What is the easiest way to promote Spotify music?

par Hannah Rees
What is the easiest way to promote Spotify music?

With a music streaming service like Spotify, you have millions and millions of listeners and potential fans at your fingertips and you need to make the most of it. So you’ve taken the leap and uploaded your music to the platform, but it’s not doing as well as you’d hoped and now you want to know how to get more streams.

You’ve come to the right place, here are some of the easiest ways to promote Spotify music.

1. Your Spotify profile and the songs you upload should be of the highest quality

Today’s music industry is overcrowded, with so much music available online. Since Spotify is one of the leading online music streaming platforms, it comes as no surprise that there are millions and millions of songs on there so the only chance you have of standing out is to make sure that you have great content and that the audio quality of your music is top notch. Quality is key here but you also have to pay attention to quantity and build up your music library to have a roster of songs available for potential fans to listen to. By having more than one song on the platform, you can ensure that it’s your music as a whole that attracts attention and not just one track. 

With that in mind, you should also aim to release new music on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to be a brand-new song, it could be an acoustic version or a remix of a previous song. Releasing a brand new track is also an excellent way of promoting any other music you have on the platform because your new music draws attention to your old music.

And if the quality of your songs has to be good, that also applies to your artist profile in general.

To make a good first impression on your listeners and audience, you need to make sure it looks professional and is complete. So, if you haven’t already done so, write a compelling bio about yourself that highlights your musical genre or niche, upload a professional photo, and make sure you also link to your other social media platforms, as you want your listeners and fans to be able to find and reach you as easily as possible. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that a good Spotify profile is an active one. In the same way that you need to have a strong online presence on social media, you need to be present on the streaming platform.

Send your music directly to Spotify playlist curators 👇

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A pre-save link is one of the best tools you can use to promote your music, because it gets the word out about any new track you have to share and it gets the ball rolling when it comes to the promotion of it.

Say you’ve got a new song coming out soon and it’s uploaded on Spotify and ready to go. Now you want people to talk about this brand new song of yours and save it to their own music libraries before it’s even released. This is when the pre-save link comes into play. You need to send one to your listeners and fans and let them know that if they click the pre-save button, the track will be automatically added to their music library once it’s released.

Not only can this help you overcome any pre-release jitters you may have, as you can see that people are already interacting with your music by liking and saving it, but it kickstarts the promotion of your new song ahead of its release.

From a practical point of view, as an independent musician, the music distributor you go through to upload your music onto Spotify, be it CD Baby, Distrokid or Tunecore, will have their own type of pre-save method.

3. The importance of playlists to promote music on Spotify

Playlists essentially show your music to a targeted audience who like the specific genre of music you’re creating and they play a huge role when it comes to promoting your Spotify music as many people rely on them to discover new music on the platform.

There are different types of playlists that you can use to promote your music to a target audience. 

  • Spotify’s editorial playlists are integrated into the Spotify platform and they are the best tool you have to promote your music as the audiences of these playlists are often huge. You have various Spotify playlists that are full of popular music trending at the moment. But how do you get your music on one of them? You first need to have a Spotify for Artists account. If you’ve never heard of this before, it’s sort of a centralized hub for monitoring your music. Once you have an account on Spotify for Artists, you can submit your Spotify songs to Spotify’s editorial team who will review them and decide whether or not to include them in a playlist. A good idea when you have a new song coming out is to submit it for consideration approximately two weeks before the release date. 
  • User-created playlists are also a great tool to promote your Spotify music. These are created by independent curators and you have a myriad of them all covering different music genres and styles. Some are even dedicated to music discovery and only feature independent artists so they could be a great choice for you! Because there are so many different ones, you need to do your research and come up with a list of playlists that could be a good fit for your music. If you’re struggling with this step of the process, a good idea would be to search for other artists in your genre and see which playlists they are featured on. When you check out a playlist, make sure that it has a decent number of followers (over 100 is good) and that it is still active and being updated regularly. To get on one of these playlists, you need to submit your music directly to the playlist curator, and for that, you need to find their contact information. If it’s not available on Spotify, you may want to check if they have a professional website or else, their social media channels such as their Instagram account or their Facebook account.  When reaching out to them, be polite and give them all the information they may need to consider your submission. If you’re pushed for time or want to make this whole process simpler, something that could help you is to go through a music promotion website such as Groover, which can put you in touch with playlist curators directly. 
  • Algorithmic playlists are one of the best indicators of organic growth on the platform because they work like this: if people like your song, Spotify will play it through algorithmic playlists. These playlists are things such as Discover Weekly and release radar … A quick word about Spotify’s release radar. Every Friday, Spotify creates a personalized playlist for each user which comprises all the new tracks released that week by the various artists the user follows. So there are two things to take from this: you want to release new music on a Friday and you want to make sure your fans follow you because then all your new music will end up on their release radar.

Finally, another thing you can do is take matters into your own hands and create your own playlist

If you do this, make sure that you stick to a particular genre and, just as you should promote your Spotify music, you should promote your Spotify playlist and update it regularly with new music. 

The advantage of this method is that it allows you to create your own audience to which you can then broadcast your music. That said, it’s also important to help others, so make sure you highlight smaller artists by uploading their tracks onto your playlist.

4. Organically send people to Spotify from Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms to listen to your music

The truth is that there are limited ways to promote your music on the Spotify platform, as it is primarily a music streaming platform. Therefore, most artists you see doing so well on Spotify had their big break on another social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram or even TikTok.

Now, when it comes to succeeding on these social media platforms, there’s no secret and the best strategy is to have quality content and post regularly. 

Once you have a small audience, you need to use these social channels to advertise your Spotify music and get your music heard. We’ve already seen that you need to include links to your social media accounts in your Spotify artist profile, but you also need to do this the other way and include links to both your Spotify artist profile as well as any new song you have on the streaming platform onto your various social media accounts. 

To do this, you need to go to your artist page and click on the three dots next to your name, and then click on « copy artist link ». To share a particular song on your social media platforms, it’s the same process but you need to click the three dots next to the track in question and then select « copy song link ». It’s as easy as that and by sharing your Spotify information with your followers on social media, you make it possible for a crossover to happen. 

5. Use collaborations to tap into a different fanbase

Collaborations are one of the best ways to promote your Spotify music as an independent artist and to grow your audience rapidly. This is because by co-releasing a song, you’re tapping into someone else’s fanbase.

When deciding on fellow artists to collaborate with, you should aim to work with people who are a little bit more established than you are so that you get to learn from them as well. But don’t dismiss smaller artists who are reaching out to you. We all have to start somewhere ! 

Two musicians collaborating.

Networking goes a long way and you should always aim to make meaningful connections and build good relationships as you never know who you may want to work with in the future. And if you are starting out and you don’t know that many people in the industry, don’t be afraid to reach out to artists who inspire you to let them know that you would love to work with them.  The music industry can sometimes be a bit cutthroat, but it’s also full of great people who are always willing to help out a fellow musician.

Send your music directly to Spotify playlist curators 👇

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