GETTING INTO SPOTIFY PLAYLISTS
Photo: Naunet. Funk band from Argentina
These are some recommendations that I have gathered from various resources and also from personal experience in the past years. Some things have been extremely helpful to do and others are great to just keep the ball rolling when you’re promoting your music.
Finding personal playlists manually
First, look up for artists that are in your same genre but 6-12 months ahead of you career-wise and see what playlists they’re on (you can see that on their “about” part of the artist’s page). If they happen to be on any editorial playlists, ignore them. We’re just looking for the ones created by real people that you can reach out to.
“Extra Tip 1: It’s important that they’re 12 months ahead of you tops because if they’re 5 years ahead of you there’s almost no chance you will get in the same playlists they’re on.”
Second, once you find the right playlists, they usually have contact info in the description and that way you can reach out to them personally. Be very human and share your music with them. If they don’t share a way to contact them, you can look their names up on google/social media (I know, very stalky) and if the username is a bunch of numbers you can also try doing a google image search of the playlist profile picture (I know, even more stalky).
“Extra Tip 2: be very mindful of the messages you’re writing to playlist owners, consider how many submissions they get a day and how little patience they can have sometimes. Be human, but don’t send a 200 word message. Just something short and to the point, and end the mail with a question like “is this something that fits into your playlist?” so there’s room for a conversation.”
Third, make a list with all this information and make it as detailed as possible, so you can always go back and share with them your next release.
Filling out the editorial playlist submission
Editors love to learn about context and community. Give them the who, what, why, when, where, and how of your song. Who made it with you? Why did you make it? When was it made? Where did you make it? If there’s an interesting story around you and/or the song, let them know. Context is really helpful to them. The more information they have about the song that you’ve worked on, the better. It’s also especially helpful to include any press, music video plans, release schedules, and promotions, as well as the social media accounts linked in your artist profile.
NEVER pay to get into Spotify playlists (pay for plays)
This is one of the worst things you could do to your music career. Not only it goes against Spotify’s rules, but it also messes up your whole fan analytics and that way you will have no idea where your actual fans are. You won’t know where is best to tour and also you won’t know who to target your ads to, and so on and so forth. Just never do it.
Websites that help in the process
https://dailyplaylists.com/
https://www.submithub.com/
These are 2 websites that I have used in the past and can get you into some playlists. However, these sites tend to have a very low acceptance rate (<10%) and not always you will know who the playlist editors really are, some might be having playlists with bots, for example, so beware. On the other hand, it’s possible as well that when you find playlists using the first method I mentioned, the editors will only accept submissions from SubmitHub/DailyPlaylists, that would be a good example of people you can trust. Do your research on where you’re submitting and test them out if you can! Let me know how it goes.
Feel free to leave a comment if you think there’s other information I’m missing! Thank you :)