Self publishing your music comes with a lot of benefits. You don’t have to share your copyrights with anyone, you aren’t bound to any publishing deals and you get ultimate control over where your work is used and how. Keep in mind, self publishing isn’t for everyone. You need to be able to commit significant time and effort to doing everything a publisher would usually do and more. But if this is something that you’re ready to take on, here’s how to do it right.
How To Self Publish Your Music
Let’s Talk Basics…
Self publishing your songs means you take on the role of both the artist and the publisher. Being a self-published writer ultimately means that you hold all the rights to your Intellectual Property (IP), which means you would be in full control of how your compositions are used and would receive all royalties associated with your share of your compositions.
This is awesome, but these perks come with a little extra work. If you’re still interested, here’s what you’ll need to do to self publish your songs…
Step 1: Make Sure Your Music Hasn’t Been Published Yet
If you’ve worked with a distributor before, you may have opted in for publishing services without even realizing it. For example, our publishing administration services are very popular with our own clients. Before you do anything, definitely make sure this doesn’t apply to you.
Step 2: Register with a PRO
In order for you to receive the royalties you’re rightfully owed, your songs need to be properly registered with a Performing Rights Organization like ASCAP, SESAC or BMI. PRO’s rely on the information you provide to determine who they need to pay and how much.
Start setting up your company by going to either www.ascap.com or www.bmi.com to obtain/fill out an application.
Step 3: Sign Up with the MLC
The Mechanical Licensing Collective maintains the world’s most thorough database of music composition copyrights and their owners. They collect mechanical royalties from digital music streaming services and transmit those royalties to copyright holders based on the ownership claims.
Signing up with them ensures that you get all the royalties that are rightfully owed to you. You’ll need to “Connect to Collect” and become a Member of the MLC in order to collect the digital audio mechanical royalties owed to you. // Click here to get started with that process and learn more about it.
Step 4: Time to Promote
Once you’ve completed those steps, you can finally start getting your publisher’s share on top of the writer’s share. Now is the time where the duties of a publisher fall onto you.
Typically, your publisher would be the one networking, seeking out sync deals for TV and film, registering copyrights, negotiating licenses, and more. When you self publish, it’s all on you.
In Conclusion…
Self-publishing typically just entails registering with a PRO to be able to manage and publish your own compositions, but it doesn’t have to end there. If you want to go even further, become a publisher and start your own publishing company! In the meantime, we hope this helped.
Always being re-defined and re-invented, this genre as a whole is designed to not have the mass-appeal that pop songs on the charts have. Avant-pop can be described as: experimental, purposefully unusual, meant to challenge the listener. It re-defines expectations while still being accessible and living in the pop category. Brooklyn Rail described avant-pop as “re-sequenc[ing] the Legos of song structure, so that (a) none of the charm of the tune is lost, but (b) this very accessibility leads one to bump into weirder elements welded into the design.” This creates a world for artists to experiment outside of the pop blueprint: so long as it’s innovating in one way or another, it can be counted in this category. The genre as a whole has threads that link back to the ‘60s with notable innovators being The Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, among others. However as time evolved, women began to find their footing in this genre and take the lead.
Though there are many credited with the inception and evolution of avant-pop, there are a few big figures whose contributions are worth noting and stories are worth hearing.
Björk
Born in Iceland in 1965, Björk’s expansive career includes nine solo albums as well as three albums with her previous project The Sugarcubes. Still active in the music scene, her eclectic style takes inspiration from electronic, alternative dance, psychedelic hip-hop, jazz, alternative rock, and classical music among other genres. Her distinctive soprano voice is elastic and she explored the unusual in her intonations and vocal performances. She’s self-labeled as a pop artist, however her genre-bending and lengthy career solidifies her status as avant-garde royalty. She explores the topics of nature, technology as well as her changing sense of self. She’s also known for her collaborations over the years, as someone who consistently works with others on music, direction, photography and fashion. Although this practice has helped her creative endeavors, she also believes this is part of the reason why she is under-credited in these collaborations. In a 2016 interview with the London Evening Standard, she said: “If a guy had done all the [arrangements and production] on his album, he would have credit for his work. It’s always like […] I just turn up and sing and go home.”
