Submit your music to Spotify playlists, YouTube, radio stations & industry professionals. You can submit your music for free with the aim of showcasing your talent to our huge network of music industry professionals worldwide. Our organic Spotify playlists cover multiple genres. The following Spotify Playlists are weekly updated using Songs from labels and artists (FiXT, NCS, The Midnight, Riot, Tasty) that have declared them safe of DMCA strikes. You can use them in your Twitch streams. The algorithm used by twitch could mute some of this songs in the recorded VODs.
- Royalty Free Music Playlist On Spotify Playlist
- Royalty Free Music Artist
- Uncopyrighted Music On Spotify
In June 2015, the service reported 75 million active users, of which 20 million were on a paid plan (that’s over 25%). Recently, their chief revenue officer shared that they were on track to hit the 100 million active user mark before the end of 2015. Consumers have adopted the Swedish service en masse, with Scandinavian countries leading the way, followed by the rest of Europe and now the rest of the world. By allowing people to experience the platform for free through their ad-supported freemium model and over-delivering on user experience, Spotify’s initial growth was largely driven by word of mouth instead of advertising.
Now, having captured the majority of market share in Europe and with the competitor Apple Music entering the scene, Spotify has attracted more venture capital and is beginning paid advertising campaigns to win users in territories such as the USA.
This is interesting for artists and labels alike, as it means that streaming is now getting more exposure than ever.
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Personally, I’m a fan.
Two years ago I started using Spotify, immediately subscribing to a paid plan after discovering the smooth user experience, nice interface, large catalog of music and ability to stream at 320kbps MP3 quality (yeah, Netherlands mobile networks rock).
Before, I had been an iTunes kind of guy, downloading music and syncing it to my iPhone to listen on the go. It worked, but the process was far from optimal – because of the set-up time of downloading and migrating the files to my phone, in reality, I ended up listening to the same collection of music for extended periods of time.
The switch to Spotify reminded me of my initial migration from Windows to OSX… awkward at first but much more efficient once I got accustomed to the interface.
The new paradigm
I think the popularity of streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music and even Netflix are symptoms of a new paradigm: accessibility over ownership.
Consumers prefer easy access and a comfortable user experience over actually owning products and services.
After all, why would you purchase CDs if you can stream high-quality music on your desktop or smartphone, with your whole collection being accessible cross-device and have the option to sync for offline listening? It’s simply a better user experience.
Sure, some people still purchase CDs and vinyl because to them nothing beats the experience of having a physical product. Others still purchase CDs or download lossless quality files because the audio quality is better. Both are valid arguments, I get them, however percentage wise this is just a minority of all the music listeners.
Streaming is changing the game and with Spotify being at the forefront, I wanted to dedicate a post to talk about how you can get the most out of it.
Getting your music on Spotify
You can view Spotify as a store similar to iTunes and Beatport, falling in the category of DSPs (digital service providers).
To get your music up on the platform, you need to make sure you have all the rights (no unofficial remixes, uncleared sample usage, etc). From there, you will need either a direct distribution deal with Spotify (reserved for large record labels) or a connection with a distributor or aggregator that does.
For those of you unclear about the distinction, an aggregator is a company that provides distribution services to a large user base, supplying the content to multiple digital service providers (DSPs) (iTunes / Spotify / Beatport / Apple Music etc).
Distributors essentially do the same thing, but at a smaller scale (fewer clients with bigger catalogues) and work closer with specific record labels and artists and can assist in facilitating marketing placements on the stores.
In terms of the time it takes for your music to be live on the store, Spotify is one of the quicker DSPs and depending on your distributor’s processes, your music can be up on the store within 1-3 days after delivering the content.
Spotify royalties
There’s been a lot of fuss in respect to Spotify’s royalty payments.
Firstly you will have to understand the difference between the freemium and premium models. The one is free to use and shows ads (display and audio) to users, whereas the premium model is ad-free and requires a monthly fee.
Plays are not treated equal on the platform. Plays of premium users result in a higher payout to rightsholders than those of freemium users.
