As recording musicians and producers enter 2023, one music streaming platform is currently dominating the music space: Spotify. The producers I know that have made a liveable wage through streaming have done it mostly because of Spotify. Personally, Spotify is the only streaming platform in which I’m currently making any significant (over $20 a month) amounts of income on. Though their pay-per-stream is fractions of a penny per stream, there are many listeners and opportunities to get your music in front of a wider audience.
So, you’ve released your music on Spotify, now what? Nobody’s listening, nothing’s happening! For artists that have not yet gathered an audience on the platform, Spotify can be immensely frustrating. You do have one powerful tool to get your music heard, though: user playlists. Average people, record labels, producers, yoga gyms, etc. can create their own playlists and put whatever music on it they like. Getting on several popular playlists can exponentially increase the amount of ears your music reaches.
But how do you find what playlists to submit to? How do you send playlisters your music when there is no messaging option on Spotify? The technique below is the most effective way that I’ve found to promote my music on Spotify. It is often free (some playlisters will charge when you reach out to them) and immensely powerful. These are the steps I follow:
- Make a list of artists that write similar music as you. Write down as many as you can think of! Get involved with Discord, Live Music, Reddit, Facebook, etc. communities and get connected with other musicians that are on your level or just above your level. I’ve found the sweet spot for this technique is to find musicians between 10k and 150k monthly Spotify streams. This will allow you to find playlists that are large and popular, but to avoid the artists that have their music on Spotify Editorial or big label playlists that are accessed through different means.
- Start going through your list of artists, methodically one by one, and scrolling down their artist page to the “Discovered on” section. When you click “show all” it will give you a list of playlists that they receive the most listeners from.
- Start clicking into the playlists on the top of their list. Avoid the Spotify editorial playlists for now. Look for contact or submission information. Some will be easy (like the example below giving an Instagram tag), some will be difficult (like the next example), some will be impossible.
In this difficult example, there is no contact. But it looks like they’re an organization. You can search on Google, Instagram, and/or Facebook to see if you can find their contact info. If you can’t find it – it’s ok! Just move on. You’ll get the hang of how much time you should put into each of these (based on the listeners, difficulty, etc.) once you get used to it.
- Make a spreadsheet of contact information and submission status. Below is a snippet of mine. It has: genre, submission site, link (to the playlist), playlist name, followers, status of my submission, notes, and to-do (if I want to submit tracks in the future). I note which playlists responded to me, and which resulted in many plays.
- Start submitting and reaching out! Send messages, emails, submission forms. Be polite! Tell them that you love their playlist and follow them on their social media and Spotify. Tell them why you think your track fits with the vibe they have. Write a personalized message. Talk to them. Do not spam! Do not demand! Some playlisters may ask you to use a submission site or to pay some amount of money. Use your own judgment on whether or not this is worth it for a placement. A large playlist that many fellow producers are getting lots of plays on might be worth $20 to you in order to get your listenership up and get the algorithm working for you.
I hope you find this helpful! This has been the most effective promotion technique I’ve used on Spotify and I’m shocked that nobody’s talking about it. If this helps you be heard or you have suggestions, feel free to send me an email!
musicalmotivationcontact@gmail.com
Musical Motivation 