Music Marketing

Your musician bio or artist bio is often the first piece of information that media creators, i.e., bloggers, journalists, vloggers, event and festival organizers, and other key figures and influencers in the music industry will read about you.

Also, today’s streaming and social media platforms have a prominent area dedicated to your musician bio, which is often the first place a person goes to read more about you if you caught their attention with a song or another piece of content.

How to Write a Musician Bio – Table of Contents

• Why Write a Musician Bio? Who Is Your Musician Bio For? What Is Your Musician Bio’s Goals?
• Elements of a Musician Bio
• Summary of a Musician Bio
• Should a Musician Bio be Written in First Person or Third Person?
• How to Write Your Musician Bio for Social Media – Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Should You Write an Musician Bio By Yourself or Should You Hire a Professional Writer Experienced in Musician Bio Writing to Do It for You?

Why Write a Musician Bio? Who Is Your Musician Bio For? What Is Your Musician Bio’s Goals?

Writing a musician bio first needs to consider who the bio is primarily for, and what are your goals with regard to that audience.

The most common primary audience for a musician bio are media creators, i.e., journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and other influencers.

The most common goal for musicians sending their musician bio to media creators is that they take notice of the musician, and agree to some form of collaboration, e.g., that they feature the musician and their music on their channel/s.

Other audiences of a musician bio could be event and festival organizers and fans. Therefore, the music bios need to reflect what each audience primarily needs.

• Media creators mostly need content that would provide value to their respective audiences.
• Event and festival organizers mostly need to know that the acts they’re hiring will bring people to the venue.
• Fans mostly need the most important latest updates (e.g. new or upcoming releases and/or tours) from the musician in the bio.

Therefore, initially, musicians should create a musician bio for each respective audience in the places they will visit. Media creators and event and festival organizers would read the music bio either sent to them in an email, or on the musician’s profile pages on platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, as well as on the “About” page of the musician’s website.

Fans would interact more with the music bio in social media sites’ bio sections.

The way I recommend writing musician bios is that you start with writing your short music bio aimed at media creators and/or event and festival organizers, then fill out a longer one for the first audience, and then write a music bio per social media platform to better suit your fans (or potential fans if you’re starting out).

Elements of a Musician Bio

A musician bio used for sending to media creators commonly includes the following elements:

Elevator Pitch First Sentence

The first sentence needs to be hard hitting. It needs to catch the reader off guard, making the reader want to keep reading to find out more about the musician.

If you think of yourself as a scriptwriter who wrote a film script, and now has to approach a production company that receives hundreds of scripts each day, what would be the one-sentence pitch you would say to them in order for them to want to continue listening to you?

The first sentence needs an incredible amount of scrutiny in order to pinpoint the specific amazing, unique and/or relatable aspect of the artist, without using hype language and clichés, and communicate it in a way that emotionally impacts the reader, leaving them hungry for more.

In terms of approaching the writing of a musician bio, it is good for the musician to think about this sentence themselves—that they think hard about what is the most unique point about them, something that could be said about them as an artist that cannot be said about anyone else. And remember, avoid clichés that are heard often in these descriptive situations, i.e., phrases like “one of a kind,” “set to blow up,” and common descriptive words like “mysterious.”

YouTuber Outerloop Group created a very good video that stresses these points, the importance of the first sentence of the music bio, and gives additional insights than what I wrote here. I recommend watching it in order for this point to really sink in…

In short, no matter how good your music is, and no matter how professional your photos, cover art, and the rest of your music bio is, if you fail to garner readers’ interest in the initial sentence, then they will likely pass over all that work you put into your music and other content you’ve prepared.

Especially in an era where anybody can upload their music to a distributor and pitch it to blogs, radio stations, and other influential channels, your music bio’s first sentence is crucial in order to make you stand out from the noise!

