Promoting Your Own Playlists On Spotify (and other DSPs)
Learn how to create and promote themed playlists on Spotify and other DSPs to engage listeners and boost streams. Tailor your playlist names, themes, and ads to target specific audiences and maximize ad performance.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about promoting and growing playlists on Spotify (and other DSPs). For example, this could be:
Growing a genre or theme based playlist blending your music with similar artists you want to be associated with.
Growing a genre or theme based playlist because you want to be a playlist curator.
Promoting a “This is” playlist to promote your entire back catalog in between song releases.
Promoting an instrumental music playlist full of your music only to get as many streams per listener as possible.
First thing - as far as ad setup goes, promoting a playlist is exactly the same as promoting a song or album. If you want to learn how to do that either check out this video, read this blog post, or check out my course Spotify Growth Machine.
BTW I just added a brand new playlist growth module!
But let’s talk about how you promote playlists.
Make Your Playlist
The first step is to make your playlist. This will vary depending on which type of playlist you want to make. But as long as you’re not doing the ‘This is’ playlist you’re going to need some type of theme for your playlist.
There aren’t any hard rules but overall don’t make your playlist too generic like ‘Hip-Hop 2025’, it’d be much better to be more specific like "Hard Hitting Hip-Hop For The Gym”. Once you figure out what music goes in your playlist, I would also clone it and make another theme for the same music. For example that same exact playlist could be called “Aggressive Rap and Hip-Hop” or “Dark Hip-Hop With Meaningful Lyrics”.
The purpose of having multiple playlist ideas is they will all perform differently in ads. One playlist idea might be $0.50 per conversion and the next $0.25 with the same music.
Give your playlist a snazzy image, and make it 50-150 songs long unless it’s an instrumental music playlist then go for like 8 hours long if possible.
Make Your Ads
The nice thing with playlists is you can swap out multiple songs to promote the list, and you can relate the music to a functional activity or hobby or interest. For example if it’s a ‘folk music playlist for camping’ you can use clips of campfires in your ads. If it’s a playlist for working out you can use stock footage of people working out.
Here’s an ad for a piano playlist where we themed the playlist around yoga and meditation, so we made ads for both yoga and meditation:
The value proposition for a playlist is often higher because instead of trying to get someone to check out a song, you’re saying ‘hey I curated several hours of music to keep you entertained, check it out’. The end user is just getting more value than from a single song.
Instrumental Music
Instrumental music is a very bing-able format. Check out this video where I show a playlist that got 67 streams per listener.
With instrumental music typically you’re making playlists with 100% your own music. If the music could be listened to in the background especially, you’d also want to make it very long. For example, a sleeping playlist or a study / meditation / yoga playlist.
The strategy is completely different from vocal driven music playlists.
Ranking in Spotify Search
Spotify has it’s own search results and ranking algorithm for playlists (and really everything on the platform). If you have a playlist called ‘indie folk bangers to cry to’ that playlist might show up when people search for ‘indie folk’ or ‘folk bangers’ or ‘music to cry to’ and more.
Certain keywords have more competition, like ‘indie’. But while ‘indie folk bangers’ would have less competition it also likely has less search traffic.
When you make your playlist you want to pick playlist themes and names that:
Make sense for the type of playlist you want to make.
Have as low competition as possible.
Have as high search traffic as possible.
There are different ways to figure out competition and search volume, and to track keyword ranking status, but the best way i’ve found is to use Artist Tools.
Artist Tools allows you to look up keyword ranking status for each playlist, so you know which search result you’re ranking for which keywords you’re targeting. You can also see which playlists are ranking for certain keywords.
Tracking keyword ranking isn’t a necessity if you’re building an artist playlist, it’s more something you’d do if you wanted to be a curator or you’re really trying to scale up the results you get from your catalog of playlists.
Should you promote a playlist?
To be clear, unless you’re doing instrumental music you should put the bulk of your budget promoting individual songs. That leads to the most amount of saves, playlist adds and streams per listener on that specific track which leads to the best algorithmic outcome from that track.
However when you’re in between releases, or you want to be a curator, or you make instrumental music, or want to promote your entire back catalog - playlists are a great option.
For the instrumental music people and the label owners out there, you typically have the most to gain by focusing on building your own playlists. For individual vocal-based artists you don’t have as much to gain so it’s more of a supplemental activity.
If doing this sounds like too much work, consider hiring my agency Southworth Media to promote your playlists for you!
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How to Promote Your Music on Spotify with Facebook Ads (2025):
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
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My ad agency specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
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