In an ever changing market, promoting your digital music is essential because the way we play music and listen to music has changed. The old trust radio-station is out and online music / streamed music is in. Free streaming has become a new pillar of the recorded music sector and now represents more than 82% of the music market revenues.

With Spotify at the top of the list (far ahead of Apple Music and Amazon Music), it is now becoming necessary for every songwriter to develop their business on the platform and boost their streams. At the end of Q2 2023, it was announced that Spotify had reached over 550+ million users worldwide. A number that exceeded their forecasts, Spotify’s growth seems to have no limits.

So how is your own music supposed to stand out from the millions of songs in the vast music collection on these music streaming services? Every subscription service has a set of key tools to get new paying subscribers to consume music on platform.

There’s no use in cheating by buying streams! Depending on the service you use, your distributor or Spotify may notice that you’ve purchased streams and penalize you by permanently disabling your artist account. That’s why it’s important to build up your visibility on the platform in a progressive and organic way. Fortunately, there are more and more powerful tools to help you do so- including Groover.

Want to give your new-music a fighting change on streaming music services? Upload your music files on Groover, get feedback within 7 days from some of the best music professionals of the music-industry, and take your music catalog to the next level.

Are you looking to get placed on Spotify playlists? ⬇️

Here are 7 tips for you to increase Spotify streams without cheating and finally, stand out from the crowd.

1. The basis for analyzing your streams: Spotify For Artists

By creating a Spotify for Artists account, your account will be instantly verified, which only adds to your credibility. Plus, you’ll have access to all sorts of great features like data analysis and notifications when your music is added to playlists. Keep track of this data as much as possible and try to note trends. This feature is completely free and allows you not only to know who’s listening to your music, but also to get an overview of which songs are most popular with your listeners.

| Also read: Spotify for Artists – The ultimate guide to boost your streams

Spotify is the stronger competitor within the recording industry when talking about any streaming platform. As an independent artist, all you want is to distribute your music and get your music heard. Spotify For Artists is the perfect tool for this. Songwriters can understand how their fan-base listen to any music and change their promotional strategy accordingly. Want to learn how to promote your music and increase your Spotify streams? Groover is here to help you out!

| Check out: How to use Groover to promote your music with success

2. How to get more streams on Spotify – Create your own playlists to promote your music

Boosting your overall Spotify streams is a great way to get your music into editorial playlists. You can use platforms such as Groover to contact playlist curators directly, but you can also create your own playlist. Creating your own playlists on Spotify allows you to bring your favorite music together in one place. You can also pin it to your homepage. It’s a great way to showcase your repertoire, bring your community together and encourage them to stream music online and offline. Showcase your music catalogue in a variety of genres.

You can also create curated playlists based on your mood or specific themes and include songs from bands and musicians that inspire you (and add a few of your own songs to them too). Don’t overdo it by inserting too many personal songs, because the challenge here is to stay authentic and share your music library and musical universe with your fans and potential future listeners. Another trick is also to collaborate with other musicians on a playlist. When you do this, you expose your playlist (and your songs) to a larger audience, which means more fans and more Spotify streams.

It is essential to add tracks to these playlists on a regular basis. Indeed, your subscribers will be notified each time you update them. This approach also leads your listeners to consult your profile, which contributes to raising the number of visitors on your profile and, in fact, the number of streams.

Think about what your listeners would want or what you, as a listener, would want from curated playlists. Put yourself in your fans shoes and find how they are listening to music. If they are studying, going on a run, working out, pregaming – create this vibe for your audience. But don’t forget, you are unique so make playlists about how you would like them for yourself, NOT for other people. This will definitely work in your favor. If you make a playlist for studying, put yourself in the situation and see what you like when you are studying. Also Pro tip! When people look up your Spotify playlist they listen to the first 3-5 songs before deciding if they want to subscribe. Make sure these are your absolute favorite ones in the playlist.

Read also : How to create your own playlist on Spotify and gain followers ?

3. How to get more Spotify plays? Be active on social networks

We can never say it enough. It’s important to maintain the link with your fans and keep them updated with news and content that reveals your personality.

Become a musical guru for your fans while promoting your own songs!

Promoting these special playlists and new tracks on your various social networks is a great way to stay dynamic, engage your community and drive traffic to your Spotify profile. It’s also essential because Spotify’s algorithms monitor your activity. So it’s imperative to engage your community to subscribe to your Spotify profile. The best way to attract new listeners is to feed your profile with exclusive content (including remixes, covers, featurings, live versions and more). Any activity is good to relay on your unlimited streaming platforms because active users with high-performance streams are more likely to have their music placed in prominent playlists. Also, the more streams and listeners you have, the more you appear in searches and custom playlists.

| Read also: How to gain new followers on INSTAGRAM?