Essential Information

No matter how interesting and attractive your music bio is, there is essential information that media creators almost always seek about an artist they’re interested in:

• Where is the artist from? Where does the artist live?
• What is the artist’s sound, genre, and style?
• What are the artist’s biggest 1-3 achievements? What is the artist’s relevant education?
• What does the artist represent? What is the artist’s philosophy, the “why” behind what the artist creates?

A musician bio needs to provide that information. It is often written plainly, sentence after sentence. However, a more attractive musician bio is one that weaves those details into the artist’s enveloping story.

Story

The story is the enveloping context within which all the aforementioned aspects come together.

The story is unique solely to the artist. It can point to one or many factors that have interwoven the specific phenomenon that is the artist: the artist’s…

• Background,
• Location,
• Surrounding environment and culture,
• Influences,
• Education,
• Experiences, and
• Philosophy.

One way to check whether the artist’s story is unique specifically to this particular artist is by replacing the artist’s name with another artist name, and checking whether the bio truly communicates the particular artist’s uniqueness, strengths, and motivations, or whether it fits with other artists as well, and thus would need further refining.

The story should naturally follow on from the elevator pitch, link through all the essential information, and end with the artist’s “why”—the vision and purpose of the artist.

Summary of a Musician Bio

• The first sentence is the elevator pitch that needs to have a killer angle, making the reader want to continue reading.
• The second sentence starts situating the artist into a familiar territory of genres and styles, while doing so within the context of a story that gives broader context as to why and/or how the artist fits into that territory.
• The following 1-3 sentences communicate essential information about the artist that anyone interested in finding more out about the artist would want to know, i.e., the artist’s background, location, influences, surrounding environment and culture, relevant education, experiences, and philosophy.
• The last 1-3 sentences should discuss the artist’s “why”—philosophy, vision, and purpose.
• All of the above points should ideally be enveloped into a story that provides a bigger context that all the elements fit within, unique to the artist.

Should a Musician Bio be Written in First Person or Third Person?

If it’s a musician bio aimed at media creators (e.g. journalists, bloggers, vloggers, etc.), then it should be written in third person. The reason is simply that third person writing lets media creators easily copy/paste the bio into their posts, whereas first person writing forces media creators to work more in order to edit the bio in order to make it third person.

If it is a bio aimed at fans or other musicians, then it can be written in first person in order to establish a more personal affiliation with them.

Again, it all depends on who the bio is written for, and what its goals are.

How to Write Your Musician Bio for Social Media – Instagram, Twitter, Etc.

Once you have your extended musician bio, you should then have a well thought-out expression of who you are, what you do, your strengths, motivation, uniqueness, social proof that boosts your artist self, your biggest 1-3 achievements, and that it is all tied together in a compelling story that is unique to you.

That bio is essentially for media creators, and it can exist on emails that are sent to journalists, bloggers, music directors, playlist curators, and event organizers. It can be on your EPK, and it also might suit the “About Me” page of your website.

However, it is too long for the bio section in all your social media accounts.

What, then, should you put on your social media profiles?

First, as mentioned in the beginning, the question should be: Who is your bio on your social media profiles for?

On your social media profiles, your bio is more for your fans and potential fans than it is for media creators.

Also, there are technical limits on most social media bios that require the social media bio to be much shorter than your extended bio, so it cannot be the same bio. It can use elements that you plotted out in your extended bio, but in a shorter form, and in a way that better communicates to your target fan audiences.

