Posts Tagged ‘amazon music’

Playlist Additions: The New and Fundamental Way to Build an Independent Artist’s Career

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In the age of digital streaming, playlists have become a crucial component of how artists have grown their fanbase and spread their music. Whether it be Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, TIDAL, or any other digital streaming platform, playlists bring new music to the ears of listeners that would not have come across it otherwise. In fact, Bloomberg argues that placement on some of the premier playlists that these platforms curate themselves, such as “Daily Mix” and “Today’s Top Hits” (Spotify), guarantees that a song will become a hit. Spotify’s biggest playlist, Today’s Top Hits, has been streamed over 20 billion times, has 25 million followers, and has had over 70 artists on it receive more than 100 million streams. Even some of the much smaller playlists have the potential to truly put an artist in the spotlight as multiple placements across various playlists could have just as much, if not, even a bigger impact promotionally. To begin to understand this new wave of music promotion, we first must understand what the types of playlists are.

Types of Playlists and Submissions

Today, there are more than 100 million listeners across the world who pay for streaming subscriptions to listen to music. The key to getting your song noticed as an independent artist is by getting it placed on these platforms’ playlists. The type that you may be most familiar with is user-created playlists, whether it be because of some playlists you have created for yourself or the ones your friends have made. Besides this, there are also algorithmic playlists that suggest you songs based on your listening data and history; some popular examples of these are “Your Daily Mix” and “Discover Weekly” on Spotify. In addition to algorithmic playlists, there are also human-curated playlists that are created by around 100 editors at Spotify and other streaming platforms. They use their expertise, marketing, and listening data across the entire app to make their selections for hundreds of playlists. Lastly, there are the hybrid playlists that incorporate both human and algorithmic elements of selection. Regardless of which type of playlist your music is on, the goal is consistent: bringing each listener the best music that they would want to listen to.

Only in July 2018, Spotify introduced a new way for artists to submit their music onto the platform’s playlists. On the Spotify for Artists service, artists can pitch their songs to the company’s editors via an online form that asks the artist for information such as mood, culture, and genre to better understand which playlist would be best suited for their success. After the submission, editors on the Spotify team review the songs on a weekly basis and use data and expertise to add the songs to their desired playlists.

However, this is no guarantee that your music will make it onto the playlists given the fact that thousands, if not more, artists are all submitting their music: to say the competition is intense would be an understatement. A myriad of artists are still skeptical about this submission process because of the lack of transparency that Spotify has provided on its specifics. For instance, Spotify will not specify how many submissions it gets on a weekly basis from artists nor how many of these submissions end up on their playlists. This has led to a lack of trust in their submission process and leads artists to look elsewhere for trusted services to use in order to gain playlist additions and organic streams of their music.

How Have Playlists Changed the Industry for Artists?

The most interesting impact of playlists is how they have shifted the manner in which artists make music. Nowadays, whenever an artist submits a song for playlist consideration to Spotify, it will automatically be added to some of the algorithmically created “New Music Friday” playlists for listeners. On top of that, artists have also realized that it would make more sense financially to release one or two songs at a time in a shorter time spans than it would to release an entire album worth of songs per year. This way, they can boost the streams and playlist additions of each one of their songs and in turn, make more from streaming royalties.

Additionally, many artists such as Drake have also began to create longer albums with shorter songs. This strategic approach to music production increase the amount of streams each song gets by a substantial amount because it reduces the odds of the listener skipping the song. Consequently, it also ensures a more successful album while also improving the odds of an artists’ music getting onto playlists with large followings. Furthermore, this trend of playlist necessity has also led artists to understand that their music needs to grab their listener’s attention within the first 30 seconds. Since Spotify does not pay artists for songs that get skipped by the listener before the 30 second mark, it is up to the artist to make sure they captivate the listener with their flow right away and that they do not waste time in the introductory seconds.

The ever growing demand by artists for playlists has led to an incredibly high supply: more than 2 billion playlists exist on Spotify alone! It would only be fair to assume that Apple Music has around the same aggregate and this still does not include the total playlists on all the other various streaming platforms as well. In a way, playlist hits have become this generation’s equivalent of radio hits. Trending near the top of various playlists could have an even greater impact that any other form of promotion because of how easily listeners who enjoy the music can download the song, add it to their personal playlists, and even share the word about the song.

Maximizing Your Playlist Additions

There is no question that playlist additions are crucial to an independent artist’s ability to promote their music. But how can you maximize your playlist placements? The answer is PlaylistStreams.com. Through our service, you can ensure that your music will be on multiple playlists that our team sees best fit to maximize the distribution of your music. From these placements, you will then receive organic streams and your fanbase and platform will grow tremendously. With our relationships with hundreds of curators who have thousands of playlists, you can count on us to deliver and push your music to the ears of fans across the world.