In Stephen Graham’s book (Un)Popular Avant-Gardes: Underground Popular Music and the Avant-Gardes he asserts: “Preoccupation with form-as-content is prevalent in underground music, alongside a concerted dedication to innovation.” Björk falls right in line with this view and consumers have taken notice. In 2015, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition of her work including her music, costumes, films, instruments and objects that were sources of inspiration. Though she began her career decades ago, Björk is unafraid of evolving and continuing to push and inspire in the new generation of avant-garde pop. Her most recent work is a collaborative album with Venezuelan producer and DJ Arca, who is another woman pushing this genre forward.
Kate Bush
Another pioneer of the avant-pop genre is English singer and songwriter Kate Bush. From the beginning of her career in 1975, Bush was inspired by historical/literary references, horror films, as well as comedy. She usually wrote from the point of view of a character or person other than herself. In her songs she tackled “taboo” subjects of teen pregnancy, suicide, incest, queer couples and love — all of which were considered especially unusual and daring during this era. She’s also credited as the first artist to have a wireless headset with a microphone. As a trained dancer, she wanted to be able to move along with her music because physical form was always apart of the experience of her artistry. Another first and precedent Bush set was releasing a film accompaniment with her album Wuthering Heights, a note that current artists such as Beyoncé and Frank Ocean have taken in their projects. Other artists that have claimed inspiration from her career include: Regina Spektor, Ellie Goulding, Charli XCX, Tegan and Sara, Kate Nash, Grimes, Solange Knowles, Coldplay, Adele, Stevie Nicks, Tori Amos, Lily Allen, and Big Boi of Outkast among others.
In a 2016 interview with The Fader, Bush was asked “There’s a statistic that only 5% of music producers are women, to this day. When you started working in production, were you aware that it was a role dominated by men?” To which she responded:
“I was aware that it was very male-dominated. But what mattered to me was that I was able to make the whole experience a much more personal expression and to be able to experiment on my own terms. It allowed me to use the production to express the actual songwriting in a way that I wanted.”
The way that Bush was able to present something with such hope and vitality as well as sorrow and melancholy created a surreal understanding of her work.
FKA Twigs
English dancer, singer, and actress FKA Twigs is another must stop on the tour of avant-garde women in pop. Though she’s a newer voice in this world, her artistry has already made huge waves. Known for her haunting vocals and genre-less style, her music can be described as raw, ethereal, and hymn-like. She was quoted in a 2014 article from French magazine Le Monde saying:
“I do not comply with any musical genre. I like to experiment with sounds, to provoke emotions by placing my voice on certain atmospheres.”
She, like Bush, is also known for her visual accompaniment to her music. As the director of most of her music videos, she experiments with visuals that match her daring use of sound. A true athlete: expert at wushu sword-play as well as pole dancing, her videos often feature her physical power as well as emotional. Her most recent album, “Magdalene,” was inspired by the historical figure and how she feels a sameness in her own story. The idea of being an incredible woman living in the shadow of a high-profile man is what inspired her to learn more about Mary Magdalene’s story. In an interview with radio KEXP she explained: “Connecting with Mary Magdalene over the past couple of years, spiritually, I started to explore the concept of the virgin-whore, which is the idea that, as a woman, you can be pure, and you can be innocent, and you can be like a fresh flower — but at the same time, you can be dangerous, and seductive, and all-knowing and healing. It’s been incredibly exciting for me to know that that’s okay and it exists and I am as much sacred as I am sensual.”
Twigs has also recently opened up about an abusive past relationship as she pursues litigation against her assailant. In a recent interview with Elle Magazine she stated “It’s hard to do this publicly…but I want people to know my story. If I can’t help people through my experience, it makes my experience 10 times worse. There has to be a point to this — a reason why this happened to me. It’s not just about my [personal] recovery.” A woman who refuses to quit on her craft, her wellness, and her purpose as an artist and human shows no signs of slowing down. She’s announced she’s been working on a new album after her single “Don’t Judge Me” was released in January of this year. She also has a project in the works with Getty Images to curate and make accessible a breadth of Black historical content to empower creators and storytellers with the images necessary to explain the narrative of their work.
