoting tracks so quickly. Have a track development plan for each release and try to make each new release bigger and better than the last. Use our "ULTIMATE GUIDE TO STREAMING SUCCESS" to rock your releases right.
5. Traffic ✅
Why do we love playlists so much? Because it’s an opportunity to expose your music to large amounts of new listeners. Playlists are traffic sources just like radio airplay, media features, film and tv synchs, mentions by influencers, and organic social media traffic. So make a goal to have a steady flow of traffic every day.
I like to visualize playlist listeners as concert goers. Put pressure on yourself to play in front of a virtual packed house every night – 365 days of the year. Set a goal to get 500 listeners a day, then 1,000, and so on… But again, make sure they are the right “target” audience for your music.
6. Curator Psychology – Motivation ✅
Understand the motivation for the curator you are pitching to. Some considerations:
Specific genre, listening pleasure, the right music for the right occasion. DJs are often very specific about what they want for what mood they're going for. Mood is a whole new music market. It’s only been recently that new artists have broken out and been discovered from “mood playlists” rather than traditional promotion channels.
They want to be a music influencer. They’re motivated by getting the largest amount of “Followers” as possible. To increase your position on their playlist or stay in longer, you should encourage your social media followers to “Follow” and “Listen” to the playlist. Then send another thank you email to the curator with examples of how you helped get them followers.
They are an established influencer on YouTube, Instagram, or Twitch (the gaming platform, not Twitter), and the playlist is another channel for them to influence their audience.
Playlisting companies like Indiemono, Headsick Sounds, and TopPlaylists are trying to get as many followers and listeners so they can either have a platform to launch their own artist content, or charge for a service. (I actually think these playlists are low quality and can be counter-productive – so I don’t recommend submitting for them). They run some sort of payola scheme where they will put anything on their playlist for a fee. (I would avoid playlist promotion companies – while they get you streams, they also get you skips, and ruin your song score in Spotify’s algorithm).
•A&R or music supervisors
•In store play playlists. Fashion retailers, salons, or other brick and mortar outlets.
•Fitness influencers
•Brands (Nike, PlayStation, H&M)
•Media outlets, press, blogs
•Independent Labels: Main goal – have dedicated places to promote new releases.
7. Do It Yourself ✅
You can do this yourself. You don’t have to pay somebody. Have a new song scheduled to be released on Spotify? In July of 2018 Spotify launched a beta of their Song Pitching Tool where artists, artist managers, and labels can now submit one “unreleased” track to Spotify Editorial Playlists directly through the Spotify For Artists portal. You should also spend time finding independent curators and contact them. Get them to add your songs. If your song reacts positively to the listeners of that playlist and you start to get more and more spins, follows, and shares, Spotify’s algorithm will notice. When the algorithm finds a track that listeners are responding to positively, it will usually be put in algorithm playlists, Discover Weekly & Radio, or into a test playlist like Fresh Finds for a week or two. If it tests well from there, it may get reviewed by several curators for further official Spotify playlist considerations.
8. Influencer Playlists ✅
Don’t just wait for major playlists to come. Increase your chances by seeking out independent curators and influencers, and ask them to add your music. To avoid skips, make sure these are targeting listeners who “should” like your music. Brands like Nike or Starbucks are influencers as well. Some playlists that have “lots of followers” might be falsifying. When observing Spotify playlists, the engagement – the actual number of targeted listeners – is much more important than the number of followers. Also, if you think the other artists in the playlist don’t fit with your music, that’s probably going to get you more skips than fans – so I would avoid submitting for the playlist.
9. Step By Step – How to Find Playlist Curators ✅
Find Playlists. (note: as of 2/7/20 Spotify has removed this listener count feature from some apps. So you may not be able to see this feature any longer.
I don’t like to find just any playlist. I like to find targeted playlists that have an “active” audience. By “active” I mean the subscribers are actually listening, rather than subscribing and forgetting about it. You can tell this by looking on an artist’s “About” page on the right side of the Spotify desktop player. There is a “Discovered On” section that gives you the artist’s top 5 playlists, and how many listeners discovered the music through that playlist. Find those and make a list.
Contact the Curator. Sometimes the curator will leave an email address or website in the playlist description. If not, click on the username for that playlist. This is the curator. If it shows a photo and a person’s name, there is a good chance you can contact them outside of Spotify. Many Spotify users sign up through Facebook, so their Facebook name and photo is the same as it appears on Spotify. So head over to Facebook and search for that person. You can message them. If you can’t find their name on Facebook, try Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube. In some cases you can find their email address or a link to a website with contact information.
If the curator’s Spotify username is not their name, it will be a made up name, company, or number like 04012873. You can try searching for these on Facebook, Google, or elsewhere, but typically these are hard to find. In some cases impossible.