Your Social Media Musician Bio Has the Same Basic Components as Your Main Musician Bio… But With These Differences

Your social media musician bios essentially have the same structure as your main musician bio, but instead of expanding at length in a few paragraphs, the social media bios are much more concise, and they fit into each platform’s profile page as integrative parts of an experience that includes:

• Your profile picture – what works best for a profile photo is a high quality facial close-up shot, or one that uses eye-catching colors.
• Your username – make sure your username is customized, and that it is the same as your artist name, or includes your artist name if your artist name is taken, e.g. “ArtistName,” “OfficialArtistName,” “ArtistNameOfficial,” or “RealArtistName.”
• Your profile name – your profile name doesn’t have to be the same as your username. It could be your artist name, or you could use it as a headline that aims to attract more attention to what your artist self stands for.
• Pinned posts – your pinned posts are the first posts that a person sees on your profile page, at the top of your content feed. It’s important to keep your pinned posts relevant with the most current update you want to say or show.
• Latest posts – under your pinned posts are your latest posts. It’s important that you have a few posts on your profile page, otherwise people reaching your profile page will see that you’re inactive and will think that there is nobody there to engage with.
• Follower/following numbers – “followers” are the accounts following you, and “following” are the accounts you follow. The general rule of thumb is that you have more followers than accounts you’re following, and also that if you want to be taken seriously, that you have at least 200-to-300 followers on your profile page. This gives your account social proof to a person visiting the page for the first time. If they see only 5 or 13 followers, then they are less likely to follow you as you will seem socially irrelevant to them.
• Your cover image – your cover image can add significantly to the image you’re trying to convey, as well as offer the most important information you want to communicate to people, e.g. your latest or upcoming release or tour.
• Your stories – your stories reflect the various strands of your content marketing strategy. For example, as a musician, your recorded music is one component out of a few in your content marketing strategy. Others could be content where you speak directly to your audience, live performances, videos and photos of you in different life situations that serve to express who you are, what you’re about, and the person behind the music, funny content, or educational content, depending on what you stand for. Your stories then act like categories pointing out the different strands of your content marketing strategy.

Understanding this landscape that your artist bio resides within, and the particularities of each social media platform, is essential to planning your presence throughout the various social media channels.

Now, when we finally get to the bio part of your social media presence, it should essentially have the same elements as your extended artist bio, but in a more concise form that suits the platform it resides in. Those elements are as follows:

• The elevator pitch that needs to have a killer angle, making the reader want to continue reading. This can be either the first line of the bio, or it could even be made into the profile name, which can act like a headline for your account.
• Your story that answers who you are, what you do, and what you’re about with only a few words and emojis. This is a different way of presenting the story than in the above-mentioned extended artist bio, one where with a single sentence of keywords, you say something that can relate emotionally to you, either by presenting your struggle, or by presenting a funny aspect of your artist self, depending on the image you aim to communicate.
• Your location that lets people geographically position you, and which opens opportunities for collaborations, local live shows, and meeting other people on a physical basis.
• Your biggest 1-3 achievements that aim to add credibility and social proof to your artist profile.
• Your links to your other social media profiles and/or to your most important current page (e.g. a current release, or a pre-save link to an upcoming release)

Then, there are a number of tactical do’s and don’ts of weaving together the above points into various social media bios, including the following:

• Use emojis together with text to give more life to your bio, making it more fun and engaging.
• Don’t use hashtags in your bios. There has been no conclusive research showing that hashtags in social media bios increase traffic to your social media profile pages, and also, hashtags are links in your bios that direct people to the respective social media hashtag pages, lessening the chances that they click on the links that you want them to click. Also, hashtags simply make your bio look ugly (especially if there are more than one of them).
• Use a call-to-action – the call-to-action can be used to get people to click on a link that you direct people to click. It is commonly used to enable people to click on the artist’s latest release, or to click to pre-save an upcoming release. Emojis can further emphasize call-to-actions by pointing directly to the links.
• Don’t be boring. There are plenty of bios that have had little to no thought going into them. Don’t make your bio the same.
• Sound human. Contrary to the extended artist bio, which is good practice to write in third person, your social media bio is good to be in first person, speaking directly to your fans and potential fans. In the same line, avoid corporate jargon and making it sound too “professional.”
• Don’t take example from established artists. A common problem with upcoming artists, not only with bios but also in many other areas, is that they take example from established artists who have millions of fans, who live in “mansions” distanced from the public and from the thousands of comments that their music and content gets on a daily basis. When you’re an upcoming artist, you don’t want to artificially separate yourself from others thinking that you’re so hot. You should rather use the fact that you’re not flooded by the masses, and that you’re approachable on a personal level, as an advantage. Use it to build meaningful connections with fans, with other musicians, to find collaboration opportunities with other upcoming artists, to value every person who is willing to make time for you, and grow together with them.