SOPHIE
If FKA Twigs represents the modern iteration of vocal avant-garde pop, then SOPHIE’s work covers the rest. A self-taught producer, singer, songwriter and musician, SOPHIE was best known for her completely unique production treatments. A notoriously media-shy creator, she began her career hiding her identity. It wasn’t until 2017 that SOPHIE started to share more about herself, including her identity as a trans woman. Her hyper, industrial, metallic and adrenaline infused pop changed the landscape for the genre as she texturized sound. In a 2013 interview with Pitchfork, she described her approach to making music:
“It’s about getting to the molecular level of a particular sound — realizing what that sound actually is made of, and why it behaves a certain way when processed or cooked. Then you use those molecules to build new forms, mixing and reappropriating those raw materials, and of course, it should be bloody delicious.”
Both a solo artist and a frequent collaborator, she’s worked with Madonna, Vince Staples, Charli XCX, Kim Petras among others on her label, PC Music. She’s also credited with pioneering “hyperpop,” an emerging genre that employs her style of fast-paced and out-of-the-box rewiring of pop music. SOPHIE sadly passed away earlier this year after an accidental fall. Though her life was cut way too short, it’s nearly impossible that her legacy will not live on in her collaborators and those who are now exploring in the genre she helped to establish.
All of these women have uniquely different experiences, yet all can be defined under the broad tag of avant-pop. The meaning of this word lends itself to this conclusion naturally: basic structures of pop music with subverted expectations. Though each of their sounds vary, all of them challenge the listener to a new perspective. It’s what has made these women’s stories, contributions, and power inspirations to other artists and genres. The duality of being at the fringes as well as the center of pop is the mystique and importance of these women and their careers. All of them unafraid to bring something new to the table in a room full of men. Their legacies have and will continue to push the envelope of the meaning of pop music and how it will evolve in the future.
EDM is simultaneously one of the most popular genres of our time and one of the most difficult genres to gain recognition on playlists.
It has partially become synonymous with the wider genre of pop-but why do green and mid-level EDM artists have trouble getting their music placed on these lists?
The pandemic hasn’t had a significant impact on the streaming aspect of EDM music positively or negatively. But what can rising EDM artists be doing during this unique, prolonged moment?
Song Structure
It all starts with a song.
You want to make sure your track is DJ-friendly and therefore, dance-floor-friendly. Enticing your listeners early on is crucial, and while it’s smart to stick to the formula of intro, breakdown, build, and drop, your song might stand out if you mix these sections up in a unique way. You want the element of surprise coupled with the element of accessibility.
According to a recent study, 35.05% of listeners skip songs in the first 30 seconds, meaning you don’t get that (sick!) $0.004 payout, and it hurts you algorithmically. And while the increasingly truncated attention span of listeners is killing indie music, this is not necessarily bad news for EDM artists who tend to not have lengthy intros and whose music is written intentionally for immediate approval and adoption-delayed gratification be damned.
Whether you choose to write a unique, non-formulaic song or you choose to play it a bit safer, it’s important that the energy ebbs and flows in a sonically exciting manner, and that it is attention-grabby within the first 20 to 30 seconds to avoid the dreaded skip. Avoiding anything that can harm you algorithmically is important to maintaining and gaining listeners and for getting you gassed up for bigger playlists and eventually editorial.
Speaking of….
Don’t Count on Editorial
If you examine the percentage of EDM on the most recent New Music Friday lists, it’s not a huge piece of the pie.
In fact, it’s the sliveriest of slivers, averaging at about 0.037%.
According to Chartmetric, there are currently a total of 218,707 playlists that are geared towards EDM/Dance on the platform. 214,117 of those are user-generated.
