I’ve been looking at how to promote music on Spotify.
There’s a couple of things that I needed to sort out for artists that I work with relating to their presence on Spotify. That led me to start to make some decisions about the basics of using Spotify for promotion as a musician – so this is what I have uncovered so far as it applied to the issues I was having.
This is just about getting the basics right to start with – I think I’m right, but it’s a work in progress, so let me know what else you know!
The obvious issue is that with Spotify getting serious traction in the UK and the US, any artist would be a fool not to use it, have their music on there and work out how to maximise that exposure.
I know some people think the royalties are too low and you’re better off not being on Spotify – that might work for Coldplay looking to maximise their ‘week one’ sales, but I see no justification for a DIY or indie artist not being on there. Exposure = fan attraction and relationship building. I don’t care about the ‘missed sales’ or low revenue from those plays. I want to see an artist build a long-term sustainable fan base who will pay for the ‘fan experience’ in a multitude of ways – downloads and streaming of the artist’s music being just one of those!
Get your music on Spotify
In order to use Spotify to promote your music, the first thing you need to do is get your music on there!
It’s actually pretty easy to get your music on Spotify. See their own page about that here.
If you have a deal with someone that gets your music on iTunes, then you’ll likely be able to get on Spotify easily. For example, Tunecore have you covered.
Spotify Artist Profile page
All Music Profile with biography and images
The most obvious issue that I had was that some of my artists don’t have a biography or pictures on their Spotify Artist Profile page. As far as I can tell, the Artist Profile page is generated from the metadata that is supplied by your digital distributor (or aggregator) to Spotify and then added to by pulling information from the All Music Guide.
If you have a biography and images on the All Music site, these will be pulled wholesale into Spotify. If you don’t, it looks like you need to go to All Music and submit information (although they will write the bio themselves rather than using what you submit directly). This can take a month or so but will then be pulled into Spotify. If you have any evidence that this can be done directly with Spotify, please let us know!
Send fans to your Spotify Artist Profile
I then realised that I wanted every artist site that I work on to have a prominent link in the sidebar (where you have your links to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc) direct to the artist profile on Spotify. I’d suggest that this is now a ‘de facto’ addition to the networks that you should link to.
To find the URL of your artist profile in Spotify, search for your artist name and click through to the Artist Profile page. Directly under the band name you’ll see a ‘Share’ link. Click on that and if you select the Twitter option it will bring up a pre-prepared tweet including the URL. Just cut the bit that begins with ‘http’ and that is the direct link to your Artist Profile page. (Don’t bother with the actual tweet!)
Find a Spotify icon by searching for that in Google (image search), download it and add it to your sidebar. If that makes no sense – time to ask your web nerd to help you out again!
Why do you want people to go and check you out on Spotify?
Well, it’s another place where they can listen to your music and with the addition of Facebook integration, everything they listen to on Spotify will show up in their Facebook Ticker feed (unless they bar it, which I know a lot of people have!). That could be a lot of exposure for your music to their friends.
People tend to highlight (star) or add to a playlist music that they discover on Spotify – which should encourage them to keep coming back to it. As I said at the start of this piece, I’m not bothered about the small royalty (although you will earn a little by people listening to your music on Spotify) but I am interested in them becoming fans!
Nonetheless, an obvious advantage of being on Spotify is that people can buy your music from within Spotify with one click and add it to their library.
Promote using Spotify playlists
There’s already been a lot of stuff written about how you can use Spotify playlists to promote your music once you have it on there. It’s a simple idea and one that you ought to be trying to see if it works for you.
Creating the link to share a playlist works the same way as we set out above for finding the ‘http’ link for your Artist Profile. Just go to the playlist that you’ve created in your Spotify account and ‘click ‘Share’ to get the URL.
My Chemical Romance using a Spotify playlist in a blog post
You’ll notice that the playlist will be from your personal user profile. Now that you must have a Facebook profile to open a new Spotify account, it might be worth setting up a ‘fake’ Facebook profile using your band name as the first and last names of your new Facebook profile. That way your Spotify account will have your artist name and that’s what will appear in your playlists as ‘Created by…’. NOTE – Facebook frowns on fake profiles…a lot! So, you’re probably better of just having the playlist come from the Spotify account of one of the band members. As with Facebook, this problem is obscured for singer/songwriters who perform under their own real name!