Should You Write an Musician Bio By Yourself or Should You Hire a Professional Writer Experienced in Musician Bio Writing to Do It for You?

Using the guidelines above, you now have the tools to not only write a solid musician bio, but a killer one!

Since the musician bio is one of the first pieces of information that most people will go to find out more about you, and especially considering that it is often sent out to people with a good mastery of written English, like journalists and bloggers, then if a musician bio is written badly, or even has some slight amateur signs like some incorrect grammar, spacing, or punctuation, then since there are so many musicians fighting for attention, and since these influencers’ inboxes are already overloaded with emails, then the lack of professionalism in your bio is also often the first and only signal to a prospective industry contact to scrap you and move on to the next one.

Therefore, while I’ve given you the guidelines, if you feel that you don’t have a mastery of written English, or that you need a hand to optimally extract those crucial points that will emphasize your strengths, uniqueness, and motivations—and especially, the angle for your first sentence—then it is recommended that you turn to a professional writer experienced in artist bio writing to help you with this.

For this purpose, I have created a service at a reasonable price to write your musician bio. In the service, I’ll take you through the above-mentioned process toward any musician bio goals you wish to achieve, from a short bio and/or extended musician bio to send to media creators, and to bios for your social media profiles. You can use the link below to use this service. Good luck!

Let Me Write Your Musician Bio for You »

 

I get asked a lot whether I can help artists get more plays and followers on Spotify, and whether I can share any tips I have to do so. So instead of writing essays to each of you individually, I gathered notes I had from my own experience, and also looked up what others were saying about it online, and put together the following material about it, which is quite a comprehensive summary of the information about it online now in 2020.

Here is a list of everything I feel is necessary to know in terms of getting Spotify plays in 2020, and the post will follow with information in this order:

1. Spot the Difference Between Genuine Spotify Plays and Fake Spotify Plays
2. Understand How the Spotify Algorithm Works
3. What are the 3 Different Kinds of Spotify Playlists and Which Ones You Should Target
4. Strategies and Tactics to Get Your Music on the Spotify Playlists

Spot the Difference Between Genuine Spotify Plays and Fake Spotify Plays

You can consider this preliminary precautionary information that will save you time and money, and also, which can save your accounts being suspended or removed.

There are a lot of scam services around promising “Real Organic Spotify Plays by Real Humans!” Usually, whenever you hear the phrase—”Real Humans”—it’s a sign to stay away from that service.

These are like the “Get Rich Quick” schemes of the music industry, which exploit artists’ desires for fame and status in order to make themselves some fast money for a fast bot process they established, which doesn’t require much work on their behalf.

In a world where we respect the “millions of followers, likes, comments,” etc. as a sign of fame and respect, then many artists today want to reach those kinds of results ASAP, and they get turned off by genuine services that don’t show immediate massive growth in those numbers, and instead opt for the services that can provide dozens and hundreds of thousands of followers/likes/plays, etc. overnight or over a few days.

What many such artists don’t realize is that the fake nature of that growth is obvious to anybody with a trained eye in the industry, and it’s obvious also to the platforms themselves where they accumulate those fake bot numbers, including of course, Spotify.

Spotify can suspend or remove accounts that it spots as having such activity, and also, industry contacts who have a trained eye for these numbers, are generally unimpressed with those artists as it exposes their naivete—an ineffective characteristic for anyone who really wants to climb the ladder in this game. They’re more likely to pay attention to a newer artist with under 1,000 followers/plays, etc. as it already displays more authenticity on the artist’s behalf.

