Spotify and the Artist's Dilemma

DECEMBER 2021 NEWSLETTER

SPOTIFY AND THE ARTIST’S DILEMMA

By now you may have looked at your Spotify Wrapped 2021 and you may have felt good, or felt kinda bummed out about the year. You may have thought about deleting the app from your life entirely. Let go of 2021. Here are ways to make the app work for you instead of thinking they owe you something.

MAKE SPOTIFY YOUR FRIEND, NOT YOUR ENEMY

Treat Spotify as you would any other marketing and social media app. Use it to reach people. It is the biggest streaming platform of all of them, and it is the easiest way for people to find you and listen to your music.

Once you get them there, keep them for as long as you can!

Upload great photos to your artist’s page, write something interesting there – a bio? No one cares about a bio really, so write anything you want there. it is a space for you to announce or say whatever you want.

HAVE MERCH & LYRICS AVAILABLE

Check out Musixmatch, the new way to integrate lyrics to your Spotfiy account!

Connect your Shopify merch store to Spotify,
because Spotify does promote and push this out to the fans that listen to your music most. We’re partnered with the low cost / high-quality printing company,
Many Moons Merch Co. The most friendly owner, Julie Gunther provides low minimums, flexibility and can even fill orders for you.

Think about how many times a song has to stream to add up to selling one t-shirt.

SPOTIFY DOESN’T TAKE A CUT OF YOUR MERCH!

But aren’t we all mad at Spotify because they don’t pay artists?
Ah – but who does? None of the streaming services! At the early stages of a music career, you won’t make money via streams.

The best advice is to use Spotify and other streaming services as a way to attract and find listeners and fans. Think of this as the top of a funnel. Use all of these big platforms to catch listeners and then funnel them to your personal website, personal email list, and merch shop.

STOP CARING ABOUT THE F’ING NUMBERS

Our best advice for 2022? “Don’t look at the numbers!”.

Spotify is making you want to compete with the system and look at your numbers every month. This is how so many artists fall into the “playlist” chasing trap. “Monthly Listeners” is a number that fluctuates and changes with playlists being dropped and added. Don’t pay attention to it too much. Please.

To get a high amount of streams on Spotify when an artist doesn’t have a large catalog of music that they have been promoting for years, you are pretty much relying on Spotify algorithmic playlists, your social media, and publicity.

PLEASE DON’T SAY,
“I SPENT THREE YEARS MAKING THIS ALBUM”

Please don’t spend years on music and then have huge expectations in releasing it all at once. This is not the way the industry rolls right now. Listeners need to have music from you dropped consistently throughout the year so they don’t forget you and move on to their next new favorite artist.

My advice to everyone is to WRITE, RECORD, & RELEASE singles throughout the entire year. Bundle the singles up and re-release them with some added deep cuts as an entire EP during the year.

ASK YOURSELF EVERY DAY,
“WHAT HAVE I DONE TO PROMOTE MY MUSIC?”

We can help you put together a social media strategy and even help you come up with concepts every day to post. We can help you focus on what gets the most engagement and brainstorm with you on how to build a look and style to your social media account. It should be the same look and feel as your website and streaming platform landing pages.

CONSISTENTLY ENGAGE LISTENERS

From my experience in releasing music, one never knows what is going to resonate with the public and with the Spotify editors. I’ve released songs without any expectations that were put on editorial lists and then I’ve dropped songs that thought would be a hit, and nothing happens. Easier said than done, but attempt to stop caring!
My overall strategy is to “plant seeds”. The more seeds I sow, the more phone calls, DMs, and opportunities come.

SO WHAT ARE “PLAYLIST
CAMPAIGNS” ANYWAY?

When we do “playlisting” with our clients, what we are doing is purely supplemental to all of these algorithmic playlists that Spotify does ‘for free’. We are asking people who curate playlists that people subscribe to and listen to for different reasons – music for studying, music for the gym, and these typically don’t add up to a ton of streams because people are listening “passively”, meaning they are just turning on music to stream while they are doing something else. They are not necessarily going to be listening to these playlists so they can discover and save new music to their own personal Spotify library, which is why I call them “supplemental”.

HOW TO GET PICKED UP BY THE ALGORITHM

As for how to hit the Spotify algorithm, it is so hard to find the magic button. The more people respond favorably to the song, the more the Spotify “robot” rewards the song and pushes it to more and more accounts with people that like similar music. It is all done by a computer algorithm, there’s no way to control it.

Listening to recent Spotify editorial playlists so you are aware of the genres they support most and the overall ‘production sounds’ that they are promoting is helpful.

Use this information to plan 2022 and a successful year of dropping 6-8 singles, supplemented by music and lyric videos, tons of social media entertainment, and we will be there with you all the way!!

We are here to work with you on your music, to help you release it with our army of consultants who work in video editing, ads marketing, merch, graphic design, logo design, press photos, short-form social media video, and more.