Triggering Spotify’s Organic Algorithm for Music Exposure
Spotify’s playlists Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix are great ways for an artist to get discovered. Even better, it’s a completely organic way to get your music in front of new listeners.
The aforementioned playlists are categorized as algorithmic playlists which are curated lists composed of recommended songs based on the listener's listening habits. Music on these lists are picked by data collected by Spotify’s AI that consists of the number of streams an artist has, how many saves a song gets along with how many times a song is skipped.
Getting your music on Spotify’s algorithmic list can boost your chances of securing your music on their editorial lists, which will in turn increase the reach of your content. Unlike the editorial lists, which you can pitch via your Spotify for Artists account to be included on, algorithmic playlists are completely organic. You can’t buy or pitch your way into them…. it’s up to the listeners to boost your song enough to be picked up for inclusion.
How Do You Trigger the Spotify Algorithm?
1) Utilize Social Media
Invite friends, family, and fans to listen to your music on Spotify and PRE-SAVE your songs. The pre-save is a huge tool that can be leveraged for Spotify playlist inclusion. Ask your audience to not only listen, but to FOLLOW you on Spotify as well. This is huge in terms of audience engagement and a definite metric that Spotify pays attention to.
Need help with Social Media strategy? Can’t figure out what to post or when? We’ve got you covered - get in touch with our team here.
2) Pitch your songs to listener and user-generated playlists
The more listener playlists the artist is added to, the more the algorithm notices. There are several ways to pitch your songs, but the key for growing healthy analytics is that the playlists are engaging, and truly organic…. aka, avoid artificial streams (bots) which will only hurt your profile in the long run and reduce the possibility of actual listeners finding your music!
There are a variety of third-party sources to pitch for influencer playlist inclusion (Submithub, Groover, etc), but we would be remiss to not mention our own playlisting service here at PressedFresh Collective!
3) Boost streams for your song as soon as it’s released
Simply put, the faster a song gets streams, the more Spotify picks up your song in it’s algorithm. As they say “the first 24 hours matters the most”. As mentioned before, the best way to do this is through a strong social media and pre-save campaign (the more people who pre-save your song, the more streams it gets ON release day. This is definitely the most effective option). If your pre-save campaign didn’t go as well as you had hoped, we have a few trusted resources that guarantee streams listed here:
Indie Music Academy - our top-recommended resource and who we exclusively partner with for all of the streaming campaigns we run for artists in PressedFresh Collective - we trust them that much. Ryan and his team are super intentional and transparent about what they do and it really shows.
YouGrow Promo - another company that we’ve worked with for a long time and completely trust with our roster. Their communication is clear and they are really effective at finding playlists that fit an artist’s sound.
Playlist Push - Playlist Push is who we worked with in the early days and we still believe they have value for independent artists. Their campaigns seem to be broader and less targeted, but that is sometimes helpful for certain artists. Special Discount for Playlist Push: 7.5% off any packages using code 3ZDQX5B
4) Release Music Regularly
Releasing music regularly ensures that your audience stays engaged and that you consistently have new content to promote.
5) Use Spotify Tools
Maximize your Spotify profile by confirming and customizing your Spotify for Artists account, using tools like Canvas to engage listeners, pitching to the Spotify editorial playlists via your Spotify for Artists account ahead of the release, and utilizing Spotify’s promotional tools to further promote your music.
METRICS
Did you know there was a way to keep up with how each of your songs are performing? There is a designated dashboard for Spotify metrics on musicstax.com. You can stay updated on what your popularity score is on Spotify. What is a popularity score? A popularity score is taken directly from the Spotify API and musicstacks.com makes it easy for you to check those numbers— both collectively and individually. To research individual tracks, you’ll need to click on Track Popularity.
Musicstax.com displays very useful metadata that compiles all your music data into convenient graphs taken directly from Spotify’s API. This is great because it shows you what Spotify takes into consideration when analyzing your songs when it comes to triggering an algorithm and an algorithmic playlist.
Well what is all this magical data that musicstax is pulling from Spotify? The data used is a summary of all of the important metrics that Spotify is keeping track of in your Spotify for such as followers, your audience engagement metrics such as streams per listener, and the number of saves and playlist ads you're getting. What’s even niftier is the added metrics such as skip rates and average completion rate, which tells how often your listeners complete your song, which is typically hidden in Spotify. If those metrics are bad, it will reflect in your popularity score as well.
In conclusion, every independent artist needs to be aware of their Spotify metrics. Metrics play a huge role in your ability to trigger the Spotify algorithm. If one of your goals is to get on playlists like Discover Weekly, and it should be as it can get you an increase in streams and followers for FREE, then you need to keep these metrics in mind.
Here are the stats you should know: streams, listeners, followers, song saves, playlist adds, stream-to-listener ratio, song skip rate, listener duration and total minutes of music streamed. You can keep up with these numbers in two places–musicstax.com and Spotify For Artists profile. No need to check these stats every single day but checking them regularly is a key to improving your Spotify profile.
Distribution is Key!
While Spotify offers many benefits for your music, every streaming platform has their own unique offerings. It’s important to do your research. A great organic promotion strategy for independent artists is securing your music on as many streaming platforms as possible. So, make sure to check out FreshNoise Distro for your distribution needs. If you like what you see, contact the team today to get started!
DISCLAIMER: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links, which means that if you click on a link and make a purchase, our company may receive a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you and helps to support our business. Please note that we only recommend products and services that we personally use and trust. We will always disclose when a link is an affiliate link, and will never recommend a product or service solely for the purpose of earning a commission.