If this knowledge is already clear to you, then move on to the next point. If it’s still unclear, then I recommend taking the time to watch the following two videos by Adam Ivy and Maddy from Burstimo.

When To Buy Followers, Streams, and Likes

by Adam Ivy

How to Get Real Spotify Streams

by Maddy from Burstimo

Understand How the Spotify Algorithm Works

The keys to getting more Spotify plays is in understanding how the Spotify algorithm works, and then working with your music ultimately at the production stage, but if not at the production stage, then at least in the stages of marketing strategy, planning and execution, in order to target your music to hit all the right triggers in Spotify’s algorithm, and by doing so, let your music virally spread throughout Spotify.

At an overview, the Spotify algorithm defines three different aspects of the music that has been uploaded:

• Natural Language Processing – Spotify defines the language of your vocals and lyrics, and knows to push it out to listeners of that language.
• Raw Audio Analysis – Spotify defines a tempo range, beat type (i.e. whether a hip hop beat, a house beat, or a four-to-the-floor pop beat, etc.) and key signature of the music to help determine its mood, and send it to listeners who listen to music with those characteristics.
• Collaborative Filtering – Spotify checks the play time of your song, the skip rate, the save rate, and the followers gained from your song.

At the production stage, you can influence the first two aspects of the Spotify algorithm, i.e., the natural language processing and the raw audio analysis. However, those are usually already embedded within your current style and not really expected to be influenced.

The third stage, however, can be heavily influenced both at the production stage, and also, at the marketing stage of your music.

At the production stage, it can be influenced by doing the following:

• Make Great Music – First and foremost, your music needs to be great. It needs to be music that people will want to listen to it until the very end, and also to save it, and to follow you for more music because of how great it is. Although this is quite obvious, due to the ease of distributing music today, many artists put up music that is still unripe in one or many of its aspects, from singing/songwriting through production through mixing through mastering. It’s important to understand that your song needs to stand up to a test of greatness if it’s going to be played until the end, saved, shared, etc. In advance of sending your music to Spotify, you would be wise to send a private SoundCloud link of your music to online communities that like music similar to yours, and gain feedback from people there, or even better, from producers themselves to get input on any adjustments or changes they see in any aspect of the music. You really want to hone your craft before expecting it to start journeying through many Spotify users’ ears.
• Make Short Songs – Considering most songs average around three minutes, if you make, for instance, a one-minute song, then you can consider in general that you potentially get three full plays of your song for every one full play of a normal three-minute song. Also, you lessen the time people have to skip your song, so Spotify will also recognize that your song will get more full plays. Of course, your creativity shouldn’t be compromised to make shorter songs only for the algorithm, but using this knowledge, you can definitely aim to create such a song or series of songs in order to test a Spotify hack for faster growth. Yon World elaborates on this tactic in the following video…

• Target Your Music Creation at a Playlist Placement – While this isn’t a discussion on how to make your music great, there are some marketing aspects to consider to reach that greatness. One is that you specifically target a Spotify playlist placement before you even create your music. That is, you note the kind of music, artists, genres and moods that a certain playlist has, as well as tracking down the playlist curator, and you create your music with the aim of getting it onto that playlist. Finding such playlists doesn’t have to be done through Spotify itself either. You can look up, for instance, Instagram influencers, Twitch streamers, and YouTubers who promote their Spotify playlists to their audiences, and reach out to them—that you want to make a song for their playlist from scratch.

Maddy from Burstimo summarizes the general aspect of understanding Spotify’s algorithm in the following video…

With the understanding that we have the most influence on the collaborative filtering aspect of the Spotify algorithm, i.e., influencing the amount of plays and saves our music gets, as well as the amounts of followers, we can then proceed to developing marketing strategies and plans based on this knowledge.

Spotify playlists become an integral part of increasing plays and saves of your music, as many playlists are the gateways to significantly increased exposure of your music on Spotify.

