Are you an aspiring musician looking to gain more exposure on Spotify? With over 345 million monthly active users and 70 million tracks, it can be challenging to get your music heard on the platform. However, with the power of Spotify’s algorithm, you can increase your chances of getting featured on algorithmic playlists like Release Radar and reach a wider audience.

In this post, we’ll explore how Spotify’s algorithm works, what factors it considers, and how you can optimize your music and profile to get featured on algorithmic playlists.

How Spotify’s Algorithm Works

Spotify’s algorithm uses machine learning to analyze a user’s listening history, behavior, and preferences and create personalized playlists and recommendations. It takes into account various factors such as the songs and artists a user has listened to, how often they listen to them, the playlists they have created, the playlists they have followed, and the songs they have liked or disliked.

One of the key playlists that Spotify’s algorithm generates is the Release Radar playlist, which is updated every Friday and features new releases from artists that a user has previously shown interest in. To get featured on Release Radar, artists should focus on building their fanbase on Spotify by promoting their music on the platform, engaging with their listeners, and encouraging their fans to follow them on Spotify.

Positive and Negative Factors for the Algorithm

There are several positive and negative factors that can affect how the algorithm ranks and recommends songs. Positive factors include playtime, saves and likes, playlist adds, and playlists following. Negative factors include skips, low playtime, low engagement, and unfavorable playlists.

To increase your chances of getting featured on algorithmic playlists, you should focus on optimizing your track and artist profiles, including album artwork and artist bio, and using relevant keywords and tags. You should also work on increasing your plays and saves on Spotify, as these metrics are taken into consideration by the algorithm.

Engaging Your Fans on Spotify

In addition to optimizing your profile and music, you should also engage with your fans on Spotify. This can include promoting your music on social media, creating your own playlists, collaborating with other artists, and participating in Spotify’s promotional programs.

One such program is Spotify for Artists, which allows you to claim and manage your artist profile, track your performance metrics, and pitch your music for playlist consideration. You can also access Spotify’s playlist submission tool, which allows you to submit your music directly to Spotify’s editorial team for consideration on their playlists!

Promoting Your Music on Social Media

Finally, you should also promote your music on social media to drive more plays and engagement on Spotify. You can create teaser videos, share behind-the-scenes content, and run targeted ads to reach your audience and encourage them to listen to your music on Spotify.

Engaging with your fans on social media and creating a strong online presence can also help you build your fanbase and increase your chances of getting featured on algorithmic playlists.

In conclusion, Spotify’s algorithm can be a powerful tool for artists looking to gain more exposure and reach a wider audience on the platform. By optimizing your music and profile, engaging with your fans, and promoting your music on social media, you can increase your chances of getting featured on algorithmic playlists like Release Radar and grow your career as a musician. We at PlaylistStreams have work with numerous artist whom have been added to algorithmic playlist with using our services. Make sure you book your campaigns NOW!

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.

In 2013, a Spotify user by the name of Sean Parker added “Royals” by the then-unknown pop star Lorde into his playlist, titled “Hipster International”. With 814,000 followers on Hipster International, Forbes aptly dubbed it one of the most influential playlists many years ago. What followed was sensational; At sixteen years old, Lorde’s song was catapulted into success and even debuted on Spotify Viral Charts soon after. Her song “Royals” amassed hundreds of millions of streams, and her subsequent albums were equally as successful as this first song. Other large artists such as BØRNS and Halsey also share similar initial success stories, and many smaller artists are growing their listener base through Spotify day by day. It should come as no surprise then, the immense power that this app has in a music makers’ career. Users, labels, and artists are all taking advantage of this platform, and for good reason too. The reason for these artists’ success lies in engagement and activity with their content, not necessarily in the number of total streams. 

In a previous blog post, I discussed some of the differences between the different types of playlists that are on Spotify. These major playlist categories on Spotify include editorial, algorithmic, and listener, or user-generated playlists. Some emerging artists assume that getting placed on any of these playlists and gaining a large amount of streams immediately guarantees their success. Of course, streams can be a great metric to quantify reach and a powerful tool for introducing original music to the world. However, these streams carry little value if there is no organic user activity with the content, or if these streams are bot streams. Bot streams or other non-organic streams do not accurately represent how many users are truly engaged with the content. For additional insight on this difference, you can check out our previous blog post here. 

Playlist activity is defined not only by whether users stream music, but also when they favorite, save, add to their own personal playlists, follow the artist account, and more. Overall activity metrics tell Spotify that the song is generally liked by many and has great potential to reach more listeners around the world. It is clear that playlist activity is all-encompassing, while playlist reach simply identifies how many listens a song got. 

Obviously, both playlist reach and playlist activity are important aspects of improving an artists’ fanbase and following, but activity reigns supreme when designing a marketing campaign for a song. Chances of landing on large, influential playlists developed by Spotify’s editorial team or the algorithm itself are improved the more people engage with artist content, because Spotify tracks overall engagement only. The importance of organically increasing engagement cannot be understated. As an artist, you want listeners to enjoy and listen to your music, to the point where they follow your account, add the song to their personal playlists, and share with their connections. 

