Should artists use Spotify Discovery Mode?
Spotify Discovery Mode lets artists opt-in songs for algorithmic playlist promotion in exchange for a 30% commission on streams. It’s typically available to artists with 5k-10k monthly listeners and can boost stream growth significantly.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about if artists should use Spotify Discovery Mode.
Before we dive in… i’m running a free online music marketing summit this Wednesday through Friday. Here’s the current speaker list:
What is Spotify Discovery Mode
Discovery Mode is a marketing tool made by Spotify where you ‘opt-in’ songs each month to get more prominent placement in ‘contexts’ such as Radio, Autoplay and Mixes (all algorithmic playlists). In exchange for the promotion Spotify takes a 30% commission on streams in those contexts.
Typically artists get access to this tool with around 5k-10k monthly listeners. Spotify’s website says 25k but trust me, their website is wrong. Note that not every distributor allows Discovery Mode either.
Is Discovery Mode good?
Most of the time Discovery Mode is worth using, and not only is it growing your audience faster but you still make more money even after the 30% commission. I have seen cases where it just doesn’t work for some artists but most of the time it’s good.
I recommend trying it for a few months to see what happens. At least with a few songs opted in. Then track the stream growth.
You also get this data and more on a song by song basis, which looks like this:
Let’s look at another artist:
A 409% increase means we got roughly 5 times more streams with Discovery Mode than without it. For this artist in particular it’s not a lot of streams, but the growth is still great. I would say this is very worth it.
Next, a different artist in a different genre but for the same month (September 2024):
Also pretty great. This increase means prior to Discovery Mode the artist had about 7,500 streams from DM contexts and currently they have 30,000 streams from those contexts with Discovery Mode. I’d say this is good too.
Lets take a look at a worse one…
It can be negative as well, but even in this +13% example it’s hard to justify using it when Spotify is taking 30%. If I saw numbers like this for a few months in a row i’d consider turning Discovery Mode off.
Overall i’d say it’s worth it for 9/10 artists. Most typical is 100% to 200% increases, but as you've seen it can be much better. If you’re in the 1/10 artists where it isn’t worth it, it will often look more like +20% or -20%.
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