The Spotify Editorial
Playlists & Algorithm
Guide.
Submitting to editorial
Spotify playlists.
Getting your music onto Editorial Spotify playlists can potentially expose your
music to an entirely new audience and increase your streams. In this guide, we
will look at how to do this, frequently asked questions and examine the Spotify
algorithm to boost your streams even further.
Before you start.
Before you start submitting your track, let’s have a look at how to start out
right.
The earlier the better.
You want to be aiming to pitch for the absolute minimum of 1 week before
your release date. Ideally, I’d want to be pitching 3 weeks beforehand.
Verify your account.
Verifying your account is essential if you want your music featured on
Spotify’s playlist editorial team. Not only this, it adds to your profiles credibility
and can help you get picked up by the algorithm too.
If you haven’t done this already, it is really straightforward to do through
your Spotify for Artists profile. Log in, enter your details and once Spotify
has verified these you get your blue tick next to your name!
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Submitting a song.
You use your Spotify for Artists account to pitch your upcoming release to
Spotify’s playlist editors. Here is a step-by-step guide:
Log into your Spotify for Artists account
At the top of your ‘Home’ screen, click on ‘Pitch from next release’, or if
you are accessing through a web browser, you can pitch from the ‘Music’
tab under ‘Upcoming’
Choose the song you would like to pitch and fill out the form
Filling out the submission.
For the best chance of getting on editorial playlists you need to give as much
information on your submission as possible.
You will need to add your main genre, sub-genre, moods and the styles of the
song, as well as the language of the lyrics and the instruments used, so have
all this information ready.
You also need to enter what city you most identify with. This does not
necessarily have to be where you live, you could select the city that your genre
is most popular in or where you know your fanbase resides. Being specific
about your location, will help get your pitch in front of editors in that area.
You also have the opportunity to describe your song, and this is incredibly
important. Tell the story of your song and give as much context as possible.
When filling out this section think about:
Why you made the song
What the song is about
What inspired it
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Filling out the submission.
Who made it – did anyone make it with you? How did you come to make
the song together?
When you made it
Where you made it
The key thing to remember is how you can make your submission stand out
from the rest and making a connection with the curator, in the same way you
try to build the connection between you and your audience.
You should also include your release plans. The press, music video plans,
release schedules, promotions and any social accounts linked to your artist
profile. Give them as much information as possible so they don’t need to
search for you – do the work for them.
FAQ & what you should know.
You don’t need a specific amount of followers or monthly listeners to get
playlisted
You can’t pitch music through Spotify for Artists post-release
If you pitch your track at least 7 days before the release date, it will
automatically be eligible to be placed on the Release Radar playlist
Both signed and unsigned artists can pitch their music via Spotify for
Artists, they even have dedicated playlists such as Fresh Finds
specifically aimed at supporting unsigned artists
You cannot pay to get onto an official Spotify playlist, this is against their
terms of service
Algorithmic playlist like Discover Weekly and Release Radar are updated
weekly
A release is eligible to appear on Release Radar for up to 28 days
You can only have one song on Release Rader at a time
Songs of any length can be pitched, there isn’t a specific length
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FAQ & what you should know.
If your music is genre fluid, consider pitching to playlists based around
moods, moments and activities, as these are catered to a wide variety of
artists, genres and styles
You can pitch are type of recording, whether that be studio or live, as
long as it is on your Spotify
Always remember.
Around 20% of all music pitched to Spotify is added to editorial playlists, so
don’t be disheartened if you aren’t selected. Due to the high volumes of songs
that are pitched to them, they also don’t provide any feedback on how to
improve, as they are purely focused on getting music in front of their users.
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A guide to the Spotify
algorithm.
When it comes to Spotify, there is a lot of speculation about how it actually
works.
Let me start by saying Spotify is Social Media, although most people do not
treat it in this way. But if you think about it, its algorithm is stats driven and
therefore it is social media. Your audience can follow you, it’s got shareability,
you can get notifications, you can sell your merch, you can tell people about
your gigs, it’s got a bio, you can tell people about you and your story, it’s got
links to your social media – it is social media.
Just like how you’re aiming to get more followers on Instagram or more
subscribers on YouTube, it makes complete sense to try and target Spotify to
try and grow your fanbase on that platform.
Let’s start with the algorithm. Every social media platform has an algorithm. A
data driven model that aims to show you exactly what it thinks you want to
see, what you might like or share, what you will enjoy. The Spotify algorithm
consists of 3 parts: natural language processing, raw audio analysation and
collaborative filtering.