How it works – roughly – is that Spotify takes all the subscription (premium) and advertising (freemium) revenues over a said period, dividing those monies by the total amount of streams.
Rightsholders are paid out based on those rates and from what I understand these are corrected by the percentage of plays that came from the freemium / premium users (so larger % of streams from paid users = higher royalty rate and vice versa).
Of course, that imposes a problem.
With their tremendous growth, going from 60m active users of which 10m paid in late 2014, to 75m active users of which 20m paid in mid 2015, the growth of free users is larger than paid users, thus diluting the per-stream royalty rate.
How do you download music onto your phone from spotify account. The more users Spotify acquires, the lower the per-stream royalty rate, unless the paid-to-free subscription ratio maintains or rises. It’s like inflation.
The rates are also influenced by the country of which the streams originate (because of territorially dependent advertising buys and currency value) as well as the price of paid subscriptions, which may vary because of discount and package deals.
Spotify officially reports their average composite per-stream rate to be between $0,006 and $0,0084.
Our rate with Heroic over 2015 Q3 was approximately $0,00475 per stream, without including any distribution fees. This is the pure rate we received from Spotify via our distributor. For clarity, these are Spotify royalties over the master.
For songwriters it is different. Internationally, parties have decided to consider a stream roughly 75% public performance and 25% mechanical reproduction. Spotify pays these rates on behalf of the label (by withholding it from the master royalties) and allocates it to the PRS’ whom in turn collect for the publishers or songwriters directly.
These rates are much lower, with some songwriters reporting receiving roughly $0,00009 per stream. That’s $90 for 1.000.000 plays.
Nonetheless, Spotify is becoming a significant revenue stream for record labels and performing artists. With Heroic, we’ve seen Spotify’s share of our distribution income shift from 10% to over 55% in the last two and half years.
Pair that up with a decrease in iTunes (Apple is pushing consumers towards their Apple Music streaming service) and Beatport sales (their new streaming service is terrible, the pro.beatport.com store is confusing and SFX stock has plummeted) and you can see how streaming is going to account for the lion’s share of (digital) recording revenues in the coming years.
Playlists
The biggest driver of plays on Spotify are playlists and charts.
These are lists that are curated by both consumers and companies, which list tracks that they enjoy. Spotify’s playlists are cool because when you follow one, you’ll get a notification every time a track is added to that playlist. That’s what drives the plays.
Every user has the ability to create playlists and retitle them, however the ability to customize artwork and add a description is restricted to VIP / verified accounts.
In the past Spotify allowed users to discover playlists of other users via the browse sections of the app, however, these playlists have been removed and only those controlled by Spotify and the major labels are now shown.
Yeah, there’s a monopoly going on there.
Because Spotify’s success hinges on their ability to use the music of the major labels, there have been intense negotiations and the majors have managed to negotiate higher-than-standard royalty rates and control over a share of the advertising space and playlists on the platform.
Most users don’t realize this, but all those popular playlists that don’t carry the Spotify brand are all controlled by the majors: Filtr is owned by Sony Music, Digster by Universal Music Group and Topsify by Warner Music Group.
This control allows them to influence (Spotify) chart positions, plays on their tracks and improve the success rate of their releases beyond Spotify (improving odds on Shazam, general charts, radio and other DSPs).
Royalty Free Music Playlist On Spotify Playlist
So you’re wondering: how do I get my music on those playlists?
Great question – with an unfortunately complex answer. Because the biggest playlists are controlled by a few established parties, penetrating the market can be difficult.
Nonetheless, here are your options.
Spotify’s self-controlled playlists:
You’ll either need a contact at Spotify, or more realistically, a deal with a distributor or aggregator that does.
Ask them about how you can file for a ‘priority track request‘ or what is also called a ‘feature placement‘. This constitutes the distributor filling in a form with Spotify where they outline the projected sales figures for the release, as well as the artist’s historical sales figures and a summarized marketing plan.