The time to take advantage of this revolutionary mode of music promotion is now and with PlaylistStreams.com, you can join the wave of independent artists boosting their platform and solidifying their marks in the music industry.

Bot Streams vs. Organic Streams: Why Earning Real Streams is a Winning Formula

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With how prevalent digital streaming platforms are in the music industry today, there is no question that streams are a crucial component and determinant of an artist’s success. Consequently, the market has become infatuated with services that give artists the opportunity to buy streams on platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, and much more. These companies claim that if an artist was to pay them a small sum for the use of their services, they will push these artists to new heights and audiences on digital streaming platforms. Though this may seem appealing at first glance, a more thorough investigation will uncover that often times these companies will provide the artists with artificial bot streams: those that do not come from fans or at times, even people. This is a severe problem for artists attempting to grow their fanbase and reflects badly on the artist even if this was happening without their knowledge. For these reasons, it is important to avoid the scams and instead, use authentic playlist builder services like PlaylistStreams.com to organically boost your streams and truly grow your audience.

How Do Organic Streams and Bot Streams Differ?

Legitimate, organic growth is observed when real fans listen to an artist’s tracks and discover their music through the exposure it gained from the artist’s work with marketing, playlist curators, and public relations. In contrast, bot streams are those accumulated by companies through fake fans or computer programs. On top of the fake users streaming their client’s tracks, these scams often do the bare minimum by streaming the tracks for solely 31 seconds on Spotify since the platform only counts streams after 30 seconds.

These types of corrupt practices have caught the attention of digital streaming platforms particularly because of bizarre stream totals on one day that are much higher than other days and streams only originating from one specific location. Once they have flagged the artists engaging in these fraudulent practices, Spotify sometimes prevents releases of their music and even blacklists the profiles. Therefore, it is ever so important for artists to do their research because they might unintentionally engage with such a fraudulent playlist builder and suffer these consequences which would hamper their musical careers. Though it may seem beneficial to boost your streams in the short-run in this manner, the truth is that getting streams simply for passing the 30-second stream mark is not helpful to an artist’s overarching career as it prevents authentic fanbase growth. Artists must understand what constitutes a lawful business, such as paying a marketing or PR team to place you in touch with playlist curators, and what is considered theft, such as paying for pseudo streams.

Besides the individual harms of the potential of being blacklisted on platforms and losing a chance to develop genuine growth of fans, bot streams take away a portion of the monetary pie from the entire community of musicians. Upon purchasing pseudo streams from an inauthentic playlist builder service, you are taking away royalties from artists who have promoted their music the genuine way with organic streams. Spotify distributes royalties among artists by taking the global amount of revenue from monthly subscriptions and dividing it by the total amount of streams and then multiplies this value by each artist’s streams. Hence, increasing the quantity of pseudo streams will result in a cut of the revenue that other artists with organic streams will get.

Identifying The Legitimate Services

It is quite difficult to tell which services are genuine and which are mere “click farms.” Each of them advertises their services in similar fashion and guarantee boosts in streams and popularity in order to attract you to use their business. The key to distinguishing the two is paying attention to the nuances of their advertisements, prices, promised results, and campaign packages. Most importantly, trust your gut: if it seems like it is too good to be true, chances are that will be the case.

At times, the graphics and presentation of a company’s website alone will be enough to surmise if the service is inauthentic. Furthermore, if you see lofty claims about how one of their artist’s popularity multiplied by a few hundred percents with just one small payment, you can also begin to suspect something is off. Do your due diligence through a simple Google search and see if the popularity that they claim their artist has now gained through their service is also reflected on any websites or businesses that are not theirs. If the answer is no, you can safely assume that the service is using pseudo streams because popularity to the extent they claim should be complemented with artist interviews, concert dates, and much more.

PlaylistStreams: Premier Playlist Builder and Organic Growth

PlaylistStreams has dedicated itself for the past few years to help artists attain authentic support and elevate their careers through organically integrating them into playlists across various streaming platforms. The company ensures that its clients avoid the dangers of bot streams and inactive playlists with the use of trusted research and a result-oriented approach when discovering playlists. The Century City, California based PlaylistStreams has a database of thousands of playlists and helps its clients secure placements on those best suited for their music and goals for exposure.

