Hopefully if you are in this course that means you have your music out there on Spotify, if not, remember you can do so with Distributors (Week 1)
Now Spotify is another place where your music can be heard easily and be shared and loved to the point where your whole music career might happen because of it. Due to the amount of help they created for artists, Spotify places for me at the top.
Get Spotify for Artists App
You can download the app on your phone or use it from their web:
Here you will request access to your artist profile and once you have it you will get to a menu looking like this:
This menu is easy to use, you want to be sure to put a nice description with influences and a biography about your music and your career, you can see stats from your songs and of course add your Links to your social media. They also give tips for artists and have multiple content that can help you along the way, but the important part in here is…
How to Pitch your songs to Spotify Playlists?
Once you upload your song to a distributor you want to be sure to request a pre-save link and put the date to more than 3-4 weeks. This is incredibly important, remember that your song can’t be added into Spotify Playlists without that time slot. 1-3 days after the song has been delivered to your distributor it will appear on that menu (upper left) and they will let you send the song to their curators. Appearing on a Spotify Playlist means being listened for half a year by hundreds thousands people.
Follow all the steps and be sure to include properly all the instruments, genres and a nice description on how you got inspired for this song, the curators are real human professionals from Spotify so that story can be the difference between being chosen or not!
They will let you know if your song is added to playlist and once the song is released you will be able to pitch your next song.
Single over Album for Spotify
Let’s talk about Spotify Algorithm, they study from moment 0 what kind of music people like, they profile the listener and the artists and send to their listeners new music over and over so they love artists like the ones they listen to. You have 2 ways to use this in your advantage:
- Be sure to describe your sound properly when uploading each song and writing your biography.
- Don’t upload music and request to release as soon as possible, if your song has over 3 weeks before releasing, it will appear on Release Radar and Discover Weekly.
Release Radar
It’s a auto-generated playlist that will show your new music on first page to everybody who follows you during the first week of release. Issue, getting followed on Spotify is a bit harder than TikTok, but when people connect to your music it will start happening so don’t be afraid to ask your fans for it.
Discover Weekly
Another Auto-generated tool that shows music you will probably like to each listener. Discover Weekly has a big chance of showing your music but less people check this one unless they are in the mood to find new music.
Release Monthly!
I admire Artists who are releasing a song monthly like Astrid S or Lane 8, is quite shocking as they also drop LPs and EPs like it’s no effort at all.
This happens when their maximum audience comes from Spotify, let’s explore Lane8 case:
Lane8 is a Chill-Electronic Music Producer with almost 2 million listeners monthly, I have seen him having over 3 millions during some months.
He composes mostly Instrumental relaxing EDM songs that can be quite long and worth listening too, but when he drops a song collaborating with a singer… that song remains for quite a long time in the playlists. Sometimes, he even releases a song weekly, and he is quite good at creating multiple versions of his music. Typically he will release the songs with a singer and the instrumental of that same song in the same package, that way people can choose what to listen to.
This gives their listeners enough music to create playlists with him and a massive opportunity weekly to get added to Spotify Playlists as well as being discovered by new listeners via ”Discover Weekly” and ”Release Radar”
Some would say he is not giving enough name to each song, others will say he is focusing only on growing, the reality is, once you perform for your fans, you choose what songs to play according to the amount of views and plays each song has or the requests and love people showed to each, so it ultimately doesn’t matter as long as it’s all well organised!
In the coming weeks we will explore other options to get on big Playlists (not connected to Spotify) and to grow there.
