How to Promote Music on Spotify?

Spotify has been on a success streak since its launch, and its rising popularity and solid listener base intrigue artists to try their luck on this platform. However, it’s not easy to ride the success wave on this platform, especially if you don’t know how to promote music on Spotify.

Learning the promotion tactics is vital for your survival on a giant platform like Spotify, and the reason is quite simple. When you’re on a platform where thousands of tracks are uploaded daily, you got to stay on your toes and promote your content to prevent it from getting buried.

Not just that, you also need to stay one step ahead of your rivals on Spotify to win the hearts of your audience, and for that, you got to know every tactic regarding music promotion.

Now, since it’s so crucial for artists to be well versed in promotion, in this article, we’ll give you expert tips and tricks to promote your tracks and explain how Spotify’s algorithm works.

How Does Spotify Algorithm Work?

The Spotify algorithm is truly a marvel of mathematical sophistication and creative thinking. It scans a listener’s taste in music and recommends him songs accordingly. But that’s just one of its basic functions when it comes to promoting content; it works a bit differently.

Of course, we can’t give you an in-depth analysis of how the algorithm works, but there are three primary factors that put a track on the algorithm’s radar and extend its reach.

First, it’s the searchability of a track. If your track appears in search results against a lot of keywords, it would be recognized as a highly searched track by the algorithm and might get promoted to all the relevant listeners of different genres.

The second is the default recommendation algorithm rating of a track. When a track gets recommended many times to the listeners of a specific genre, the algorithm takes it as a renowned track and promotes it further, sometimes even to a cross-genre audience.

The third is the engagement ratio. Spotify’s algorithm is governed by an AI system called BART, which is Bandits for recommendation as Treatment. This AI checks how much an artist interacts with Spotify and, as a result, how many users interact with his tracks.

If that interaction ratio is positive, the track is considered to be doing well, and vice versa. At this point, you must be feeling like both of these factors are out of your hand, and you can’t control them. Well, that’s where the expert tactics come in. You can improve these stats of your tracks and get favored by the algorithm by applying the tactics we’re about to show you.

How to Promote Music on Spotify?

With over 400 million users worldwide, Spotify’s user base is rapidly growing, which isn’t just boosting its popularity but also the potential competition.

That’s why we’ve compiled and presented the best tactics to deal with this menacing problem. By applying the following tips, you will be able to promote your music effectively and always stay one step ahead of your competition on Spotify.

1. Spotify for Artists

When most artists hear the word promotion, they think about complex marketing strategies and pay campaigns that will cost them a fortune. Fortunately, on Spotify, you can do most of the promotion by using the built-in tools that the platform provides an artist.

But to access those tools, you first need to ensure that you have a Spotify artist’s account, which is verified. Most artists keep uploading their music on the profile and never get it verified, which affects their stats negatively.

Start with getting your artist profile verified, and after that, you can move on to using the promotion tools. Spotify for artists allows you access to advanced tools like analytics through which you can track your stats and find out your strengths and weaknesses.

2. Complete Your Profile

Make sure that you give every bit of information about yourself and your music in the profile. A complete profile is like a strong launchpad for your tracks, which attracts the attention of listeners and the Spotify algorithm itself.

A well-optimized and complete profile helps the audience know more about you as an artist and gives you an edge over the competition since most artists don’t bother to fill in the details.

3. Create Your Own Playlists

If you’re an artist, you must know that these days, people don’t search for individual tracks; instead, they look for a playlist of their favorite genre and roll with it. People love playlists because it saves time and gives them a chance to explore new tracks of a specific genre.

That’s the main reason experts emphasize so much on creating playlists. It’s best that you create playlists of your tracks based on their genre, mood, or the season they represent.

For example, you can compile your ballads in a playlist and call it The Rainy-Day playlist or something like that. This will make it easier for your audience to surf music, and if they like your playlist, they might share it with your friends, which is a huge plus for you.

4. Use the Canvas Feature

A creative and attractive visual presentation of a track helps capture the audience’s attention and increase your track’s plays. Commonly the visuals on Spotify are considered to be the album art for a track, but the latest canvas feature has taken this idea one step ahead.

Now, you can upload an aesthetic image that will appear in the background of your track when it gets played. Unfortunately, this feature is still in beta version and isn’t accessible to every artist on Spotify. However, it will soon be available to a general audience, and you will be able to use it to make your track more appealing to the audience.

5. Build Your Spotify Followers

When it comes to promotion, there’s no tip more effective than building your Spotify listener base. See, when you have a lot of fan following, the reach of your tracks extends automatically, and you can request your followers to share your track with their friends.

Let’s say you have 10,000 followers, and you ask them to share your track. Even if 1,000 or 500 among them follow your instruction, it would still boost your stats a lot, and your track will perform better. Also, with a great number of followers, you get the chance to make money by collaborating with brands and injecting ads before your tracks.

6. Pitch to Playlists

Sure, making your playlists works like a charm in attracting the audience, but there are playlist curators out there with a lot of following, and you can request them to add your track to their playlists.

This process is called playlist pitching, in which you either request a curator to add one of your songs to their playlist or present your whole playlist to be showcased on their account.