Spotify then decides whether to place you or not. Success is largely based on the validity of your story; sales numbers, outstanding marketing campaign, proper label backing. It’s important to have both your label and distributor double down if you really want to make this happen.
Record label playlists:
Spotify premium mod apk latest. Release with one of the major labels or bigger independents that control their own playlists. Labels such as Spinnin and Armada are doing a great job at playlisting in the electronic realm.
Leading up to your release, ask them about how they will employ their playlists to generate traction with your release. You may even want to ask them to run a Spotify exclusive for 1-2 weeks leading up to the release, if they think it will increase your odds of being included in one of Spotify’s primary playlists via a priority track request.
Independent playlists:
With Spotify removing independent playlists from the Browse section, tracking the best independent playlists can be a struggle.
Here’s a few methods to find them:
- Search for popular keywords (think Tomorrowland, EDM etc) and filter through the results, filtering out those with the most followers (anything with 5.000+ followers is significant).
- Search Google for lists of the most popular playlists. Like this.
- Or use websites that index Spotify playlists such as Playlists.me and SharedPlaylists.com.
From there, the process is straightforward: trace the account that created the playlist and employ your best internet researching skills to find a way to contact the playlist creator (usually via email, Twitter or Facebook Chat).
Catalog your results in a Google Sheets database. Here’s a template that you can use (copy the tab to a new Sheets document to get started).
Analytics
Similar to other streaming platforms, metrics are important to both see how your releases are performing, as well as to better understand your demographic (where they are based, when they listen etc).
You can view the play counts of tracks on Spotify by hovering over the battery like indicator next to a track.
These metrics are always delayed by 2-3 days though: 10.000 plays on a Monday would be visible on a Wednesday or Thursday.
In the past, Analytics were accessible for managers and labels via Spotify’s integration with Next Big Sound (a social media data aggregator for artists). Recently however, Spotify announced Fan Insights, for which limited beta applications are being accepted here.
We’ve recently received access to Spotify’s more extensive Analytics platform and the data is incredibly interesting – all our artists see a massive fall-off of plays on Saturday and Sunday, whereas the more downtempo music peaks in plays on Monday and more club-oriented music performs best on a Friday.
We’re also seeing that the bulk of our Spotify audience is in the United States, followed by the UK, Sweden and Germany. Germans seem to love bass music and trap.
Verified profiles
Beyond the freemium and premium subscription levels, Spotify makes a distinction between traditional user accounts and artist profiles.
When a release is distributed to Spotify, a profile is created for the artist, automatically generating a profile picture based on the release’s artwork.
Initially, these artist profiles are detached from any user accounts, however through requesting verification one can link these together, as well as add an about page with a custom biography, as well as customize the artwork – and receive a shiny blue checkmark (check out the San Holo page as an example).
The linkup between the profile and user account is great, because it’ll merge all the followers of both accounts into one and allow the artist or label to use the personal account as if it were the artist account, sharing all activity in the process.
This creates great opportunities for sharing content within Spotify (by right clicking a release), broadcasting it to all of the account’s followers with a custom message.
Any playlists that are created by the user are now linked and displayed to the artist profile. This is amazing and allows an artist with say 20.000 followers to create a playlist, share it to the followers and kickstart the playlist’s follower growth.
If you’re verified, I highly suggest you to use this trick to your advantage, creating a playlist in which you can include all your releases (titled something like ‘Artist – Official Releases’) and one for your inspirations (‘Artist – Inspirations’). This will be interesting for your fans to follow and allows you to give your releases a little extra push when they come out by including them in those lists.
You can request verification for your account here.
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I hope this article improves your understanding of Spotify and how to excel on the platform. Please let me know what your biggest struggle is on the platform in the comments, or any other questions you might have. I’ve also put together a checklist of ‘best practices’ you can use in order to get the most out of your Spotity profile which you can get below.
If you’re interested in other platforms such as SoundCloud you can check out my newest article here on how you can improve your SoundCloud marketing game.
Like this content? Check out the free video series for my new course, the Music Marketing Academy. You can get access here.
