I’ve seen countless artists talk about how Spotify playlists and Spotify playlisting is the bulk of their music marketing strategy. But in my opinion this is a massive waste of time and money in most cases. There are a lot of situations where playlisting makes sense but it should never be used as the foundation of an artists fan growth.
In case you haven’t heard of this, you can pay money to get your music on popular playlists on Spotify. Sometimes you pay per pitch (SubmitHub, Groover, PlaylistPush) and other times you pay for guaranteed coverage (Moonstrive Media, YouGrow Promo, Partnered Projects). The playlisting industry is full of bots and scams, but i’ve tested all the companies I listed and they are legit.
Playlisting is often quite cost effective per stream, at least on paper. The problem is it doesn’t lead to good results long term, and it isn’t cost effective at gaining actual fans. The quality just isn’t there and the listeners you gain don’t stick around.
To illustrate this let’s look at two songs with roughly the same amount of streams in the past 28 days. One is promoted with mostly playlisting, while the other is promoted with mostly advertising through Meta Ads using conversion campaigns.
Streams | Listeners | Streams / Listener | Saves | Saves / Listener | |
Mostly Playlisting | 15,841 | 7,572 | 2.079 | 51 | Less than 1% |
Mostly Ads | 15,138 | 5,277 | 2.869 | 1,393 | 26% |
The main two stats of interest in the table above are the streams / listener and the saves / listener – these are quality metrics. They represent how many times each person listened to the song, and what percentage of them saved the song to their library to listen to later.
The song promoted mostly with playlisting had a save rate of less than 1% and an average streams per listener of 2.079. The song promoted mostly with ads (Meta ads in particular) had a save rate of 26% and a streams per listener of 2.869. Ads give a much higher save rate and give more streams per person on average.
This makes sense because listening to a playlist is an inherently passive activity. You put a playlist on because you want someone else to make decisions about what to play next, and you put your phone away. For example, while driving, at the gym, at work etc. On the flip side, people that come from ads just watched a video by you, clicked to go listen to your music and have their phone in their hands while your song is playing.
As a rule of thumb I tell people that playlisting has a save rate of about 5% or less, while ads have a save rate of about 50% and greater.
This is why if you’re primarily using Spotify playlists to promote your music:
- Your monthly listeners crash back to where you started after the campaign ends
- People aren’t coming back to listen to your song again in the future
- You have a very low ratio of followers to monthly listeners
- Nobody is listening to your music on other platforms
I think of Spotify playlisting as a ‘turbo’ that you can use to boost streams and omnipresence when necessary for specific amounts of time. It’s like candy, fine in small doses but if you eat nothing but candy you’ll get sick.
If you’re working how Spotify Marquee fits into this, read this article to see for yourself.