How to Make Spotify Promotion Work For YouThere are two questions that every growing musician asks themselves at some point. One, what is the secret to eternal happiness? And two, does Spotify promotion actually work? The good news is, we’re working out the answer to the first one and we’ll let you know when we figure it out. The better news is we have the definitive answer to the second question. In this post, we’ll walk you through what Spotify promotion is, how it works, the cost of promoting on Spotify, how to identify a (legit) promotion service that’s right for you, and, most importantly, how to monitor if your promotion $$ are getting you returns. But first things first: what exactly does “Spotify promotion” mean? Legitimate Spotify promotion services pitch artists’ music to curators of prominent Spotify playlists, providing exposure to real listeners through such placements. This is distinct from bot networks offering fake streams; using these violates Spotify’s TOS and may result in a ban from Spotify. It’s extremely important to understand the nuances and implications of this, so let’s look at it in detail. Why Does Promotion on Spotify Matter? Broadly speaking, “Spotify promotion” refers to a set of practices that enable artists to gain more listeners and streams for their content on Spotify. Why is this important to an up and coming musician? As you can clearly see from the above graphic, there’s quite a journey between releasing your song on Spotify and generating royalty income from it. The major stages in this journey include: Playlist placement Your track is placed on multiple Spotify playlists created around a genre, mood, social message or other unifying theme. This maximizes exposure to thousands of listeners who could convert to potential fans. Growing listens, subscribers, fans As more listeners discover your music, your track streams grow, leading to more subscribers and fans. Algorithmic streaming Rapid growth in your listenership is detected by the Spotify algorithm, which then begins serving up your track to more and more listeners whose playlist selections overlap hugely with those of your existing listeners.  Music income With an expanding fan base and an ever-growing list of subscribers, your music generates income through royalties, tours, merchandise and other avenues. How Does Spotify Promotion Work? Like other media platforms (Netflix, YouTube), Spotify works with the objective of maximizing user engagement. The Spotify algorithm is designed to detect and promote music content that keeps listeners engaged on the platform—playing a song, hitting the ‘like’ and ‘repeat’ buttons, browsing an artist’s profile to discover more songs and so on. But when you have a new track on Spotify, or if you’re an artist with relatively few listeners on the platform, the algorithm has insufficient data to figure out who might enjoy your music. As a result, the algorithm won’t actively push your music to users. Curated playlists can give your music that much-needed, initial launch-pad. Getting featured on such third-party playlists is a great way to help Spotify’s algorithms gather data on the types of listeners who like your music, which in turn tells Spotify who to recommend your music to. When your music generates enough interaction through playlist placements, the Spotify algorithm recognizes this activity and is more likely to include your songs in its algorithmic playlists such as Discover Weekly and Release Radar. Spotify Promotion Methods At the time of writing, there are at least three distinct methods that are variously described as “promotion”: placement on legitimate, third-party-curated playlists on Spotify placement on Spotify’s own official playlists sketchy third-party networks with pay-per-stream services for fake streams through bots As we mentioned earlier, getting fake streams goes against Spotify’s terms of service, and Spotify can and does remove content and/or withhold royalties for artists using such tactics. Given that Spotify pays artists royalties based on the number of streams their content receives, they obviously won’t be happy about users trying to game the system by using bots to generate the appearance of thousands of streams. These types of services are typically offered by shady operators using fake names, often (but not always) on platforms like Fiverr. They’re easy to spot because they claim to deliver thousands of streams for a handful of dollars, and either won’t name the playlists where they’ll get your content placed, or rely on low-quality lists that exclusively feature artists nobody’s ever heard of (real users don’t seek out and listen to playlists like that). If you’re ever tempted to try out such services, take our advice: DON’T. Spotify’s algorithm’s are very sophisticated and it isn’t at all difficult for them to detect which streams come from real human listeners, and which ones are coming from bots that are trying to game the system. Besides, the whole point of promotion is to help more real people discover your music and build real fans. Paying for fake streams completely defeats that goal, so it makes no sense at all. Spotify also has their own pay-per-stream feature called Marquee, but since this is really more of a pay-per-click advertising product (similar to using Facebook to advertise your music to potential fans), we won’t discuss that here. This leaves the two other methods of promotion, which we’ll review below. Placement on Spotify's editorial playlists The only way to get your music featured on Spotify editorial playlists is to pitch upcoming tracks to their team via your Spotify for Artists dashboard. There is no guarantee that your pitch will be accepted, but here are a few measures you could take to increase your chances: Keep your artist profile page fully updated Take the effort to shoot or create an attractive, professional cover photo Write a bio that impresses your audience and listeners — if you’re not sure how, you can inexpensively hire a copywriter to write this for you Add at least 4 to 5 photos to the image gallery Add links to your social media handles, and ensure that they are active Promotion via third-party curated playlists For serious music lovers — the kind of people who you’d want as your fans — the real joy of Spotify lies in the countless playlists that allow them to discover new, amazing music.  Many of these popular playlists curated by third-party users on Spotify have thousands of followers (