This is a guest article written by TJ Jones, the Artist Relations Manager at Playlist Push. TJ has amassed over 75,000 profile followers and over 100,000 playlist followers amongst his top 20 playlists.
TJ first started by creating playlists to play while he worked as an Uber driver – now he works with Playlist Push, which has reached more than 25 million unique listeners.
Knowing how to properly create and manage playlists can be tremendously helpful in growing your project, and it can even become a strong source of income over time.
This article outlines the tips and tricks he’s learned that can help anyone grow a following on Spotify.
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If you have a love for music, then making a great Spotify playlist isn’t hard. In fact, you’re already halfway there! If you are like me, you spend your free time organizing your immense music library and you never pass up the opportunity to choose the music at a party or in the car. If you want to create an amazing Spotify playlist and share it with the world however, you’ll have to put in the extra effort. And in order to build the best playlist in the world, you should take the time to learn what exactly you are up against.
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Spotify is, at its heart, a tech company. Their extensive user-data collection detects and corroborates every user’s exact listening habits, and uses that data to give each user their own unique song and artist recommendations. Here’s how it works:
Spotify generates a “taste profile” based on songs you listen to and save. Spotify will then search through the billions of playlists and identify similar songs that appear alongside your taste profile on those playlists, also generating songs from other user’s playlists that you haven’t saved or listened. The more you listen and save, the more accurate of a taste profile you develop. And the more playlists are created, the more accurately Spotify can suggest new songs to you. This is the bedrock of the popular “Discover Weekly” playlist.
Those song and artist recommendations are not from Spotify itself, but rather from the other users data in the cloud. Essentially, the real magic of Spotify isn’t the fluidity of the app or the catalog of music – its the other people!
Royalty Free Music Artist
In addition to their algorithmically generated “mood” and “weekly” playlists, Spotify employs a team of human tastemakers to curate highly popular collections of songs and artists. These include the notable “Rap Caviar”, “Essential Indie”, “Funky Jams”, and many many more. In this game, Spotify has a home field advantage. They have already established a long list of market dominating song and artist curation. But playlisting is like gardening – it must be tended to and cared for, or the songs will get stale and the user’s, bored. New songs lose their relevancy and older songs return to glory in a seemingly unpredictable pattern.
But this unpredictability is exactly why any Spotify user can make a great playlist – the Major Label teams aren’t always going to get it right. The most popular playlists by follower count (like Today’s Top Hits, Rap Caviar, and Viva Latino) are all made by human beings, with emotion and love for their craft and effort and hard work. Put in a little organization, some hard work, and a love for music, and you could end up creating the next million-follower Spotify playlist.
Your niche is the specific and unique mood or overall vibe you want your playlist to invoke for listeners. There’s nothing inherently human or emotional about Spotify’s algorithms generating a list of songs based on data. There is something special about your personal & lived experience resonating with an artist or particular type of music. A great playlist has meaning to you! It will be helpful to create a purpose for your playlist and identify why you connect with specific songs. You should continue to add artists you relate to with that purpose in mind. Fans of an artist will go out of their way to discover new music that identifies with them. And if they can tell your playlist was built with intention, they will listen to it.
Also, make sure that you’re doing something unique with your playlist. If all you’re doing is adding a collection of your favorite Top 40 songs, you’ll be faced with a TON of competition.
Uncopyrighted Music On Spotify
Having these three assets prepared will convey as much information about your playlist as possible before a potential follower checks out the actual tracklist. An attention grabbing title is dependent upon your target audience, but generally it should be something descriptive and catchy (“Hand Picked Beets” or “Rap Caviar”) You can find inspiration for the name of your playlist by visiting the profiles of artists you added to the playlist, and browse their “discovered on” section. Include keywords people are searching for in your playlist’s bio. These can be the artist names, mood or setting based names (beach, hiking, relaxing) or highly niche genres like Preverb, Grave-wave and Christian Trap.
