Spotify Promotion
I’ve decided to share more of my experiences the past year and a half with Auracane. My biggest teacher has been mistakes, and so here’s another valuable lesson.
There are no real spotify promotion companies. You cannot pay for real spotify plays no matter how legit their website and reviews look. On top of that Spotify recognizes these fake plays and exempts you from their editorial playlists. Those plays and followers will eventually disappear and you wont even get paid from the streaming royalties when it does. Worst of all you run the risk of getting banned from spotify forever.
I’ll also mention that engagement groups are terrible for your spotify. If you join a group of artists that all run up a playlist together your “recommended artists” will be them. Unless they all fit your genre you will confuse the shit out of spotify’s algorithms and this will stain your page for a very long time. This happened to me and once I stopped all my personalized playlists were removed, recommended artists removed, “auracane radio” gone (still is), and this lasted about 7 months. I’ve just recently received 3 recommended artists on my page and they all fit my genre, and have over 100,000 monthly listeners each.
So what’s left for you to do? There’s generally 4 sources of promotion I use for my spotify page and music releases.
Submithub.com: Now before I start I want to say I fucking hate this platform. Most of their curators run playlists that have all grown through a “follow to submit” platform such as dailyplaylists (we’ll get there shortly) and will have >5 listeners a month on a playlist with thousands of followers. This money is better spent on facebook ads, however, I can’t ignore the importance of landing on a huge playlist. If you really want to use your money wisely there, take a good hard listen to the playlist you’re submitting to, and keep track of curators who’ve accepted your music before. Build a relationship with them and they will help you out tremendously.
dailyplaylists.com/soundplate.com: These are free to pitch sites with tons of useful playlists. My only recommendation is to make a burner account on spotify to pitch because it will flood your spotify with playlists and artists you’re forced to follow in the submission gates. I have three burners I use to pitch extra on these platforms and have been added to some really great playlists off there.
Facebook ads: This is where you should focus a majority of your budget if you have one for a release. This has become quite oversaturated the past year or so, but still worth it. You’ll have to youtube the current best practices for conversion campaigns, otherwise you’ll waste a large portion of your budget on bots (fucking everywhere). Andrew Southworth taught me everything I know on there but it’s worth exploring for new ideas.
Spotify search: This is a new method for me but it’s very promising. In the search bar on spotify type in your genre of music, add a space, and then ‘@gmail.com’. This will bring up playlists in your genre that list a gmail in their bio for submissions. Takes a bit more work but by far the most direct way to pitch to playlists that are open for submissions.
There’s always going to be new ways to pitch spotify because artists are incredibly creative, so if one ever gets their music in front of you in a creative way, pay attention to how it worked and emulate it. If you have questions for me just reach out on my social media.