I find that lots of musicians that I work with don’t really know the ins and outs of Spotify. So here’s what I know. A small disclaimer here, I don’t do half these things. I’m terrible at social media, but there’s people I know who have got a lot out of this information so as always its presented here out of pure laziness for me to link people to.

There are two things that matter in the music industry. Great experiences and money. If you’re not chasing one of those things what are you chasing?

If you’re trying to get rich on Spotify. Don’t. A million plays can work out as less than a days shift at minimum wage, so chasing plays has to result in great experiences. A coveted festival slot, a tour support or enough infamy to get asked to appear on top of the pops(if it still existed). There’s no evidence that Spotify plays alone is going to do any of that for you.

When you upload music to Spotify these days, you immediately start getting spammed on social media. Maybe it’s just me, but my sponsored adverts have changed from marketing secrets of running a video/music production business to getting 1 bazillion plays on Spotify with this “one simple trick”. If you chase them up they amount to the same bullshit.

Why Spotify?

After 20 years of music on the internet, it’s come down to a few key players owned by the big boys. Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon. They’re all much of a muchness, and I think unless you have some serious clout or you exist in a niche genre, they are the primary means to show off your musical creativity online and try and build an audience. Spotify is king among the youth and therefore the people with lots of followers.

There are attempts to replace this business model with one which is fairer for artists, but I think we’re closing the door after the horse has bolted, the barn has burned down and someone has built a multi-storey carpark on the site of the farm. The consumer market now expects to have access to everything all the time for next to nothing. By all means support the improvement of the distribution methods, but accept that in the mean time you need to find a way to deal with the current system.

Why me?

The charlatans mentioned above say “i made so much money, rather than sitting on a desert island and swimming in a Scrooge McDuck style money pit, I’ve decided I’d rather devote my life to telling people on facebook how to do the same. You just need to pay me $20”. It makes no sense at all.

I’m a spinner of plates. I first put music on Spotify over a decade ago. I’ve produced, played on, written and made videos for numerous tracks that have 10,000-100,000 plays. It may not seem like much, but I enjoy it and I’ve constantly paid my bills from music for the best part of a decade.

I’m here imparting that knowledge. I know people with a million plays on Spotify who wipe arses/pull pints for a living. While the NHS/Your local pub is a noble occupation, bear in mind that Spotify has to be one thin strand of a music career.

Music Marketing 101

In order to understand Spotify, you need to understand marketing. There’s not really any such thing as a one hit wonder. By this I mean that you don’t go from 0-100 with one track. The people at 100 didn’t start there, and if they did then there’s some fishy nepotism going on there(relatively common).

With this in mind, if you have a track that you are incredibly proud of and that you think is amazing, then make sure that you are already adding it to a rolling ball. All too often, band’s either plough all their effort into one track or worse an entire album, spending their parents money on musicians, great recording studios, marketing, a loss making launch gig. Etc. etc. etc……

It has a wee burst of energy and then when the hangover wears off the band sits down and thinks. “Okay. For our next trick?” And the process starts again with less enthusiasm.

Social media(and the music industry) is about regular periodic quality content. If you have 1 amazing song. Then write another three. Record them well. Make sure there’s some visual content - a video for 2 of them and a decent band photo and then begin. Release one that’s representative, but not the best, then gradually release the other two. When you release number 3. Start to record another 4. etc. etc.

Obviously it’s not an ideal world, so this never happens, but it gives you an idea of the thinking that will avoid you booking out a 500 capacity pay to play venue so that your friends and family can pay someone to serve them expensive drinks once a year.

Make a budget(based on time and money), work out whether you can afford to release a song once a month or once every 3 months. Intersperse it with live sessions, random chat and fun instagram stories and bob’s your uncle. That’s a whole year planned which only costs as much as a photo session, recording for 4 tracks and production of 2 music videos(ball park £1000 all in between all the band members). Want it to happen faster, add more money to speed up the release schedule and hire better studios, mixers, masterers, photographers and video producers.

Each of those people should be the best and most notorious that your budget can afford. It’s all well and good saving £50 by getting your mate’s maw to take some photos, but £50 is peanuts for using a photographer that’s up and coming and who will be touting your photos next to bands of a similar genre. Look at your peers. Find out who they use and copy. Open your local newspaper, who is taking the photos of the bands one rung up the ladder from you.

Do all of these things equally. There’s no point in spending £500 on getting photos done by the coolest person in your city and getting your track mastered at Abbey Road for £90 if none of you can play and you recorded it on an iPhone 4 in the corner of your rehearsal space.

How Spotify works

So if we’ve established that this is an ongoing marathon and not a sprint, then how does Spotify play a role in great experiences and/or money? Well you have to understand a few things about Spotify.

You get on Spotify by uploading your tracks to an online music distributor. There are several out there. They have different prices and business models. I recommend using Emubands because I can almost see them from my house in Glasgow.