There are three kinds of Spotify playlists, and understanding what they are and how they work is necessary to strategizing how to target your music toward them.

What are the 3 Different Kinds of Spotify Playlists and Which Ones You Should Target

Spotify’s playlist placements are a major aspect of getting your music more streams and plays on Spotify. I’ve added the above video by Thomas Anthony, who explains these three different kinds of playlists, and various ways to approach them.

The three kinds of playlists are:

• User-Generated Playlists – Playlists that any Spotify users can create and promote.
• Algorithmic Playlists – Playlists that Spotify creates per user according to the artists, genres and moods that they listen to. These playlists include, “Discover Weekly” and “Release Radar.”
• Editorial Playlists – Top-tier playlists curated by Spotify staff.

User-Generated Playlists

In addition to promoting your music directly, another effective way of promoting your music is by creating, running and promoting your own Spotify playlist. Then, whenever you have a release, you can make it the #1 song in your playlist.

Your own playlist can target your potential fans by connecting to them through:

• Related Artists – Fill in the blank to the following sentence—”If you like [insert artist names here], then you’ll love my music“—and create a playlist with those artists. Find an umbrella phrase that connects all those songs together, e.g. a certain genre and/or mood of all the music, and use that as your playlist title. Then, insert your music as the #1 item in the playlist.
• Genre and Mood – Create a certain playlist based on pinpointing a genre and mood that your music fits in, and place your music at the top of that playlist.

When you have your playlist ready for promotion, you can use a variety of methods to promote it, including:

• Media Buying – Paid advertisements on sites like Facebook and Instagram, which aim to bring people to your playlist according to certain audience criteria. For example, if you do it based on related artists, you can target people who like those artists, write something like “If you like [insert artist names here], then here’s a playlist you don’t want to miss,” and by doing so, bring streams to your music at the top of that playlist. In addition, you can retarget advertisements of your own music to people who engaged with those ads.
• Link Promotion – Promote your playlist as the main link in your social media bios, on your website’s home page, in your music store bios, and anywhere else you hold online real estate. There are various keywording tactics you can do here, which I won’t elaborate on (you can message me directly about them if you like), but in general, by gaining multiple links to your playlist, it gets better indexed in Google, and can gain additional reach by doing so.

Also, you can use your playlist to trade with other artists you network with by offering to place their songs on your playlist in exchange for them placing your songs on their playlists.

Algorithmic Playlists

Spotify’s algorithm is built in a way that tries to give Spotify’s users music they like, according to the artists, genres and moods of music they listen to.

They work in a viral way, where Spotify first tests your music out on an audience of 1,000 users, and it checks the amount of:

• Plays
• Skips
• Saves

The gist is that the more people play your song, and play it ultimately till its end, or at least for a considerable portion of the song, as well as saving it, and doing other engagement actions, like using the sharing tools from your song to share it with their friends, or following you during or after playing it, then all these actions send triggers to Spotify that a user with a certain set of interests did such-and-such action/s, and then Spotify seeks to send it out to more Spotify users with similar sets of interests.

The more your song climbs up this Spotify algorithm ladder, the more it gets placed on algorithmic playlists.

Depending on how it performs at each stage, it can reach the ultimate Spotify algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly and Release Radar.

In addition, Spotify crawls the Internet to find out whether artists are being published on influential music blogs and other media, to see if they’re buzzing around the web, and use this information to see whether they should be “plugged” more on Spotify. The Indie Music Academy elaborates on this point in this video:

Contrary to much speculation, the Indie Music Academy states that if you think that articles and posts about your music are irrelevant to your Spotify growth, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Spotify looks for whether artists are being discussed in the industry, and uses this information to boost them on its own service. At this stage, I’ll give a plug to my own services, which currently specialize in creating articles, artist bios, press releases, and other write-ups and pitches of your music to music blogs (including my own). Here’s the link to my services if you want to pursue that further (feel free to message me there if you want to discuss something more custom-built).

