[Revised for 2025] How can I get on Spotify's playlists?
7 years since this viral article was written. Is it still relevant?
In 2017 I wrote an article that seemed to hit a nerve. It was titled: How can I get on Spotify's playlists? and was written at a time where the DSP’s editors were very gate-kept and every artist, manager and label under the sun was tearing their hair out trying to answer this question.
At the time I was only a couple of years into working at a brand new Artist Services company called Platoon, where we’d had some early stage success with signings from Billie Eilish, Jorja Smith and Stefflon Don, who had opened up the way into Spotify and made this process a bit easier to understand. This simple question was one I heard constantly, and one day I sat and wrote this article and the words poured out so easily that, without hesitation, I hit ‘publish’. I didn’t anticipate how informative the article would be to the industry at the time.
Thankfully it was a good nerve I hit; with the article re-published on other mediums, I was invited to speak at multiple panels on the topic. Even Spotify referenced it to their artists and managers as a source of truth.
But that was 7 years ago now. With so many changes in the industry, is the article even relevant in 2025? Let’s break it down.
Firstly, the stats I gave in 2017 - wow. Let’s do a quick comparison:
2017: 50M subs, 100M active users, 60 territories 2B playlists.
2025: 300M subs, 600M active users, 120 territories and 6B playlists.
Very impressive growth, Spotify. We’ll come back to this soon.
Now I’ll quickly break down the different sections from my original article where I offered 7 pieces of key advice:
1) Find your tribe. When I wrote this in 2017 I meant surround yourself with people who share your vision and I was really speaking to independent artists who didn’t know where to start. This is still relevant, and even more so with artists now having more options than ever to release music in whichever way they wish. To have the best success, you need to build the best team around you.
2) Get verified on Spotify. This specific instruction is no longer relevant, with verification no longer a step artists need to take, although the point here was to utilise the tools available on Spotify’s platform to at least do everything they’re asking. This is still important - but now there are a lot of tools available to engage with the platform, e.g. canvas, integrating merch and tickets, creating artist playlists, artists pick, the list goes on. Most importantly, and of relevance to this article, is that Spotify now has an in-built pitch tool, pitching tracks directly to their editors. Surely this has solved the problem? Not exactly. We’ll dive into that further below.
3) Remind yourself that there’s a world of consumers to be captured outside of Spotify. And what I meant here is that Spotify is only one puzzle piece in the wider release strategy. There are audiences to be found on so many corners of the internet and even IRL (gasp).
4) Have you got PR? The original message here was to get your music pitched out to blogs, but we know that in 2025 blog readership is way down and while blog features still have some weight, they don’t drive streams. They just drive perception. I still believe that blogs who also have physical magazines are the ones who will prevail (CLASH, Rolling Stones, Dazed etc).
5) Do a “digital health check”. Haha. Telling people to utilise social media. Next.
6) Tell your story. YES, yes, yes. But now this is more important than ever, to find genuine fans who want to join you on this story-telling piece. You need to build an entire world now and let fans in, piece-by-piece. So what is the story?
7) Get creative. Yes that’s it - “Get Creative”. So vague! But this now applies more than ever. We’ve been inspired now by too many incredible campaigns, so there are no excuses to not have creative ideas going into a new release strategy.
Funnily enough, the next point is actually the only one that I would now be more careful about saying:
Finally, if you really are doing all this and the music isn’t getting picked up, it may be time to revisit the quality of the music.
Hear me out. Back in 2017, Spotify editors actually had a lot of time to listen and consider new music. Did you see those platform stats from 2017? Back then, you had to release via a known distributor or label if you wanted to pitch your music to Spotify editors, and even then they would supply a priority list of submissions for their review. So if that was happening but you weren’t getting any support and you really weren’t building an audience but you were ticking all these other boxes, then that was a gentle nudge to perhaps revisit the music with an honest lens and make sure it stacked up against your peers.