4. Take advantage of Spotify Ad Studio – How to get more streams on Spotify?

Spotify Ad Studio is an advertising platform that allows users to easily create and manage Spotify audio advertising campaigns. You can create audio ads of 30 seconds or less. Spotify users hear them during commercial breaks between songs. Each ad also contains a clickable image linked to the URL of your choice.

Keep in mind that these audio ads are disturbing the listeners listening. Imagine you are in your home and you listen to music online through an Echo, Alexa or Sonos … the last thing you would want is a boring ad to disrupt your playlist of jams! Be clever about your audio ad and make it enjoyable for the listener. Make sure to stick out and create a positive impression on a new potential listener. Don’t be the reason why someone pays for a music subscription and choose to go ad-free! Keep in mind that Spotify Premium users do not have audio ads served to them on the streaming music service.

This new feature allows you to accurately track the flow and growth of your streams and gives you the ability to target new listeners by geography, demographics, and listening trends.

Need help finding the perfect audience for your music online? It’s harder than many people think! Contrary to some preconceived notions, no artist can pass from the shadows into the spotlight just by snapping their fingers. Also, getting a good song out there is not enough anymore, and there is no point in making buzz just for buzz’s sake if you want to build a solid and lasting reputation. Finding your own identity as an artist and bringing together an audience around your project is a long-term process.

Indeed, you have to remain authentic, but also use the right methods to capture the audience that corresponds to you and understand what it expects from you. Knowing your fans allows you to interact with them as well as possible, but also to develop a better communication strategy in order to gain visibility- and especially notoriety. Here are some tips to help you target your audience as a musician.

| Check out: How to find an audience for your music: 7 Tips to boost your visibility

5. How to get more listeners on Spotify? Use a Spotify code

A Spotify code is a kind of QR code that you can add to your various communication media. It’s possible to create Spotify codes for artist profiles, playlists, albums and songs. In addition, you can share Spotify codes almost anywhere. Use it on social media, websites and more. Your fans can then scan the code using the Spotify app’s built-in scanner.

There’s also a new feature on Spotify for Artists that allows you to share your music directly from the platform with Promo Cards.

6. Integrate Spotify plug-ins into your communications

The integration of Spotify players and a ‘subscribe’ button allows your fans to access and listen to your music directly. When a user clicks the subscribe button on your Spotify account, they instantly become a fan of your music and follow all your activities on the platform. In fact, Spotify notifies your subscribers when you post new tracks or play gigs near them. It works with any HTML-enabled website. Non-Spotify subscribers will be able to enjoy a 30-second preview of your track. It’s an easy way to get more exposure and increase Spotify streams.

7. Get heard by playlisters to gain streams

In order to do this, it is imperative that you know what kind of music you are playing and what kind of audience you are addressing. It can by any types of music from hip-hop to techno or indie music; it’s important to understand your realm and/or music universe. As an emerging artist, the best way to get more streams is to appear on playlists managed by musical influencers. These curators usually address a niche and have the potential to share your music with your future biggest fans. The more you appear in user-generated playlists the more likely you are to get into Spotify algorithmic and editorial playlists.

So the question is, how to get into user-generated playlists ? And here are the two best solutions we recommend :

• Groover

Contacting the editorial teams of radio stations, podcasts, bloggers or labels/record labels directly is often tedious and almost never yields concrete results. (Don’t forget about internet radio too, this is a great tool to keep in mind!) With Groover, you can contact the best bloggers and playlists (including Délicieuse Musique, SideKick Music and Lymu) and be assured that you’ll be listened to, get feedback on your music and why not be on Spotify’s top playlists! To make it easy for you, we’ve even set up a special category to help you find them in the filters from the media selection page:

• User-generated playlists

1. Check out profiles of artists who have between 1,000 and 50,000 listeners per month – including your “Similar Artists”.
2. Go to “Overview” ⇒ “Fans also like”
3. In “About” → “Discovered On”…
4. Once you see the playlists that bring them the most streams, aim for the ones that are not created by Spotify and you might have a chance to get in too!

| To go further : How to get on Spotify Playlists ?

Spotify is not the only music streaming service that will help you promote your music online. Check out streaming services like Apple Music, iTunes and iTune Radio, Soundcloud, Google Play, Youtube Music, Tidal, Napster, Pandora, and many more. Any music service, like the ones mentioned, is a great music discovery tool that will allow any new listener to listen and download your music. Make sure to check them out!

For more concrete advice on playlists, we suggest the guide for artists and playlist curators 👉  Work Hard Playlist Hard