A plethora of artists have partnered with PlaylistStreams and benefitted tremendously from the organic growth the company provided them with. For instance, after being placed on 25 specific playlists by PlaylistStreams, the rapper Young Pooda saw his music and audience organically grow to the point where he saw his music added to over 1,100 playlists. This growth was not just limited to Spotify, as the organic growth also resulted in exposure on other services like TIDAL, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. The company even helped Torey Lanez increase his placements on Spotify playlists during his tenure at Interscope Records.

What separates PlaylistStreams from other companies in the field is its deliberateness and authenticity. Not only are the playlists which their artists’ songs are being added to real, but the company also coordinates these placements after a thorough overview of which playlists would be most beneficial for exposure given the artist’s style and current stage of career. PlaylistStreams is every artist’s go-to service for boosting their streams organically and ultimately, bringing the artists closer to their fans.

Royalty Structures: How Do Artists Make Money?

The answer to how much music streaming services pay their artists has always been a complicated one, but today, we will begin to unravel this key component of the music business. Aside from the immediate differences in payments due to distinct digital streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify, other factors such as reach and aggregate users can also influence royalty rates and the ability of artists to propel themselves to the upper limits of success.

In the music industry, royalties are payments that individuals with the right to pieces of music (artists, songwriters, producers, and composers) obtain from anyone who uses their licensed music. In other words, people compensate the right holders for the ability to use their music. When an artist’s music is distributed through digital streaming service (DSP) as it is often the case nowadays, they receive a payment for each stream of their music. Interestingly enough though, these platforms such as Spotify and Amazon Music do not have flat and fixed payments that they allocate per stream. Instead, a stream’s royalty rate is determined through the listener’s country and specific location, the artist’s royalty rate, how pricing and currencies vary amongst countries, and if the listener has a free or premium account. Due to these various factors which are always subject to change, it becomes extremely difficult to ascertain a specific stream royalty rate.

Nonetheless, studies of musicians’ payments on a number of digital streaming services have been conducted to gain a general understanding of estimated royalties across platforms. Some general findings include that per stream, Napster pays $0.019, Tidal pays $0.01284, Apple Music pays $0.00783, Google Play Music pays $0.00676, Deezer pays $0.0064, Spotify pays $0.00437, Amazon Music pays $0.00402, Pandora pays $0.00133, and YouTube pays $0.000069. Though these approximate royalty rates for each stream may alert artists to pick the highest paying services first, it is crucial to remember that the platforms with lower payments may still provide unique advantages due to them having higher user totals and greater international reach. Additionally, when artists release music on platforms some of the lower-paying platforms like Apple Music and Spotify, they provide a direct route to the fingertips of millions of fans; a process that used to be much more tedious, taxing, and expensive than now. These factors help provide an artist with the whole picture in digital streaming services and remind them that royalties are just reflections of the value these services bring to the client.

With numbers as low as these, an artist may wonder how it would be possible to achieve financial success to the extent they which through solely streaming. Playlist Streams is how! When an artist uses Playlist Streams, all their streams generate royalties and their music get exposed to large audiences. Although it is possible if your music is received extremely well by the users, this also points to the fact that royalties are simply one part of an artist’s finances. Other aspects such as touring, gigs, CD sales, and so much more will all help artists succeed financially and work in unison with streaming royalties. Furthermore, even if artists were able to make significant sums from just streaming royalties, then a large portion of it will be eaten up by other entities in the process of getting to the artist. For example, the Economist conducted another study in which their experts say that a billion streams on any subscription services bring an average of $7 million for big label companies and $1 million for the artist responsible for creating the music. Through this $1 million may seem like a substantial amount, we must put it into perspective as it is a sum that only a select few artists who top the charts for the day or week will receive. Every artist is nowhere near that popular, and the nonprofit organization Music Industry Research Association found that in a survey of 1,277 musicians, the median musician made $35,000 in 2017 and only $21,300 of that sum was from music-related sources. Clearly, there is a disparity between not just the payments received by label companies and big-name artists, but also between those larger name artists and the majority of the other artists in the industry. There needs to be much more improvement in relation to these rates and allocating a larger portion of them to the creators of the work.

Regardless of the fact that royalties are just one part of the equation and that they need improvement, they are undoubtedly one of the biggest portions of an artist’s financial journey because it allows them to be compensated for each time their music is used for enjoyment and even commercial purposes. Services such as Playlist Streams help boost your streams in an organic manner that will help you gain exposure while also monetizing upon it through the royalties. Ultimately, these royalties are dictated by a myriad of factors and are only one part of your financial journey as an artist. However, the exposure that these streams and royalties can help you gain is unmatched and truly beneficial for your journey in the music industry.

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