Simple playlist rules are that, unless you’re already very successful, you don’t want to just make playlists of your own material. Make up lists of your influences, your genre or your local scene. They don’t necessarily have to have your music in at all on occasion. Just having music to talk about by referencing a playlist can give you something to engage your fans with. For example, a short blog post on your influences with a short playlist for your fans to listen to as they read could prove very popular.
Then, of course, you can leverage other online coverage by offering your playlists to other sites. How about what you’re listening to on the tour bus that you send to all the local ‘what’s on’ blogs for each town you’re visiting on tour?
There’s plenty of other ideas for promoting your music on Spotify if you have a quick search – such as ‘piggybacking’ and recording covers as discussed in this article on Ditto Music.
Advertising on Spotify
One other option is to advertise.
You can do this to people who you know have Spotify by using a Facebook ad that is additionally targeted to Facebook users who ‘like’ Spotify.
Or, you could advertise on Spotify itself. This can be surprisingly cheap and you’ll no doubt have noticed how an element of Spotify advertising is now de rigueur for all major label releases, whether that takes the form of the audio ads that non-premium Spotify users hear or the various banner placements that you see within Spotify. You can learn more here.
I’ve been lucky enough to see what Spotify can do with their in-house promotion when working with major label acts. They post on their blog, mail to their newsletter (over 2 million strong), post to their Facebook page and so on. It can drive awesome amounts of traffic and interest to an artist.
Of course, that’s generally available to internationally recognised acts, but they do offer this ‘Platinum promotional package’ to bands that they take a shine to. Remember that Spotify is run by music lovers and they want to be seen to be helping grass roots acts.
How can you get spotted by them and offered this kind of help? Well no-one says that’ll be easy but do the things we always recommend – get some great music locked down, build a presence online and offline with a live following and drive attention to it. If you add a little bit of focus to Spotify’s blog and their Facebook page (by commenting there etc), who knows if that might help you get lucky!
Before you count on that though, get your music on Spotify, send your fans to your Spotify Artist Profile and creatively promote your music and your scene through playlists.
That’s the basics of how to promote music on Spotify. More as it develops!
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Is it usefull to keep butting your music on every media ?,First there was myspace,facebook,and Reverbnation. What is the point of getting a another account on spotify?
Still much love and respect for this website.(my favourite )
Toni
It’s all about where you expend your promotion and marketing effort. I think Spotify will become so ever present that if your music is selling oniTines, you ought to have it on Spotify too!
But, the beauty of the DIY musician era is that no method of selling and distribution is a ‘must do’ – if you can find a better way to promote and sell your music you should go that path – maybe selling only via a Bandcamp store will work for some. My preference is to have your music selling everywhere!
Try it and see.
Thanks for saying we’re the best!
You should use RouteNote. RouteNote.com can get your music onto Spotify for FREE!!! thus making it possible to monetize the free music that you have given away on the web!
I’ll check it out.
Thank you, we were trying to sort out spotify and this helped.
You’re welcome.
Bio from “All Music Guide” – funny how they don’t accept digital submission. Feels a bit outdated that Spotify get data from a source relying on the good old postal service and lead times of over a month =) A good sign that Spotify is strictly controlled by major record labels.
I agree Stefan – I’d much prefer some kind of direct submission!
Ohh I just loved this post, thanks! Spotify brings music to the social media and a good opportunity to promote music.
However as I learned you cannot submit directly, you have to go through from a distributor like CDBaby for Spotify to “Spot” your music. And it takes like 2 months. Again a distributor will put your song on iTunes, Spotify and many others, so there is nothing much to do from your side. They should speed things up and make the option to edit the details as it will play as a major music hub in social media.
Tamal – yep it’s a pain that you can’t submit music direct but using a digital aggregator such as Tunecore is the best way to get your music on a host of sites anyway.
An editable artist page would make a lot of sense – I agree.
Its great people take the time to share their “How to’s especially when it comes to self releasing for the first time (Lots of headaches from my experience)
I have used a local distributor to put an “album sampler” on spotify but im unsure of what to send to all music as there is no physical product to send ……
Should i just send a note of the band name , song titles , photos and bio ?
Your advice is appreciated mate
S
Stepehn – I think I’m right in saying that All Music need a physical CD – you can make one CD on demand on Amazon.
But follow that link in the article to All Music and check their requirements there.
Ian