How To Get On Spotify Playlists

If you're going to approach major playlist curators and attempt to get a feature, you need to have all of your music, branding, and online presence in tip top shape. This includes all your website, your social media, your brand, your music, etc. You have to look like a pro, or you won't even be considered. The standard is so high these days, so make sure you meet it. Here's a rough checklist:

Someone is making these sought after playlists, and therefore it is your job to find out who they are. You'll have to do research for relevant playlists in your genre, but here are some general places in which you'll find curators:

Label distributors have direct access to the staff/curators at all DSPs, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc.

They usually offer "bespoke" marketing to these DSPs to help you land on playlists. What does that mean? Well, they don't execute your marketing plan directly, but they use it as leverage in their pitch to the DSPs for some playlist adds.

For example, say you're executing a TikTok influencer campaign for your single and directing all consumers of that content to Spotify, the label distributor can then go to Spotify and say, "Hey, this artist is pushing people to your platform with this campaign, can you help them with an editorial playlist?"

These days, you have a significantly higher chance of landing on an editorial playlist such as New Music Friday if you work with a label distributor.

Well as you might imagine, you can't work with a label distributor directly. You have to work with a label type 'entity', which could be a record label, management company, production team, etc. For example, Velveteen Music acts as a label entity and offers label distribution through Believe Music.

If you want to learn more about distributing through Velveteen Music, click here.

Label distribution runs on a revenue sharing model rather than an annual fee. Distributors typically take 10% - 20% off the top, then the entity may take an additional percent off the top, depending on their circumstances.

There are three main label distributors. Note: you can view the distributors on Spotify's Provider Directory under Label Distributors.

You're going to have to start approaching these people, and you'll want to do it in a respectful manner to see results. Don't forget, curators are constantly going through new artists that reach out to them, so you'll have to poke through the crowd somehow. Here's some tips:

Yes, create your own playlists! This is an ideal way to get your music out there. Create a killer playlist for your target audience that includes some of your favourite artists. Then put one of your songs in there. Now share it! If you have completed the "Do The Prep Work First" as we talked about above, you'll be able to share this playlist out to all your socials and hopefully start to see some movement

Don't be too "salesy" with this approach however. If your playlists come off as too self-promotional, you're not going to see any movement as no one will be interested. Focus on great content first, as with all web stuff.

Getting on a curator playlist is a difficult undertaking, but as with most things in your career, you just need to continue to build and refine. It will happen.