Now? The floodgates have well and truly opened and no one who is not already a Billie, or a Charli, or a Lizzo, is safe. And by that I mean no artist between the emerging to mid-level is near-guaranteed to get any playlist support, no matter how good your music is. Chances are it won’t be listened to by the editors. Have you ever heard the daily content upload stats? In 2017 this was estimated at 20,000 tracks uploaded to Spotify per day. 7 years later this has increased to approximately 153,000 per day. Which ChatGPT tells me is an increase of 666.7%. You think your music is getting listened to by an editor? No, me neither.
But I don’t want to be doom and gloom, it’s not my style. Because 7 is my lucky number, I’ll share 7 more ways you can try to get Spotify to notice you in 2025. (And for reassurance to anyone still reading, I’m not going to include “have a viral TikTok” because I’m trying to provide sustainable, tangible advice.)
Before I begin - it’s worth a note that at the time of writing I have started my own Artist Services venture, called Goodtwin, working with really early emerging artists. So this is very much a live trial of trying to get our artists featured on Spotify editorial playlists. It’s harder than ever, so we sympathise, but we believe there’s still a path to success and hope that by being transparent about our process we can help others.
Submit your tracks to SubmitHub or another third party playlist provider. We’ve tested a few out and SubmitHub is by far the best of the bunch for us, because you match with genuine curators. I wouldn’t part money with Boost Collective again, who I paid £150 to and they carelessly threw a song (a beautiful ode by a daughter of Iranian parents) into playlists such as “POV feeling horny”. It’s thoughtless and automated. We have seen that by getting playlisted on some great indie playlists, it has then boosted Spotify’s algorithms for things like Spotify Radio and Discover Weekly, which can then really get the stream count going at a sustainable pace, to then start to lock in to the “Fresh Finds” type early playlists. So it can work.
Your Spotify followers is also something you need to continue to push marketing to, because any new release will end up in their weekly “Release Radar” playlist which can kick-off Spotify’s algorithms. So a call to action that should be central to your entire rollout is directing fans to follow you on Spotify.
Nurture your Direct to Fan relationship, find your “Super fans”. Note: this is not a new concept despite everyone now trying to sell you an online course on building 1,000 true fans. The super fan has always existed, ask Elvis Presley or The Beatles. What is a “super fan”? Those are fans that would buy anything you put out into the world (merch, gig tickets, etc). There are now just more ways to find them (but also more competition). Honestly when we ask our artists “how many super fans do you currently have?” the answer can be as low as 5. That doesn’t matter, because it’s all about finding them, nurturing them and building that number up. I can write a separate article about finding and nurturing super fans.
The rules have changed, so dare to be different. You are no longer penalised by Spotify for having a radio premiere before the release is live, or selling a vinyl of your album ahead of your digital release, which is what NxWorries did with their album “Why Lawd?” which they made available for fans one week before it was available on streaming services. Good Marketing is just Good Ideas. Get a handful of people in a room and grab a whiteboard and have an ideas session. It’s how we start every new campaign.
Have a digital marketing strategy. Apply or pay for the marketing tools that are available on Spotify’s platform (not all of them are available until you reach a certain streaming threshold), and use digital ads to run campaigns to your tracks. Someone who spells this out so incredibly well to indie artists is Magic Nothing.
The same rules apply - try to release consistently, a track every 4-6 weeks ideally, to keep building momentum and stay present in fan’s minds. Make a plan, and when you start to rollout, don’t stop.
James Blake said it, and I’ll say it, “The humble email list is back”. Grab ‘em, nurture ‘em and convert ‘em.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my first Substack post. Hit the ‘Subscribe’ button for more thoughtful articles, real-live experiments and transparency as I attempt to do something not entirely unique (building a home for independent artists with big visions and dreams). Am I nuts? Some days I think so. Maybe you want me to succeed? Maybe you want me to fall apart? Either way, I’ll be here full of hope and promise and I’d love for you to join me.