Using effective keywords in your titles are will maximize the chances of getting your playlist discovered. Spotify’s native playlists will rank higher than yours in the search, but dedicated fans of good musicians in your playlists will look for the independent playlists listed after Spotify’s. Remember that your desired audience should play a role in your selection of a playlist photo. Visualize the personality of someone who would listen to the artists on your playlists (yourself included) and find a photo that embodies that in one way or another; for example, the ‘Summer Party’ playlist has an image of a blonde girl in a sundress sitting by the pool. You can use your own original photos, but there are a few royalty free image websites that are great for playlist covers. Be sure to use images that are your own, or Spotify could delete your playlist for copyright infringement. Here are some websites that I search for royalty free photos:
Include keywords people are searching for in your playlist’s bio. These can be the artist names, mood or setting based names (beach, hiking, relaxing) or highly niche genres like Preverb, Grave-wave and Christian Trap. Using effective keywords in your titles are will maximize the chances of getting your playlist discovered.
Fluidity is key in playlist creation, and so I would advise against stockpiling your entire music library into 1 playlist. A giant playlist with all of your favorite tunes may align with your personal listening habits, but if you want people to follow your playlist, you’ll need to categorize your tastes into seperate & cohesive playlists. I would also avoid generic pop playlists, as top 40 fans will likely gravitate towards the dozens of Spotify pop playlists. Your best chance for success is to choose something that you love but don’t see much of. You definitely want the genres of selected artists to be related, but your theme ought reflect a mood or a personality type. I would also advise that you listen to your playlist with a crossfade between track.
This will give you some insight into how well your playlist flows as a whole. Each track doesn’t have to seamlessly blend into the next, but a crossfade will highlight any particularly jarring differences in mood or personality between songs. (Death Grips into Beyonce) Most playlists are listened to on shuffle, so every song must work together in the collection. To sum up, you want to find a niche in your music knowledge that reflects a mood or personality, and choose music that caters directly to those fans to consistently grow your playlists.
Debut your new playlist with as few as 40 songs and steadily increase it to the 80-90 track range. The first 8 tracks in the playlist hold a disproportionate amount of weight in the playlist as a first impression. It is among these first 8 songs that users are most likely to choose the first song they listen to, so make sure they are the strongest choices. You can make a playlist with hundreds of songs and it could become extremely popular, but if you want to monetize your playlists you should keep your playlists between 50-90 tracks. A playlist with over 100 songs can overwhelm a potential follower looking to discover new music, while a playlist with under 40 songs may not appear to have enough potential for discovering a user’s next favorite artist. And by monetize your playlist, I am referring to using the audience your playlist has accumulated to benefit independent musicians through playlist servicing platforms like PlaylistPush.
Once you have a big enough following, you become an influencer – and that’s valuable to artists and musicians. Placement on your playlist might give an artist thousands of new streams and potential fans; many artists are willing to pay for that opportunity! By having your playlist service up on Playlist Push, you open the door to having artists contact you with offers.
You created an excellent playlist! Now, go get those followers.
Gaining your first 100 followers can be difficult, and potentially discouraging. Keep your playlist private, not public (you don’t want to leave visitors with a bad impression before you’re ready), and prepare a coordinated social media release to your most intimate and connected audience. Once your playlist is perfected, make it public and promote your playlist on your personal social accounts and ask friends and family to follow them to gather your first few followers. (A playlist with 5 followers will show up in a search before a playlist with zero, which will help people discover your playlist more easily early on). From there, you can join niche Facebook groups and post about your playlist in genre-specific subreddits. Spotify’s social aspect allows friends of users to see activity in their friends feed and your playlist can be discovered this way as well.
Another tip is to DM each of the artists that you have included on your playlist, or tag them in some sort of social post. You never know, they may just repost it! Your audience is out there and finding them is a matter of persistence and outside-the-box-thinking. Once your playlist has gained a little traction, you can search for independent artists looking to get on playlists (if they haven’t already come to you). How much traction you need depends on the size of artist you’re targeting; a good rule of thumb is that you’ll want to be able to expand their potential audience by at least 10%. A small artist with only 1000 followers would appreciate the opportunity to get in front of 100 new potential fans; an artist with over 1,000,000 followers might not care as much.