How to Develop Your Music Promotion Strategy

At PlaylistStreams, we recognize how important activity is for emerging artists, and also how difficult it can be to initially increase engagement with a song. While building a fanbase through engagement does take time, there are a few tactics that can greatly improve chances of success. Before releasing music, we recommend submitting songs through a Spotify for Artists account to the Spotify Editorial Team to be considered and added to their playlists. Creating high-quality, suitable content for each artists’ target audience is another important factor to success. A great method of increasing engagement is reaching out to user-generated playlists that match the vibe and genre of the song. PlaylistStreams draws on its large database and connections to playlist curators cross-platform to find the perfect playlists for your activity and stream goals. With time and commitment, your goals for organic engagement can definitely be achieved with PlaylistStreams campaigns.

Music streaming platform Spotify boasts 286 million monthly active users as of 2020, claiming 36% of the global streaming market. Yet, the app is able to create personalized recommendations of playlists, songs, and content for every one of these users who log on. 

How? The answer lies in the data.

Big data truly is the trend nowadays, and for good reason. Spotify leverages this big data through its well-developed algorithms, which are essentially a set of rules to be executed by a computer to solve a problem. Spotify’s algorithm learns from each time a user clicks on, saves, and listens to a song. It further monitors music history, skipped songs, past playlists, and even location to recommend music and save user data. Interestingly, the algorithm also looks at how long a user listens to a song. If the person listens for more than 30 seconds, Spotify will mark this song as a liked song that will be used for future song references. Spotify can therefore recommend songs based on previous music sessions, but can also add fresh songs that are likely to match a users preferences. While it may seem bizarre that this single app is capable of holding so much data, it is precisely the mechanism that sets the app apart from other music streaming services. 

There are three main algorithmic playlists that artists can be featured on: Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix. Discover Weekly contains songs that are custom tailored to the users listening history, as well as listening history of similar individuals. It is updated biweekly with new songs that Spotify’s algorithm predicts a user will enjoy. Release Radar contains new songs released by artists, and Daily Mix playlists are curated based on genre. Up to 6 Daily Mix playlists can show up on a user’s homepage based on different genres explored during the week. These playlists are all dynamic, changing with the songs and artists users explore each week. 

As an artist, the importance of having your content land on one of these algorithmic playlists cannot be understated. They reach a massive amount of targeted listeners who are very likely to listen to the song in full, save the song, and continue sharing it through their personal playlists and audience. The result is a large amount of high-quality streams that is likely to help developing artists reach more widespread fame in the heavily fragmented and dynamic music industry. For some artists, it can be a necessary step to getting their music noticed and becoming a full-time music creator. Though streams and monthly listeners do not necessarily equate long-term fans, more streams and listeners from real people increases scope of influence an artist can get. From there, the opportunities to get placed on editorial playlists or personal user-created playlists is boundless. 

The only way artists can ensure the highest chances of landing their music on these algorithmic playlists is through high user engagement and of course, a well-made and catchy song. The more users that engage with your music on Spotify, the more likely a song can be caught by the algorithm and gain a coveted spot on a Spotify playlist. Music creators can also increase overall engagement by having their song placed on a listener-curated playlist or editorial playlists, which accept music pitches through Spotify for Artists. PlaylistStreams in particular can draw on its vast resources and playlist database spanning various genres to help get artists’ songs placed on these listener-curated playlists, ensuring that the song will receive real streams from real Spotify users. With PlaylistStreams, artists are more likely to notice steady growth in monthly listeners and overall streams on Spotify and other music streaming platforms, meaning a higher chance of getting picked up by the Spotify algorithm. 

If you are a music creator with songs that possesses great potential, continuously promoting your current and previous releases with PlaylistStreams and platforms such as Spotify will allow your content to reach the widest audience possible. Being placed on a popular playlist and gaining a huge increase in streams should be celebrated, but the work does not stop there, as being an artist means constant work for personal growth. With music marketing services such as the campaign plans from PlaylistStreams, any artist can gain the amount of streams within their goal range in addition to loyal listeners cross-platform. 

Hey! We have been getting a few inquires about adding new team members to your Artist for Spotify accounts, so we decided to share that information with you all here.

Spotify’s Artist for Spotify provides artists and their teams with audience stats and tools for promoting their music and managing their profile on Spotify. You also become a verified artist, so your profile on Spotify gets a blue verification check mark.

Here is a quick guide as to how to add a new member to your team:

If you have Admin access to a profile in Spotify for Artists, you can invite as many team members as you like. Bandmates, managers, and other trusted team members can all get involved.

1. Log in to the Spotify for Artists web page.
2. Open the side menu by clicking the three dots in the top-left.
3. Click Manage team.
4. Click INVITE in the top-right.
   • To invite 1 team member, add their name, business email address, role, company, and choose their access level.
   • To invite multiple team members at once, click BULK INVITE in the top-right and follow the steps on the next page.
5. Click SEND INVITE.
6. We’ll send them an email with a few steps to follow, then they’re in!

Note: It’s not possible to add team members on the Spotify for Artists mobile app.

If you have any additional questions please feel free to email us or you can check it out on Spotify.