EDM Music Marketing: How to Promote Your Music on Spotify

how to promote your music on spotify

Needless to say Spotify (and streaming platforms in general) are the way of the future. In this guide we dive into different promo techniques

ESTIMATED READING TIME – 5 Minutes (Or VIDEO TIME – 9 Minutes) 

Needless to say Spotify (and all streaming platforms in general) are the way of the future. With tens of thousands of tracks being uploaded to Spotify daily, it’s safe to say everyone has coined onto Spotify being a great place to upload their music, grow their fanbase and get paid for it.

But has everyone coined on to how to promote their music through the giant streaming platform? So if you are one of the many artists that have uploaded original music to the platform, what are you doing to make sure your tracks are standing out from the near countless new ones a day?

Well we’re here to help. Currently there aren’t too many methods available to help promote your music through Spotify since it’s not a social media platform like Instagram or Tiktok, however there are still things you can do to help boost your audience and make it grow! 

PLAYLISTS [MOST IMPORTANT]

Playlists are by far the most effective method to broadening your audience and boosting the amount of streams your music gets. When getting featured on a Playlist, you’re essentially taking an already established audience who follow already follow a specific type of music and then, you’re slotting your track right in front of them and that placement is key!

So by now you’re probably thinking… well, how do I get onto these playlists? Don’t worry, we’ve broken it down to 3 potential ways to get on Spotify Playlists.

 – BEING DISCOVERED – 

This one is strait forward, someone discovers a song of yours through the internet or Spotify and then decides to add your track to their playlist. I know, not that helpful and way out of your control, but what is in your control is having a good online presence that allows you to be discoverable so people can find your music and add it to playlists.

So make sure you’re active on social media and getting your name out there! Being discoverable is key! Thank what can you do to boost your overall online presence and get your reach to more people?…

dubstep don promo

 – SPOTIFY’S OWN PLAYLISTS – 

The ability to submit your music for Playlist consideration to get on a Spotify’s very own cultivated playlists is a big game changer for promoting your music on Spotify!

With this ability, Spotify has essentially given you a massive helping hand to help promote yourself. In the past if you’d wanted to get your music on the radio, you’d have to pitch your music to someone in radio. But chances are they wont talk to anyone not from a label or manager 🙁

But now within a couple of minutes you can pitch your track to Spotify and they can see whether your song would be a good fit in a playlist.

So let’s break it down. Big Playlists = More Listeners. More Listeners = More Streams. More Streams = More $$$.

(Assuming you’re doing a self release) In order to submit your music to these cultivated playlists, the next time you send your new music off to the digital stores through your music distributor (ie Distrokid, CDBaby, Tunecore or Label Engine) make sure you schedule your release a couple of weeks out from the day you send it off. This gives time for Spotify to receive your new music and time for you to submit it for playlist consideration.

After scheduling your release through your music distributor, wait a couple of days and then login to your ‘Spotify for Artists’ account (you can sign up here) you should then see a big banner on your Spotify for Artists homepage with a place to submit your music for playlist consideration. Then follow the instructions from there, like in this video below 🙂

spotify playlist

 – SEARCHING FOR PLAYLISTS – 

The method is pretty strait forward. Find playlists that other artists/labels/brands/people have made and try send your music to them to feature on their playlist.

This is often a harder technique as Spotify doesn’t have an easy, ‘message playlist owner’ button. But you can look up the whoever made the playlist (each playlist has an authors username) and search for their social media, find an email address or facebook page or instagram for you to message and ask if they are accepting submissions for their playlist.

The good thing about this method over the Spotify Cultivated Playlist method is you can keep pitching your new and old music and send it to different playlists rather than just hope that Spotify likes your new release enough to feature and promote it in a playlist.

There are also online services like ‘submithub’ that streamlines the process (getting you in direct contact with playlist owners,) but do your research first to see if this sort of thing is something you want to do.

LINKING YOUR SPOTIFY

Just because there are limited ways to promote your music inside the platform, you can still help to promote your profile outside the platform.

Simply go to your profile, click the circle with the 3 dots inside, click ‘share,’ click ‘copy artist link‘ and start sharing that link with your social channels and friends.

Here are a few ideas where to paste that link…

Twitter – Left Sidebar Website Link
Youtube – Leave a link in the About Page (can also have mini links in channel header)
Youtube – Links in the descriptions of your videos
Soundcloud – Right Sidebar
Facebook – About Section – Website Link
Instagram – Link In Bio (website Link)

spotify promo soundcloud

PRESAVE [PRE-PROMOTION]

Getting fans to Pre-Save a song before it even comes out is also a great feature! There’s quite a few ways to be able to create a Pre-save link Toneden.io  pictured on the right looks the best, but requires a Facebook Ad account to create the link.

If you use Distrokid for distributing your music, you can used whats called a Hyperfollow link from an upcoming track to Pre-save your song.

pre save spotify promo

CDBaby also has a feature to Pre-Save, although you’ll need to create a Show.co account through your CdBaby account to access this.Creating these Presave links is a great way to start promoting your music even before it has come out yet!

RELEASE RADAR

Here’s another playlist idea although this promotion method is basically done for you it’s still a good thing to know so i’ll explain more. Every Spotify user gets a playlist automatically created for them called ‘Release Radar’ and every Friday, Spotify updates this playlist for the user with brand new music that has just come out from the artists they are following.

(New music typically has a release date of a Friday) So if a fan is following a your Spotify artist page, whenever you release a new track the fan will see it updated on their Release Radar the next Friday. So you’ll be pleased to know that your brand new music will end up on your fans Release Radar on the following Friday it’s out! Nice and easy!

START YOUR OWN PLAYLIST

Why not start your own Playlist. Since playlists are the best places to promote your music on the platform, why not create your own to be in control of it?

Simply figure out what genre your music resonates with the most and create a playlist with some of your own music and some other favourites of yours from other artists with the same genre.

It’s a wise idea to make sure the first song on the playlist is yours and be sure to not flood the entire playlist with your music as people will see strait through that and it might be a turn off if a playlist is mostly just one artist when its meant to be a collection of music for a genre.

spotify playlist promotion

For example if you make Future Bass, you could create a playlist called “Best of: Future Bass Music” send a link to your friends to follow your playlist and check out the music there. And with a bit of luck, people will also search for Future Bass music on Spotify and discover your music!

This method is more of an indirect way to promote your music which might sit easier with some people who aren’t too keen getting “check out my new music” thrust upon them….

FINAL THOUGHTS

So there you have it. Our top tips on how to promote on your music on Spotify. Like I said at the beginning, there aren’t too many methods on promoting inside the platform since it literally is a platform that hosts music for people to stream and enjoy.

However there are a few ways that you can help leverage your profile and music so more people can listen to it like we mentioned in the points above.

Please remember to stay away from buying streams as it goes against Spotifys terms, could get you permanently kicked off the platform and fake streams pull money away from artists that actually earned their streams through a legitimate following/fanbase.In the end, it really seems like

Spotify does care about its artists by providing them with the tools to boost their fans and analytics to research their stats which is immensely valuable. So if they do end up making changes to the platform that affects how you can promote your music through it we’ll be sure to update those features here.

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