Additional Steps:
Choose one or two songs to submit. Curators get a lot of requests, so they don’t have an endless supply of time to listen to your submission. At most send them 3 songs to consider. Be grateful if they add one of them. Before submitting to follow their playlist, listen to several of the songs to truly know which of your tracks may be a fit. Then send a simple conversational pitch asking for their consideration and support. In my experience, most curators care about the song more than anything. So short and sweet is just fine. It’s best not to bombard them with too many accomplishments. You can let the music speak for itself, or add one or two achievements that make you stand out.
If you get added to their playlist, share it on social media and encourage your audience to subscribe. Do this as soon as possible. Then follow up and show them you supported.
10. Out Of Date Playlists ✅
When searching for playlists you may find one that has 50,000 followers that looks perfect. Make sure to sort the playlist by Date. Hit the calendar icon near the top right side of the track list. If the curator hasn’t added many tracks in the past few months, it’s probably not worth your effort to track them down and submit.
11. List Of Curator Services ✅
SoundPlate, IndieMono, Listed, etc. I’m not big on this strategy any more… but you can check them out.
Click the genre bubbles to seek out playlists to submit for. Or press the “Start A Topic” button to post your own playlist.
13. Reddit ✅
Reddit has a minute-by-minute feed of Playlist action. Or use the Reddit search bar to find specific playlists, or search for curators, submission forms. I find the Google search engine better than the Reddit one.
14. Don’t Buy Fake Spotify Plays ✅
There are shady companies called click centers that sell you packages of fake streams. Don’t do it. It is against Spotify policy and not worth risking your reputation with one of the world’s biggest music streaming services.
15. Spotify Promotions Services ✅
I no longer recommend using so called “Spotify promotion services”. In fact I discourage you from using them. They are getting too many skips from their poor quality playlists. Those skips are preventing artists from getting Official Spotify playlists and official Spotify algorithm play.
Some guarantee a certain amount of playlist adds or streams. How can they do this? Some actually pitch in the same way I described above. But most aren’t actually pitching your music to curators. They have contacted the original owners of those playlists and purchased the account for cash money. So they now control it and can put tracks from their paying customers. Very few of these services have direct relationships with official Spotify curators. They also don’t pitch the major label owned playlists Filtr (Sony), Digster (Warner), and Topsify (Universal). These label owned playlists are curated almost exclusively with Sony, Warner, and Universal owned or distributed content.
Not all are fake. But in my experience, these types of playlists are of low quality because they are curated based on money, not on which tracks flow well or sound good on the same playlist. Consequently, these service owned playlists don’t usually have a good return on investment. You certainly won’t make your money back from streaming royalties. And they will do damage to your algorithm song score. It’s a counterproductive strategy.
16. You Got Added To A Playlist. What’s Next? ✅
Once you get in a playlist, make the most of it! Find a way to contact or reach out to the curator who added your playlist and thank them to show your gratitude. It tells them you appreciate their support, and it might lead to an ongoing relationship for your future releases, or even your old catalogue. To continue with the venue analogy – Don’t be the artist that forgets their email sign-up list at the venue. It’s critical that you make and retain fans. Keep them up to date with an email newsletter. You can’t rely on social media algorithms to communicate and stay in touch with all of your fans. Though there is no direct way to extract an email address from your Spotify listeners, there are many ways to direct them to sign up for your email list. Direct them on your bio section. Think about where they will go next. Most likely Google or YouTube, or maybe Facebook. Make sure you think of all the possibilities of where you can place that sign up link. It’s important to make it easy for your listeners to become your fans. You can also research how to use “gates”. Gates are forms or widgets that help you capture information or unlock content. There are several options you can research. Feature.FM, Metablocks, Show.co, and more.
17. Artist Playlists ✅
Curate a playlist by yourself so you can understand the process and motivation for yourself.
Artist Playlists can be a powerful asset to use later on when you have a new track to release.
18. Social Media Links ✅
Use the Social Media links in your Artist Profile. It’s the easiest way for curators and fans to learn more about you and follow you. These social media links will help steer traffic into your email list.
19. Spotify Ad Studio ✅
Sign up for Spotify Ad Studio: https://adstudio.spotify.com/ by advertising on Spotify, not only will you increase your plays and discovery, but this activity could help get the algorithm to notice you, or get the attention of official Spotify curators.
20. Playlist Tracking ✅
Track your playlists. You can use Spotify For Artists to track your plays and playlist stats. Or, there are subscription services you can pay for that allow you to track what playlists others are on, find playlists, curators (not contacts), and provide you with data analytics that makes it easy for you to find playlists to submit for. Some companies that I like are SpotOnTrack and ChartMetric.
Use this information well, work hard, and nothing can stop you! All the best.
