Spotify Tips to Help Compensate
for their new <1,000 stream system
If you have music on spotify, rather than complaining about the company, there are some things you can do to make it work better for you. When I discovered how easy it is to put music online, I was drunk with that “power” and put way too many singles of back catalog out. If you are unhappy with the results you get, pull your tracks from Spotify. I did that for 135 tracks that would not get the required 1,000 streams per year.
Look at the 24 hour song performance. How many tracks on that list are being heard, how many times by how many listeners? You will probably need to find ways to boost the ones that aren’t getting attention. There is an audience out there for anything that’s well done, even if it’s not perfect. Perfect is overrated! Good is good. You aren’t ordinary, so neither is your audience. You just have to find them.
Look also at the source of streams of the most successful songs. If you see it has a high percentage on “Spotify editorial and personalized editorial playlists” almost guarantee good results.
Another thing to look at in Spotify Artists: Click on “Saves” to see how many people added your track to their library. This is pretty significant because it would tend to mean they liked the track enough to want to hear it again.
Collaboration with other artists elsewhere in the world exposes your artist profile & work to people listening to the track from their placement on lists, links they post, etc. In my collab with a Brazilian composer, for example, each of us gets what amounts to double visibility for that reason. We also both do whatever promotion is possible, on social networks, emails, etc. Then there’s the pleasure of making the music together, obviously.
You’ll also want to make your own playlists and play them. Even better, get other people to play them. Some restaurants use Spotify and with a little luck, you might persuade one to play your playlist, which happens to contain a few of your songs mixed in with some sure successes. I’ve also found groups that exchange playlists and this works pretty well.
Pitching to playlist curators gives uneven results, but my recommendation is to never pay to pitch your track(s). I use DailyPlaylists for that. There’s no fee or even registration, it works via your Spotify account. Every Monday, you are given 20 credits to pitch to the lists. They can be shown by genre, or you can do a search. It’s a pretty effective system if you get the genre matched. You also have to choose the lists by their activity (or not), the number of subscribed accounts and the numbr of tracks. Lists that take 10 hours to play may or may not get your tracks played. Lists with 120 subscribers alos may or may not give results.
One thing is certain: if you don’t put in the work of analyzing and pitching, or find someone to you trust to do it for you, there will rarely be any growth of your audience.