It’s a great way of presenting your music in front of a massive eager audience, and if you get recognized by them, they will come looking for you and reach your account, which will improve your engagement rate and followers.

7. Get on Discover Weekly and Release Radar

This tactic sure is a tough nut to crack, but if you manage to ace it, you will become a renowned artist in your community overnight. As you know, Spotify has a discover feature that shows the listener’s top tracks of the week. Your goal should be to get featured on that list.

Now, as we already said, it’s not easy to do, but here are some steps you can follow to reach this goal:

• Uplift your music and improve quality
• Optimize your tracks for maximum searchability and reach
• Share your music with your followers and ask them to share it further.
• Try to get as much engagement on your track as possible, so it can be picked by the editorial team for the discover weekly section.

Once your track reaches this list, millions of listeners will check it out in order to see what masterpiece the Spotify curators have picked this time, and it will improve your profile in the blink of an eye.

8. Add Lyrics

To improve the optimization of your track, it’s a fantastic idea to add the lyrics of the track to it. This will allow your listeners to sing along with the track if they want to, and the algorithm will also take this action positively.

Currently, there are two services you can use to add lyrics to your Spotify tracks, which are Musixmatch and Genius. Make an account on any of these platforms and start cranking.

9. Collaborate with Influencer Artists

Imagine if you get to sit in a podcast with Joe Rogan; wouldn’t that boost your online presence a hundred folds and make you famous in a matter of hours? That’s what collaboration with influencer artists does for you on Spotify.

Find well-performing artists in your niche and send them a collaboration request. They might not accept it right away, but once they do, you’ll become an artist who hangs out with famous creators, and it will do wonders for your public image.

Perhaps that’s why promotion experts say that if you want results quickly, there’s no better strategy than collaborating with influencers.

10. Use Spotify ad Studio

One of the best built-in promotional tools of Spotify is the ad studio. You can advertise your music by starting a campaign on this platform and reaching your audience. It requires you to spend a hefty sum, but if you’re willing to take your career a step forward, it’s worth it.

All you have to do is fix the budget for your campaign and set a target audience. Once you launch the campaign, the algorithm will recommend your track to your targeted audience, and most will end up checking out your music.

11. Promote on Social Media Platforms

Instead of going for complex promotional and marketing tactics, you can simply take out your phone and start promoting the tracks on your social media channels. It’s been observed that a lot of visitors to Spotify come from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

It means that social media is an awesome way of increasing the organic traffic on your account. Therefore, you should start posting the links to your Spotify tracks on your social feeds and ask your friends to check them out.

You can also share the release dates of your upcoming tracks to make your followers excited and give them some details regarding its genre and theme etc.

12. Check Your Insights

Always keep an eye on your Spotify insights to see which of your tracks are doing well and which of them slipped in the cracks. Using the data from analytics, you can adjust your marketing and content strategy and focus on coming up with a better plan for the future.

13. Run a Spotify Pre-Save and Follow the Campaign

To get better reach and stats on your tracks, you best focus on running a pre-save and follow campaign for your Spotify account. The benefits of running a promotional campaign that focuses on these two elements are as follows:

• Pre saves will allow the listeners to listen to the track as soon as it gets released, so encouraging them to pre-save secures your number of plays and likes.
• Pre-saves increase the engagement rate on your track.
• The followers’ campaign will effectively increase your number of followers, which is the single most crucial element necessary for promotion.
• A follower campaign will also increase the reach of your content, and even if you don’t get new followers, you will still end up getting more plays, likes, pre-saves, etc.

14. Buy Spotify Followers

So far, we’ve seen that the goal of the entire promotional tactic is to increase the number of followers on an account. Why is that? Because the success of an artist on Spotify entirely depends on his fan following. That’s why you need to focus on boosting your followers as soon as possible.

It takes a lot of time to establish yourself on the platform and get substantial followers, but if you’re not willing to wait that long, you can always buy Spotify followers from a trusted agency. Purchasing Spotify followers is one of the most recommended tactics by the Spotify veterans as it allows you to focus on your music without worrying about promotion and stuff.

All you need to do is look for a trusted service provider that has a good reputation in the market for delivering authentic followers and purchasing followers from them. To identify an authentic service provider, look for the following features:

• Should provide followers in a realistic time frame
• Demands a fair amount of price (It shows that they aren’t low bowling to scam you)
• Has positive customer reviews
• Proper website and well set up social media channels that have engagement on them
• Helpful customer service department that can guide you every step of the way.

Once you check all these features, you can purchase followers from the agency to leave your promotional worries behind and move ahead in your musical career.

Conclusion

It hurts when you spend your whole life perfecting a craft but don’t get recognized for it on a platform they adore. Sadly, most aspiring artists give up on music after they fail to get the audience’s attention on Spotify. That’s why we gave you these, so this doesn’t happen to any of our readers, and you get to fulfill your dreams.

Make sure to go through the mentioned tactics slowly and apply them consistently to promote your music and reach your target audience eventually. For more helpful articles like this, subscribe to our newsletter and follow our blog, which is brimming with informative content.