It’s a core strategy that every musician (DIY, indie or major label, with or without prior success) should be using to grow their fanbase and drive their career forward. Playlist promotion is not necessarily the best way to grow your streaming music success. There’s something that Spotify playlist promotion companies don’t tell you. There are literally endless examples of this but a good one here is ‘roadtrip’ themed playlists where Spotify has editorial roadtrip sets that range from less than 100,000 followers to several with a few million, but some influencers have playlists that nearly match Spotify for follower count. Many of the leading and largest mood or context playlists are edited and curated by Spotify and they may have various sub-playlists that overlap in mood, but, in some cases, independent, brand or influencer playlisters might have mood playlists with huge followers that we can also target. For example, in pop you can go from New Pop Revolution (150,000 followers) to Today’s Top Hits (23M and counting.).

These are the playlists with the largest followings but can range from smaller genre or mood focused playlists up to the industry leading genre standards. Spotify playlist editors respond to pitches from record labels, playlist pitching services and use a lot of personal knowledge and artist data to add to and edit these playlists continuously. Then there are brand playlists usually run by the major labels under their own branding or more often on their private playlist companies (such as Filtr, Digster or Topsify) as well as those run by entertainment brands or lifestyle brands with an interest in music.Īt the bottom of the funnel, and most sought after, are the playlists editorially curated by Spotify. From those run by music fans, which might have only a few thousand followers through to ones curated by individuals, music blogs or influencers who have developed a wider reach.

Spotify playlist curators