All About that Special Spotify Playlist Button!
By Tod Turner
CEO, Intercept Music
When it comes to audio spins, Spotify is the big kahuna, representing 70% of all audio streams worldwide. Getting your music on Spotify is an easy process. If you’re an Intercept Music client, it’s a matter of uploading your song and supplying us with some essential information.
The real challenge is getting your music heard on Spotify. Jeremy Erlich, Spotify’s co-head of Music, said earlier this year that the platform ingests more than 60,000 new tracks every single day. A sobering stat, indeed, but there are methods to move your song closer to the top of those 60,000 competitors, including a special button on Spotify, unknown to many artists, that will help you rise higher.
It’s widely known that Playlists and Collections drive most Spotify song spins. Understanding how they work is critical to your success, so I’ll start by defining these two terms.
Playlists on Spotify fall into two buckets:
- · Editorial playlists are human-curated by the Spotify playlist staff, or by labels, artists, journalists or music aficionados.
- · Algorithmic playlists are automatically generated for each listener with a focus on personal music preferences and input from editorial playlists.
Collections represent the content within a listener’s own library, such as their personal playlists.
In addition to playlists and collections, Spotify has three other analysis categories: Radio, which represents the noninteractive spins on the Spotify ad-supported tier, Search/Browse, and Other.
For any artist with a new release, a basic marketing strategy calls for an alert to the fan base about the release. Hopefully fans will add that song to a personal playlist and recommend it to their friends. This is a good start, but to get a real boost in airplay, emerging artists need to show up on editorial playlists because that’s where they can reach a new audience.
Here’s a great example: Intercept Music artist iakopo recently released Top of the Hill. Check out how his spins originated in the first week of play:
The vast, vast majority of iakopo’s first-week spins came from playlists. It didn’t hurt that Top of the Hill had very able collaborators, 2Chainz and Uneekint – featuring Dnoori & Edison, who were credited on the song. These artists did the hard work to get the song on editorial playlists, exposing it to an untapped audience.
After a song has been out for a while, playlist appearances will decline, similar to a hit song’s lifecycle on music charts. It’s then up to the artist – or Spotify’s playlist algorithms – to find classic or lifestyle-based playlists that accommodate recurrent or older titles.
In February 2021, Intercept Music artist Clayton Anderson released Tennessee (take me down). It too was dominated by Spotify playlist play early in its life, but now that six months have passed, playlists account for just a third of his total spins, and most of those playlist spins emanated from the Beach Playlist 2021, curated by upbeatcountry.
It’s also worth noting that a quarter of Clayton’s spins are coming from Spotify’s algorithm-driven, ad-supported radio, a good sign that Spotify sees positive interactions with the song in other playlists.
Finally, I’ll give you one more example showing the power of playlists in a not-so-good way. I won’t reveal any identities, but in this case the artist did not promote the song to playlist curators. As a result, Spotify playlist spins accounted for only one-sixth of all first-week spins.
This artist did receive a decent amount of collections and radio spins, however. So what does that tell me? There was promotion to the fan base, the fans liked the song, and those “like” interactions generated algorithmic spins on the Spotify radio tier. A stronger showing from playlists would have been incredibly helpful to the release.
What About that ‘Special’ Button?
Earlier, I promised to tell you about an option to help you get your song noticed by Spotify’s playlist editors. It’s not really a secret button, just a special button called “Pitch,” yet I’m amazed at the number of artists who are not aware it exists.
To access the Pitch button, upload a song for release, wait a couple of days, then log into your Spotify for Artists account.
- · If on mobile: At the top of Home, select PITCH FROM NEXT RELEASE.
- · If on a browser: Navigate to UPCOMING > MUSIC
From there, choose the song and fill out the info. Pro tip: When describing your songs to curators, avoid the PR BS, put on your songwriter hat, and share a thoughtful and heartfelt story.
Take note, this is important! The option to pitch your song will disappear if you’re within a few days of the release date! That’s why it is crucial to have a step-by-step song-release plan each time you drop a title. Intercept Music recommends uploading your song at least two weeks in advance of the release date. In future blog posts, our staff will have more tips about a song-release plan.
By the way, pressing that Spotify “Pitch” button is by no means a cure-all. You’ll still need to work your way through the long list of third-party curators, but your job of developing the relationship and telling your story with curators will remain a crucial part of your future success.
By the way, Intercept Music is made up of passionate music fans who have a singular goal of providing the guidance and tools that help you with the marketing and business angles, giving you more freedom to creating great music. Drop us a line and we’ll tell you more.
Tod Turner grew up in the Pacific Northwest. One of his fondest memories was as a member of his high school’s swim team, where he learned about persistence and teamwork. He launched into the software industry with a goal of helping to simplify the way businesses work, including audio conferencing technology used in Skype and WhatsApp. Today, as Intercept Music CEO, Tod combines his lifelong passion for music with his ability to develop solutions to restore creative time to music artists.