Editorial Playlists

Editorial playlists are a function of your music’s success on algorithmic playlists. That is, if your song continues getting considerable plays and other engagement in the algorithmic playlists Spotify puts it on, then at a more refined stage of the Spotify algorithmic ladder, a Spotify editor is expected to pay attention to it, and use the music’s success data on Spotify to make the decision to place the music on an editorial playlist, which are considered the penultimate Spotify playlist placements.

How to Get on Algorithmic Spotify Playlists

Since climbing the rungs of Spotify’s algorithmic playlists holds the key to getting on the editorial playlists, and ultimately, to gaining the most amounts of targeted Spotify plays, then your releases should be planned in order to get on Spotify’s algorithmic playlists.

You want to get as many plays, saves and follows as possible on your music in the first 24 hours of its release, and then continue gaining more and more plays, saves and follows as possible afterward.

There are a number of strategies and tactics to do this. Below is an outline of a few of them, divided into three general stages:

• Pre-Release Marketing
• Release Marketing
• Post-Release Marketing

Pre-Release Marketing Tactics

• Update Your Spotify Profile – Make sure you have your Spotify profile updated with artist bio, social media links, a banner, and artist photos. Spotify takes this information into consideration as part of their algorithm to know whether to continue pushing your music out, or whether you need to still get yourself established. Damien Keyes goes into a lot of detail about using a major artist as a template for the info to add on your Spotify profile page in order to signal to Spotify that since you’re taking Spotify seriously, it should take you seriously.

• Reach Out to Twitch Streamers – Twitch streamers have large followings, often have Spotify playlists, and often have music playing while they stream.
• Collaborate With Other Artists Who Have Momentum – Find artists who are gaining momentum on Spotify playlists, and offer them payment to collaborate on a song, and then Spotify’s algorithm is more likely to notice how you have collaborated with a momentum-gaining artist, and thus push your music out more to similar audiences as that artist’s. Watch the following Burstimo video that gives more insights on the last two points…

• Get Your Music on Music Blogs – aim to build traction on your release day by securing placements on various music blogs in advance of the release date. Note that getting blog placements is not only about gaining listeners and fans from the blogs themselves, which often have a relatively small amount of readers relative to the amounts that would satisfy you, but these placements are noticed by Spotify’s Internet crawlers, as they send triggers to Spotify that you’re music and artist presence is being discussed in the industry, and thus it’s worthwhile taking notice of you and promoting you on Spotify as well.
• Write About Your Own Music – As a prelude to sending your music to music blogs, you need to have your EPK setup (including your artist bio, press release, artist photo/s, cover artwork and pitch), and in addition to your EPK, it’s good practice to write an article about your own music on your own blog, or on an article website like Medium.
• Pitch Your Music to ‘Spotify for Artists’ – Once your song is in queue for release on Spotify, then in Spotify for Artists, you can pitch the song to Spotify editors. You should fill out the information in this pitch in order to better target a specific kind of Spotify editor. It’s recommended to do this four weeks in advance of your release, in order to give Spotify editors more time to actually get around to listening to your music and considering it.
• Increase Your Spotify Followers – There are many tactics for this. One is to reach out to your social media following with a contest to take a screenshot following your Spotify account in exchange for something of value they would get if they win the contest. (Thanks to Burstimo for this tip.)
• Increase Your Spotify Pre-Saves – There are many tactics also for this. One is to create and promote a video of yourself speaking on social media with a call-to-action asking people to pre-save the link, and also, increasing engagement by turning it into a contest.
• Gain Pre-Saves to Your Upcoming Release – Most distributors give you a pre-save link. You can send this to your social media followers and email subscribers in order to gain pre-saves to your song with the aim of getting as many plays as possible in the first 24 hours of your release. If your distributors don’t provide this, then you can create a pre-save link using a paid account at show.co.
• Prepare Your Release for Fridays – This is in order to increase your chances of getting on Spotify’s “New Music Friday” playlist.

