Our focus for our playlist placement service is primarily to get your music added on Spotify playlists.

There is some crossover with Apple Music, Deezer and Pandora (and even YouTube) where Spotify curators occasionally also operate playlists on those other platforms.

In addition, in our research, we do find curators on those other streaming platforms and add them to our databases.

But, our primary focus is on obtaining playlist additions for our clients on the most appropriate and effective Spotify playlists.

The way we pitch your music will depend on where you’re at in your career, whether you have had any prior success on Spotify, where your music fits and whether you need to focus on more playlist ‘adds’ or on maintaining listeners and sustaining your current level of streams.

There are several tiers of playlists.

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.

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.

At the bottom of the funnel, and most sought after, are the playlists editorially curated by Spotify. 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.

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. For example, in pop you can go from New Pop Revolution (150,000 followers) to Today’s Top Hits (23M and counting...).

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.

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.

Throughout that mix of playlists sit Spotify’s algorithmic playlists which are triggered by the way your music is received on Spotify. When your streams (and amount of time streamed), listeners and followers and additions to user curated playlists build sufficient momentum then your music will activate Spotify’s algorithm and see you added to these automatically generated playlists.

This can happen at any time and at any stage of your Spotify trajectory, but these algorithm driven additions are caused by real interaction with your music by Spotify users.

Playlists tailored to each Spotify user, such as ‘Discover Weekly’, ‘Daily Mix’, ‘Time Capsule’ and ‘Release Radar’ can be activated at any level of exposure, but our Spotify playlist placement will help increase the exposure of your music on these algorithmic playlists.

If you’re just starting out you need to start building a story around your music and your artist, so we’ll start with the ‘Curator playlists’ and move on to ‘Influencer playlists’. But, if you have already had some success at that level, we’ll dive deeper and pitch to brand playlists.

The truth is, it is exceptionally hard to get featured on the brand playlists operated by the major labels since they fill them with artists signed to their labels, but there are other brand playlist openings that we can target.

If you’ve been placed on Spotify Editorial playlists in the past then we will add those to our targeted pitching and, if you’re starting without any playlist activity or only from smaller curators, we’ll work to build a story so that the Spotify editors notice your traction and give you a shot.

Pitching to Spotify editors directly is something that we do in addition to using the pre-release playlist pitching tool inside your Spotify for Artists Dashboard.

Critically, we can approach Spotify editors for playlist additions at any time, even when a track has been released many months (or even years) in the past, whereas the pitch tool in your dashboard is solely for pre-release pitching.

Every artist has access to a ‘Spotify for Artists’ dashboard that enables you to see all the data on your Spotify activity – real time stream counts, followers, playlist additions and much more.

Within this dashboard you can pitch direct to Spotify editors for placements on Spotify playlists – those edited by Spotify themselves.

This is clearly a fantastic resource and opportunity, but can only be used for pre-release music.

It’s an essential tool that every artist needs to use to maximise their chances of playlist additions, not least since using it guarantees appearing in the ‘Release Radar’ playlist of all your followers in the week of release.

If you are releasing new music during a campaign period working with us we will work with you to perfect your pitch through your dashboard.

Outside of release periods, our playlist promotion service will reach appropriate Spotify editors without use of the playlist pitch tool.