Other services that I’ve used in the past are CDbaby and distrokid, but I think there’s a value in keeping it local.

Whichever distributor you use, once you’ve uploaded your tracks, you want to have a release date around 6 weeks in advance. I know musicians aren’t great with deadlines, but this bit is important. Once your track is uploaded and processed(the distributer might query your artwork etc.) you then need to sign up for Spotify for Artists

This is your dashboard for controlling your Spotify artist account. You can do various things from here. Change your profile pictures and see the history of your plays and followers per song etc.

The most important thing about here is that once a release is uploaded(BUT NOT RELEASED), you can pitch a track to a Spotify curated Playlist. This takes a few weeks to process, which is why you upload your release 6 weeks in advance. You can’t pitch a track to a Spotify curated playlist after it’s been released, so if you have that well recorded track on Spotify that you think will make you experienced or rich then you either need to choose a different track, remove it from Spotify and start again or be less concerned with Spotify metrics.

So what is a release? This is your single, your EP or your album. They can contain a single track or multiple tracks. Distributers usually charge a flat fee for an album so it seems to make economic sense to put up 20 tracks, call it an album and then your upload fee per track is lower.

But…… from each release you can only pitch one track.

The third rule is that you can’t pitch the first release uploaded to an account. So to reiterate. You have to pitch tracks after they are uploaded but before they are released. You can only pitch one track from a release, and you can only pitch from an account which already has releases on it.

All in all(If Spotify is your be all and end all) this moves us away from an album economy and towards a single economy like the 7 inch boom of the 1950’s.

Adding this to what I said about music marketing 101 means that we have a release cycle of releasing a new single every few months, uploading it to Spotify and constantly trying to grow your brand in order that you are eventually featured on a Spotify curated playlist.

Spotify curated playlists

So Spotify’s main aim is drive your music discovery in order to sell subscription models and advertising. One of the methods they use for this is to create “spotify playlists”. Now anyone can create a playlist, but Spotify playlists have a Spotify logo in the left top corner.

They are curated by genre and lifestyle. They have far more followers that normal punter playlists so you want to have your tracks there so that you can get on playlists beside Beyonce. This increases the people who are discovering your music, which increases your plays, which makes you look like you’re doing better, which increases your chance of being on a Spotify playlist(and also increases your chance of getting involved in some great experiences)

When you are pitching your tracks, it makes sense to try and mention which playlists you think it should fit with. There are 1000s. This is an art unto itself and your mission now is to play with Spotify enough to find the perfect playlist to pitch a track to. Now not only are you a musician, a marketing assistant, a home music producer and a small business manager, you’ve to add ‘digital librarian’ to your arsenal of skills.

Tips for finding suitable playlists to pitch to

The one positive thing I can say about Spotify is that it rewards music discovery. There isn’t really a shortcut to finding the right playlists. You have to enjoy it. Sign up to a few and play them in the car. Different tracks that you’ve written might be suitable for different playlists, which makes it an ongoing pursuit.

Try and find a realistic playlist to be part of. If your band plays retro Rock N’ Roll then I’m sure you’ll find a playlist with Elvis, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, but if there’s no other bands recorded in the lat 50 years on it then you’re unlikely to get added to it.

It makes more sense to try and find bands who are your peers. This might be a local band you know, but it can be more advantageous to find suitable bands outwith your area but within your genre. Ideally they should be a couple of pegs up the ladder from you and their Spotify account can be a gold mine of useful information.

On the overview page you can judge the band’s musical ability based on their plays and their monthly listeners.

I’ll then jump to the about section.

The gold mine is the “discovered on” section. If you can find the right band, via radio play, a Spotify playlist or even -shock horror - physically seeing them, then the ‘Discovered on’ section can send you to playlists which would be suitable for your band to get put on.

There’s two things you can do to get on these playlists. One is to pitch your next track. The less monthly listeners and the more specific your track is to the genre, the more likely you are to get on it. The other is to work out who is curating the Spotify playlist. They are generally people who are already movers and shakers in the genre or in the location based playlists - that local scene. This is another reason why Spotify activity is useless in isolation.

Once you’ve trawled the ‘Discovered on’ section and added the interesting playlists to your list you move to the “fans also like” section

This is a list of similar bands. You then go to their page; You go to their about section. You find new playlists; You find new bands.; Ad infinitum.

Some of these won’t exist until a band has enough momentum and info.

Non-Spotify curated playlists

While the Spotify curated playlists are the main objective in the game the side missions are that of non-Spotify playlists.

Anyone can make a playlist. Even you. That means your local radio station/blogger/newspaper might have one. They typically have a lot less followers, but it’s easier to work out who is curating them and it can be good for hoovering up some followers from your local scene. Send a message on social media or email and ask what you need to do to have your next single included on it. Convince the receiver of the momentum that your release is going to have(“we’ve got a review in next months Horse and Hound”) and the worst thing that can happen is that they ignore you.

