How to Get Your Music on Spotify Playlists in 2024
Playlists have always been a great way to find new music and keep the vibe going.
But today, playlisting is becoming more & more crucial to our listening experience.
As music retailers such as Spotify, Apple Music & Amazon Music, push us to listen to trending playlists as well as those that are tailored to our past listening experience.
For artists, Playlists become a great way to expand your audience and reach new fans.
That being said, getting your music on Spotify playlists and other music retailers’ playlist works as an useful way to promote your music.
First, here’s how to get your song on Spotify.
HOW TO Upload your music to Spotify
To start, you want to make sure your music is streaming on Spotify and all other major music retailers.
It’s quite simple and doesn’t have to cost much at all.
To get your music on Spotify you’ll need to upload your songs to through a music distributor first, who will handle getting your music streaming and available for sale on whichever platforms you choose.
You may have heard of - CD Baby, DistroKid, Ditto Music or TuneCore.
These are music distributors. They will act as a ‘middle man’ to get your music streaming.
Personally, I use DistroKid, their pricing model makes the most sense for what I need and Spotify has recently purchased part of DistroKid. Allowing it to integrate better with Spotify and best of all…
Get you verified instantly!
If you don’t have your music streaming everywhere yet, I’ll walk you through how upload your music to Spotify in my recent post linked below.
Now that you have a presence on Spotify, it’s time to put in some work and get on these Spotify playlists.
Below are various ways of getting this done.
How to Get on Spotify Playlists
Spotify Curators
Branded Curators
Branded Spotify curators create playlists around their brand identity.
They choose songs which best represent their brand and what their audience would be interested in listening too.
Brands like H&M, Nike, Coca-Cola and Reebok all have Spotify playlists for their store and/or brand,
and all of these brands need a curator.
You can do some research to find contact information of these curators to see if they’d like to add your music.
I’ll show you a great tool at the end of this article, to help you find curators and contact information.
Individual Curators
Individual curators would be anyone like you or me, or anyone who enjoys creating playlists for their own listening pleasure. You may have a playlist for the gym, parties, doing homework or anything else.
With a quick search on Twitter, Instagram or even Google, you can find a 1000’s of people who have created their own playlist and want others to take a listen.
Reach out to these people if their playlist is the right fit for your music and pitch them on why your new song should be on their playlist.
These playlists may not generate a huge amount of streams, but they are the easiest to get you started and some of them may even start gaining more attention and blow up if the curator is actively promoting the playlist.
Adding your music to individual Spotify also helps with triggering the Spotify algorithm to work in your favor.
The more plays, shares & adds to playlists your song gets - the more these stats tell Spotify’s algorithm to push your music to additional playlists and recommend it to an even wider audience
Create and add songs to your own playlists, ask your friends to add your song to their playlist and to take it even further, trade with other artists who have playlists.
You can agree to add another artists song to your playlist if they add your song to theirs. This way it’s beneficial for both of you.
Music Bloggers
Many music blogs these days are starting to create their own Spotify playlists so that their following can listen to all of the blogs music selection in one spot.
Another way to get on Spotify playlists is simply to reach out to music blogs who post similar content to yours, and see if they would give your music a feature or premier.
Many music blogs have a submission area to upload your music.
I would suggest packaging up your best and most recent track (or unreleased), introduce yourself and submit your music.
If they do feature your song on the blog, they will most likely also add it to their Spotify playlist if they have one.
But you can also ask them straight up to add your track to a playlist if they like your music.
Submit to Official Spotify Playlists
Spotify allows artists to submit their music to official Spotify playlists directly from their Spotify for Artists profile.
The key to submitting to these playlists is making sure you get your music on Spotify at least 2 weeks before the release date of your song.
This is to ensure official Spotify curators have a chance to listen to your music and decide whether it should be the right fit for a particular playlist.
In this video, I show you exactly how to submit to Spotify playlists:
After you have your music on Spotify,
Sign up for Spotify for Artists. It has an app as well and is where you customize your Spotify Artist profile, displays all of your music, shows useful insights & more.
In the Dashboard head to Music > Upcoming.
This will display your unreleased music, you can then choose one song at a time to submit to Spotify for playlist consideration.
During this process you’ll identify the genre of the song, what types of playlist you want to submit to and other information to help identify the song.
Chart on Relevant Sites
Charting on mainstream music sites definitely catches the attention of music curators, blogs, and brands that are looking for fresh new music to show off.
Another way to get on Spotify playlists is to try to build a following or chart on sites that people look to when creating popular playlists on Spotify.
These are two you’ve probably heard of before, but they are some of the most influential.
YouTube Channels
Similar to music blogs, YouTube channels that curate trending music usually have playlists on Spotify as well.
Look up some popular channels on YouTube that feature songs in your genre, and see if they have a Spotify playlist.
Reach out to these youtube channels and submit your music. If you get featured on their channel ask if they can also add you to their Spotify playlist as well.
Even if they don’t have one, at least your music will be heard by the right audience. Make sure a link to your song on Spotify is in the description of the YouTube video so people can find it on Spotify.
Do Your OWN Research
Getting your music onto Spotify playlists becomes much easier once you have a plan of action and at least know a bunch of playlists in your genre that you’d like to be a part of.
You’ll save yourself and curators a lot of time if your music carries the same vibe and is produced at the same level as other songs featured in the playlist.
You know I can’t let you go without plugging you in to something to help you through the process…
I told you I had a super useful tool I recommend for analyzing Spotify statistics, artists, playlists, curator contact information and much more.
It’s called, Chartmetrics.
Chartmetrics
Chartmetrics tracks your Spotify growth and basically gives you an even deeper dive into music analytics than Spotify for Artists.
It also identifies music influencers, tastemakers and displays other useful trends.
But how does it help you get on Spotify playlists?
You can use Chartmetrics to identify which playlists any particular song is currently added to.
With this, you can look up a similar artist to yourself, see which playlists have taken an interest in them and you can see the details of the user who created the playlist.
If your music really is a similar vibe, reach out to the user and share your music with them.
Chartmetrics will sometimes have contact info for the user,
But if not, you can try doing a Google search to see if they have any contact info available elsewhere.
Conclusion
As you see, there are many ways to get on Spotify playlists. Use a combination of all of these to give yourself the best chance of being featured on playlists.
At the end of the day it’s about spreading your music.
Make valuable connections with these curators, share their playlist & support each other.
I hope that this has helped even a little bit with getting your music onto Spotify playlists.
Good luck with the music promotion and let me know how these tips have helped!
Which method of getting your music on Spotify playlists will you use?