Getting on a Spotify playlist can help you be discovered by new fans who might be interested in your music. Plus, Spotify playlists can help you earn some cash on the side to support your future musical endeavours.
Well, maybe not that much cash..... but we digress.
In this post, we will talk about how to exactly get on a Spotify playlist but first we need to understand what types of playlists there are on Spotify.
There are 3 types of Spotify playlists.
Spotify Listener Playlists
Spotify Algorithmic Playlists
Spotify Editorial Playlists
We're going to go through each of these Spotify playlists and show you how you can sunmit your music.
Spotify Listener Playlists
These types of Spotify playlists can be made by anyone who has access to a Spotify account. No matter if you're an artist or a listener. Anyone can create these playlists just as long as you have a Spotify account.
Sometimes these playlists can also be referred as user-generated playlists or collaborative playlists. Some good examples of Spotify listeners playlists are the ones we have on Neon Collective. For instance, our Energetic Indie Pop playlist or our Happy Alt Pop playlist.
Both are considered Spotify listener playlists. There are thousands of Spotify listener playlists available out there and in some cases they are bigger than Spotify editorial playlists. It happens.
We think you should start submitting to Spotify listener playlists because they are the quickest and easiest Spotify playlists to get on.
Check out this article, from Gemtracks, if you're looking to discover a variety of independent curators who specialize in Spotify listener playlists.
So how do you get on them?
Go on Spotify and search for appropriate playlists that you could potentially get on. For example, if you make Chill Electronic music then it would be a good idea to search chill electronic inside Spotify search bar.
2. Navigate to the see all section (pictured above). Here you will find a list of all chill electronic playlists.
Notice in the specific example above every single playlist happens to be a Spotify listener playlist and not any of the other playlists. You can see this because author name of each playlist happens to be random. If it was a Spotify editorial playlist the author name would be Spotify.
3. Now you must go into every specific playlist and check if there is contact information or some direction to submit your track.
For instance, look at the Chill Electronic playlist below. It provides us some information on where we can submit a track.
Take a look at the Neon Collective playlists too. You can see on every playlist we've made it clear where artists can go to submit their songs for our playlists. By the way, you can submit a track to us at any time if you think it's a fit.
Spotify Algorithmic Playlists
Spotify algorithmic playlists are somewhat out of your control. These specific playlists include Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Radio, On Repeat, etc.
If you'd like to get on these playlists the best thing you can do is to keep your current listeners engaged. For example, get them to follow you, heart your songs, share your songs, and add your songs to their playlists. All of these metrics will help signal the algorithm in order to surface your songs to new audiences.
With that said though, they are very valuable playlists to get on.
We've noticed that it takes about 6 weeks in order for the Spotify algorithmic playlists to kick in. For instance, if you release a song on July 10 and manage to get 15,000 streams and over 1000 saves then the Discover weekly playlist should be triggered 5 weeks after the fact.
Discover weekly playlist can almost double the amount of streams you get every day. Take a look at the screenshot example below of one of our artists who was recently added to the Discover weekly playlist.
Spotify Editorial Playlists
This is the crown jewel of all playlists. In order to get on these Spotify Editorial Playlists you will need to have the specific contact information of Official Spotify Curators.
We also have a longer format post to this topic on how to get on Spotify editorial playlists.
Spotify curators are very secretive on the Internet and they rarely ever give out their contact information. Even if you happen to come across the contact information of an Official Spotify Curator they would likely direct you to the artist submission page where you can submit your track to an official Spotify curator.
Every artist that has their music on Spotify will have an opportunity to submit their track to Official Spotify Curators before the release date. In order to do this you will need to have Spotify Artist Profile. Here's a great video on how to set that up if you do not have one yet.
Inside your Spotify Artist profile navigate to the upcoming section, see below:
If you have any upcoming music that is not released yet it will be under this tab. Don't worry if you've uploaded your music, for example, to DistroKid, and you don't see your music here yet.
It takes a few days for your music to make it from the distributor onto Spotify. Once it's there, you will be able to submit to official Spotify curators. This is a new feature Spotify introduced in 2019.
Is it a guarantee that you'll get on a Spotify editorial playlist?
Unfortunately, no.
But it's worth submitting because you never know. To go over the detailed steps on submitting to official Spotify curators check out our post how to get on Spotify editorial playlists.
Conclusion
Getting on Spotify playlists will be difficult at first but it gets easier as you start to grow your following. Once you start getting more followers, fans, and listeners. you then start to look a lot more attractive as an artist for playlists to feature you.
Keep at it.
Here is a great video of what we talked about with some extra information on how to get on Spotify playlists that could be helpful to you in your research.