You can also make playlists. You can use this to take more advantage of Spotify rewarding you for musical discovery. If you’ve found a band that do a similar thing to you, especially if they are on the other side of the world then stick them all in a playlist and start collecting them. Call it “bands <insert your band name> are listening to”. Not only are you collating a collection of bands you like, if you start playing them together with your music, then the little algorithms in Spotify will start to associate you with those bands, so you can ride the coat tails of their success by getting played alongside them when Spotify plays people random music. Most importantly your music will be getting pushed at people who are actually likely to like your music.

You’ll also start to appear on bands’ “discovered on” page and when those bands look at their Spotify Artists page they’ll find your band.

This is some major slow burner activity, but I like to think that it’s the modern version of music discovery and one day you’ll end up in some town in the middle of nowhere playing your music to 20 fans of a similar sounding band you found online and they’ll love you.

That one simple trick

So that’s it really. There wasn’t a magic trick. If you insist on following the spam, here are the basic tricks for circumventing the hard work.

1 - Buy Plays

You can pay for people online to play your track or follow your band or add you to some random playlist. Short term this could be worthwhile if your aim is to sell a pdf about “that one simple trick”, but you have to wonder what value there is in a Bangladeshi techno fan following your Scottish folk trio. In all the social media platforms, they’ve been wise to this for years and it doesn’t help you play the algorithms to really take advantage of Spotify. If anything you could get plays and likes taken off you.

2 - Buy lists of playlists to pitch to

You can also pay for lists of playlists. Again - what’s the little value in being put on a playlist on the other side of the world in an unrelated genre.. The same goes for “10,0000 radio stations to send your music to for $20”.

3 - Download gates

This is one that can genuinely work. Download gates force you to make some social media interaction(signing up for a mailing list, following someone on Spotify) for some sort of reward(presale for a tour, download of an mp3). It’s pure spam and I feel that if you are big enough for a pre-sale for your tour or for someone to want to download your track then they are probably aware of your Spotify Acitvity.

On top of your subscription fee for the download gates($9 a month), you then subscribe to an automated chatbot system($10 a month) to drive your leads to a clickfunnel($50 a month) which up-sells your customers to your shopify page($30 a month) to buy your tat. This whole thing is driven by paid adverts on facebook. All in all more than most peoples rent every month in subscription fees.

Once you are racking up 100,000’s of plays on Spotify a month in return for more money than it would cost you to get a music video made, the best course of action you have is to tell people about how they too can make money with this system.

In my opinion the whole spammy marketing internet thing has no place in the music industry. If you are bothering with this shite, then go and sell protein shakes in a multi level marketing system for your kicks. It’s the same work for more money.

4 - Play the genre game

The other one that I see a lot of the charlatans doing is playing the genre game. They upload tracks in a niche genre, which then get played more often by algorithms because there’s less tunes to choose from. You really want to get playlisted by the NME in their indie rock category, but the entry level is 150,000 plays, so why not write a hammond organ instrumental and get playlisted by ‘Hammond organ hits monthly’ cos that only requires 300 plays(yes this is a red dwarf reference). It’s pretty valueless for any other reason than to show off your figures in order to get someone to buy your pdf for $20

5. Take a page from the amateur comedian playbook

You can also jump on a bandwagon or write a novelty song. Anyone who follows amateur comedians will be familiar with this method. You jump on a bandwagon and release a novelty song/sketch which relates to a current trend or event and then ride the coattails of it being in the zeitgiest. This genuinely works, but where do you find yourself? You’re uploading tunes which sound like Agadoo in the hope that the followers will stick around to listen to your original creativity afterwards. The reality is that eventually you are trawling the trends looking for a suitable news story or event that fits one of your songs to try and sustain your plays.

6 - Focus your creativity on playlists

Write for the playlists. Just like the world of Sync agents, a lot of people are now writing specifically the type of thing that is likely to appear in certain playlists. This could work, but I find it depressing that Spotify’s algorithms are driving not just what we listen to but how music sounds and evolves.

7 - throw money at it

If you haven’t fully extinguished the bank of mum and dad yet and you have nothing better to spend their 80’s savings on, you can throw money at the whole thing. It’s a better spend than $20 for a PDF, but probably not much else. If you want to throw money at it, I’m confident that Spotify will be setup so that you do quite well out of paying them for adverts. I have no proof of that.

In conclusion

So that’s it. The secrets of finding fame and riches on Spotify. Have a long hard think about why you are doing it and what you want to achieve.

The person who I stole the download gate method from has 500,000 followers and a track with 20 million plays. He’s on lots of Christian Rock playlists which I’m sure you all covet. He spends his days spamming the internet to pay his bills(not very christian). I spend my days producing music and making music videos to pay my bills and I’ve had some great experiences along the way.

As always, if you like this and you want to see us do more. Like, Share, comment and interact.

Blog

What we know about Spotify