You can leverage a position on your playlist for a social share or even to make your playlist their “Artist Pick” on their Spotify artist page.
The “Artist Pick” is a playlist, chosen by the artist, located at the very top of that artists Spotify page. It is a highly desirable position, so anything you can do for the artist in exchange for this position will drive a ton of that artist traffic to your playlist. If the artist shares your playlist to their active fan base, the followers will stream in with little effort. Don’t ask artists to share your playlist until you’re sure it can gain streams and has a dedicated following (at least 100 followers).
You should never compromise the integrity of the playlist’s flow or mood to fit an artist in that promises large exposure.
This will likely come back to bite you as even one song can turn a listener away. By far the best way to share your great playlist with a large amount of people is by building rapport with musicians and mutually benefiting each other’s career.
You now have at least one successful playlist, an audience, and connections with independent artists. How do you maintain it?
It is more important to curate a playlist that has an engaged audience than a large audience. This means that using a service that brings your playlist non-organic followers is a vanity tactic. Search results in Spotify are ranked by how many listeners those playlists are gaining, or the growth of the audience. This is because most Spotify users won’t unfollow a playlist that they have stopped listening to. A playlist with 10,000 followers may look really good on paper and draw attention to your profile, but if your audience is not consistently listening then the future of your playlist is looking grim. Spotify will recognize that you aren’t growing, so they’ll stop ranking you as highly in search results. The quality of the music on your playlist will shine through and keep you afloat with an organic growth, especially if it is well tended-to. This means you must listen to your playlists regularly. If you come across a track that feels repetitive and stale, chances are your followers think so too.
Update your playlists regularly but don’t get too wild. People are following your playlists because they saw music that they enjoy. Rotate tracks in and out of your lineup gradually. The single worst thing you can do is a major rebranding of the vibe of the playlist by switching our the majority of the tracks and adding new ones all at once. This will result in a swift decline in playlist followers, because your existing fanbase will no longer have access to your original product: the collection of specific songs that drew them to follow you in the first place.
Spotify also has a new folder feature that encourages grouping playlists so users can follow a large amount but keep their sidebar organized. You’ll want to try and avoid having your playlist placed in a folder a user has made to hide the playlist, or to only refer to on special occasions. Outdated or generic playlists, and playlists with uninspiring names will be the first to be pushed into a sub-folder – keep your playlist fresh, and you’ll reduce your chances of being ignored.
- Don’t add more than 3 songs by the same artist to a single playlist. This forces you to be more creative in your song choice and will result in a more diversified and well-rounded playlist.
- It’s easy to fall into the cycle of listening to the same music, or same musician for months on end. When you’re feeling the urge to be inspired by new music, I recommend visiting everynoise.com for the ultimate music discovery experience. Everynoise is an algorithmically-generated scatter plot map of the musical genres on Spotify – it contains every genre, complete with examples for each. You never know if Japenese Jazztronica or Berlin Minimal Techno will inspire your next playlist.
- SpotOnTrack.com is a great tool for keeping track of follower growth and other important playlist stats. They have a 14-day free trial!
- When your playlist has reached 400 followers, you should sign up to become a curator on Playlist Push to start making money from your playlists and easily track your playlist activity.
- You should build multiple playlists at the same time that showcases the music you like. People who follow one will likely check out the others too.
- Including dozens of key terms in your bio can get really tacky, really quick. Keep your keywords limited and tasteful.
The operative word for playlisting is “patience”. If you want to make the next great Spotify playlist, you have to be committed for the long haul. Don’t expect your playlist to gain hundreds of followers overnight – You should expect a slow trickle of listeners.
The speed your playlist grows really comes down to two simple factors: How easily people searching can find it and whether or not it is good enough for people to share with their friends.
Stay on top of music trends and new releases from top artists on your playlists, and you’ll maintain and grow a successful playlisting career.