How to get your music on Spotify playlists

In today’s age, it is no secret how important it is to get onto Spotify Playlists to help boost the streams of a song. Getting on a highly followed Playlist can increase your numbers dramatically. Most of the popular ones are controlled by Spotify themselves or one of the major labels. There are still plenty of independent curators with large Playlist followings.

How do you get onto these playlists? Below we will cover some tips and tricks as we receive a lot of tracks ourselves.

Song and Profile are as complete as possible

Before you even send your track out to an independent curator. You need to make sure that the song is well produced and unique. Another factor that also helps is making sure it is keeping up with current trends. Many of these playlist curators receive 100s of songs a week so it really needs to stand out.

What is often overlooked and is very important is to make sure your artist page on Spotify is completed as much as possible and that you have active social media pages. You don’t necessarily need to have loads of followers just the more you have filled in it flags to curators that you are taking your music seriously. Most curators are more likely to support artists who are taking things seriously than someone who looks amateur. They want to help someone who is putting the work in as well.

Here is a link to Lucas & Steve who have their profile filled out very well as an example.

Pitch to Spotifys own playlists

Before pitching to playlists there are two types of playlists that you should know about. The first is Spotify owned playlists these can’t be pitched to individually. The way to do this is to make sure that you are signed up to Spotify For Artists. You can pitch to their playlists by logging in. Finding music that is scheduled to be released, choose the song and fill in the information in as much detail as possible.

The Spotify playlists are created based on genre, mood and also the New Music Friday playlists that get updated weekly.

Pitching to independent curators

Now there are tons of independent playlists and curators out there. Before even thinking of submitting to them make sure your music fits the playlist to even stand a chance of getting put into one. The easiest way to do this is to search for the genre on Spotify and listen to a few of the songs within or maybe search for a mood.

Once you have found a playlist you can click on the user to see other playlists they have because some curators only specialise in certain types of genres. Now the hard part is finding contact information to be able to pitch your song. Also, certain curators may have forms or one certain way they like to be contacted make sure this is done correctly nothing more annoying than people not following instructions.

The way to find the contact information is to either look at the playlist description, search for them on social media and Google.

Once you have found the correct way to pitch to an independent curator make sure you give them the right information. What works in principle is just a few sentences detailing who you are what genre you make a link to your latest track on Spotify, SoundCloud and your socials. Also, a nice touch is to say why your song fits the playlist and to give a bit of information about the curator or blog as it shows you have done your research. Also when pitching make sure if it is an email you only send one at a time no one likes to receive one with ten addresses copied in as it just seems to the curator this is just one of many people you are sending it out to.

Once your song gets into a playlist don’t stop there try and forge a good relationship with the people who own the playlist as this will make it more likely that they will put your future releases in. The more noise you create the more you will organically be on people’s radar. The way to keep in touch is to maybe repost their playlist on socials and thank them for the support. To keep up with the person by email and social media DMs.

Discover Weekly & Release Radar

You might have heard of these playlists as well. These are generated by Spotify by themselves and appear on every user’s profile. The release radar gets updated on a Friday and contains all the latest tracks released that week. Where Discover Weekly gets updated on a Monday. There is a trick to get into Release Radar. Every time someone follows you on Spotify they will get your new releases in that playlist. So make sure you are promoting your Spotify profile as well.

Final thoughts

Now with all these things, there are a lot of factors that go into getting on Spotify playlists and one of them that can’t be controlled is the playlists do favour certain genres of music compared to others. The more popular your sound is and if it fits into one of the major genres the more playlists there are to find. Obscure genres and ones that tend to be listened to but the older generation are harder to generate streams from as there aren’t as many playlists ultimately to pitch to.

Don’t worry if your song doesn’t get into a playlist or they never reply to your email or social media message because some of these curators receive 100s of tracks a day. It is a numbers game and if it doesn’t work out maybe your song isn’t special and that is something you need to work on.

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