Natural language processing.
In simple terms this means that it is defining the language that a song is
sung in. Defining the language means that it can then put music sung in
your preferred language in front of you. While this may sound obvious,
when you consider that Spotify is available in 79 countries, it needs to
define the language so that it can show you the right music.
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Raw audio analysation.
This means that Spotify analyses the tempo, the vibe, the feel, even down
to the key of the song. This helps it to fit the right playlist and the right
song into the right time. Its algorithm is trying to figure out whether this is
a sad song, a happy song, a song for working out to, for driving –
whatever category it might fall into.
Collaborative filtering
This is what the algorithm uses to decide what songs best fit into your
listening habits.
The whole point of the algorithm is to keep you listening to music on Spotify
for as long as possible. It does that by dropping in fresh new tracks very
carefully so that you don’t get bored but also not too often that you lose
interest. The way that it does this is by breaking it down into two categories:
exploit and explore. Exploit is all about you. Your listening history, your
playlists, what you skip past. Whereas explore is all about everyone else, it
takes into consideration other users habits and works out how that fits into
your habits.
The key thing to know about the algorithm is that it analyses the most amount
of information in the first 30 seconds of a song. You need to keep people on
your song for longer than 30 seconds so you’ll need to think carefully about
your intro, what is your catchy hook and all the other elements that will keep
people listening.
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How to beat the Spotify
algorithm.
So, we know how the algorithm works, but how do we break through it? Our
job is to wake up the algorithm in the first 12 – 24 hours of a single being
released. To awaken the algorithm you need to cause spikes in the data that
it’s being fed. It’s these spikes that trigger the algorithm. So, let’s have a look
at some tips.
Acknowledge that it’s social
media.
Spotify is social media, and how do you get ahead in social media? You
add value. To add value to your Spotify you need to make sure it looks
and feels great. Have you got up to date pictures? Have you updated
your bio? Your merch? Your gigs? All of these elements should be on
your profile to encourage users to spend extra time there which in turn
notifies the Spotify algorithm bots who will think “Hey! Something
interesting is going on here.”
Link it up.
You also need to stop thinking of Spotify as a stand-alone platform. Your
Spotify needs to fit into all of your other socials like one big jigsaw puzzle.
Use all your other socials to push people through to Spotify to listen to
your single causing a spike in data that lets the Spotify algorithm know
that something is happening and grabs its attention. It’s all about gaining
that momentum.
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Pre-saves.
I actually don't recommend pre-saves and I'll explain why. Pre-saves are
great if you have an existing audience that you know will listen. In the
early days we ask a lot of our audience and a pre-save is 'just another
ask' when you'll need to follow up on release day too. Also if you get 100
pre-saves and only 25 then listen, this gives weird data to Spotify.
Friday release.
Another tip is to always release your music on a Friday because if you
have done this well enough, there is a chance that you will get onto New
Music Friday, a big playlist that gets updated every single week.
Labelling your track.
When you go into Spotify for artists, have you given Spotify all of the
information that it needs to start seeing what this track is and where it
fits into the world of Spotify and who it should be showing it to? You need
to be giving all of the information for these metatags such as mood and
genre as they make a huge difference in how Spotify figures out what
your track is. You need to be as accurate as possible, because if you put
the wrong data in and Spotify starts to show your track to the wrong
people who start skipping it really quickly, Spotify will also take note of
this data and it will negatively affect you.
Make your music Spotify
playlist friendly.
Have you thought about writing music for a specific Spotify playlist? This
means taking into consideration the tempo, the key, the style, the vibe
and feel, the intro, the title – all of the elements that feed into Spotify’s
data.
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Make your music Spotify
playlist friendly.
An example of this is that a whopping 71% of users leave Spotify on for
their dog. You can go into Spotify and there are reams of playlists
specifically for users to play calming, soothing music to their dogs. And
when you go and check it out, every track, every album and the playlist –
everything is titled and targeted to fit into that algorithm to get as much
traction as possible. Now I’m not saying you should go and make music
for dogs, but I think you catch my drift!
Harness the power of your
fanbase.
When your track has dropped and everyone has got it from the pre-save,
I want you to ask your friends, your family and your fanbase to make a
playlist of not only your track but 20, 40, 50 of their favourite songs. And
where do you fit into this playlist? You’re number one. And can you guess
who’s going to notice this? Spotify!
Always remember.
You can’t just complete all of these steps for one single. You must do them for
every single track that you release. The algorithm is constantly watching and
learning so you need to keep feeding it to get the best results.
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