Release Marketing Tactics

• Submit Your Music to Indiemono – Indiemono is a Spotify playlist curation service where it is free to submit your music. They promise to listen to all music submitted, and state that there is around a 15% rate of selection of music sent to them that is added to their playlists. To increase the speed of your music becoming noticed and placed on their playlists, they request a $3/month free through Patreon, and then promise to listen to your music within a 30-day period.
• Use Hypeedit Download Gates – Hypeddit offers various music promotion tools, and their principle focus is on download gates. One way of using download gates is as a means to gain Spotify followers, i.e., by offering fans and potential fans the ability to download your music in exchange for some engagement on their behalf, including becoming your Spotify followers. The more you grow Spotify followers in such a way, the more your followers will be notified when your releases come out on Spotify. Therefore, use your releases to offer downloads in exchange for people becoming your Spotify followers, and then more people will become notified of your future releases. Below is a video of Hypeedit’s John Gold, who discusses how to grow your Spotify streams not with playlists, but by advertising directly to streams themselves, and using download gates in order to gain followers. The idea is that after you gain followers, then your streams for future releases will grow organically.

• Make Your Release the #1 Song on Your Playlist – nothing much else to say on this one.
• Exchange Your Song With Other Artists Who Own Playlists – develop a trade relationship with other artists, which would likely be those with similar follower and play numbers as yours, and who make music in the same genre, and ask them to place your song on their playlists in exchange for putting their song on your playlist.
• DM Friends Who You Know Would Like Your Song – Don’t just spam all your friends, but pinpoint the ones who you know would genuinely like your song and appreciate the contact.
• Use SubmitHub to Pitch Your Music to Playlist Curators – SubmitHub places Spotify playlist curators through a mild vetting process in order to make sure that their playlists are legitimate. SubmitHub’s model of charging a dollar to playlist curators and bloggers to consider tracks for review and playlist placement ensures that there are no fake stream incentives on behalf of the curators, so it’s a way of finding legitimate and genre-specific playlists to submit to. Placements on such playlists not only help in terms of streams, but also in terms of their genre-specificity, i.e., it helps Spotify’s algorithm understand that your music fits a certain genre, and thus Spotify is more likely to push your song out to listeners of that genre, which will increase your chances of reaching your target audiences who will listen to your music, not skip it, save it, follow you, etc.
• Send Your Music to Spotify Playlist Curators – There are various tactics on how to find Spotify playlist curators. One is by finding them on Spotify itself, typing a related artist, seeing their “Discovered On” results, which are a list of playlists, and then searching for the playlist curators and writing to them either via social media or email. Another way is by finding playlists using Chartmetric.
• Use Other Services to Pitch Your Music to Playlist Curators – There are various paid services that take care of pitching your music to playlist curators. While many are dodgy, some provide genuine pitching. The main thing with these is considering your return-on-investment. Off the bat, Tom DuPree III created a detailed video that showed what spending $1,000 on Spotify placement services got for his music. Ultimately, while he got over 100,000 streams and various playlist placements, he ended up with a loss of about $800+, and stated the main takeaway as being that if you’re planning on using such services, make sure your music is not in a border niche, but something that is mainstream and has potential to be played by a wider audience than the ephemeral music he was posting. These are the services he tested. It’s worth watching the video for more info on an ROI perspective of doing such an action and what to expect from it: SubmitHub | SpotiFLY | Soundplate | Indiemono | Klangspot

While there are more marketing strategies and tactics to get yourself more Spotify plays, this post covers many that I would consider necessary ones, as well as some additional. With some serious planning and execution, you should be able to hit it off and get your music setup for more Spotify plays. If, however, you still feel lost or that you want help in strategizing, planning and/or executing these items, then feel free to reach out to me at 44faced [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Good luck!