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.

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.

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.