That being said, it’s absolutely prudent to continue to submit to editorial via the artist portal and when you do, be strategic with your efforts. Again, based off the Chartmetric analysis, the top two most followed Spotify workout playlists, “Motivation Mix” and “Workout,” are made up of EDM and its sub-genres by the vast majority. Consider submitting to those over the all-too-tempting New Music Friday.
If you’re choosing between a few songs, choose the one that grabs listeners’ attention the earliest. The quantity of submissions is overwhelming and you can’t count on Spotify curators to give songs more than a verse-chorus listen, if that. But make sure your energy spent on editorial is commensurate with the likelihood of your music actually getting placed on one of those elusive lists.
Hit Up Timely User-Generated and Branded Playlists
So now that you know there are over 200K user-generated EDM playlists, making up about 98% of the EDM playlists on the platform, what are you going to do about it?
Create a database for yourself of independent playlists and curators-archive their playlist name and link, what genres or moods you notice, and the contact info of the curator. You can first keep your research general-search for and reach out to third-party or user-generated playlists that sonically fit the mood, feel, and genre of your music.
Then pivot to more of a targeted approach by researching brands. EDM is obviously a very popular genre in the fitness world. Expand your database by creating a list of popular fitness brands (ex: SoulCycle, CycleBar, Exhale) and reaching out to their official playlists. If it’s difficult to get through, aim for more local or personal brands.
Moving to even more of a narrowly targeted focus, think about what playlists would be relevant for the current cultural, social, or political moment. For example, during COVID-19, at-home “quarantine workouts” have become increasingly popular. Search these types of playlists and pitch your music to them. Capitalize on the moment.
Let a Promotions Company Do the Work
If you’re thinking, “I’m too focused on writing, performing, managing, and booking myself to worry about playlists,” there are plenty of companies that would love to do the heavy lifting for you. Be sure to choose an artist-focused, ethical company that has real relationships with real curators.
This unique moment could actually be beneficial for EDM artists.
Be sure to write and produce songs that are unique yet accessible, and grab the listener’s attention early on so you can be algorithmically successful.
Just because EDM isn’t always a priority for Spotify editorial lists, there are plenty of thematically timely, impactful, branded, and user-generated playlists that would love to have you.
No matter where you fall on the positive/negative, love/hate scale, at the end of the day, streaming isn’t going anywhere. Even though artists, understandably so, get frustrated with digital service providers because of how little they pay out, streaming saved the music industry and therefore must be prioritized.
Here are some strategy suggestions for releasing in 2020:
Optimize your Spotify profile and embed a follow button on your website
Spotify is such an important platform and the way you present yourself is crucial. Make sure you have a cover photo, a few stock images for your About section, a bio, and your socials connected, and embed a follow button on your website. Taking it a step further, make sure your photos and the tone of your bio are cohesive with your website and other media platforms, and make sure they express your personality and the mood of your music. This may seem obvious, but if your music leans more melancholic, maybe consider a more serious photo with cooler tones, and make sure the verbiage of your bio encapsulates the vibe of your music lyrically and sonically. Brand integrity is key. All of these small components matter.
Become your own playlist curator
Create an artist playlist and start building a following. It can be a themed playlist. It can be a list of your influences. Just remember to always include your music on the playlist. You can update it weekly, monthly, or however often you want, and slowly start to gain a following. Let artists submit their music to it and tag them when you add them. This is a great, tangible way to become your own playlist curator, connect with other artists, and organically grow your streams and listeners yourself.
Understand social media insights when posting a release and implement the “seven times factor”
Social media insights are a great tool for knowing the ideal times to post a new release and for cross-referencing what kinds of posts your audience likes to engage with the most. On your Facebook Page (not your personal profile) and your Instagram (that must be a business account) you can utilize these insights.
The Marketing Rule of 7 has been a maxim since the 1930s. It basically insinuates that a buyer needs to hear a product advertised at least seven times to even consider purchasing said item. Implement this when releasing music! Songs are creative expressions yes, but they are also a product. Treat your release as such and share it on your platforms at least seven times. Map out a schedule beforehand of seven or more different creative, fun ways to share your product with your community.
Use targeted ads on social media
You can target specific demographics on social media and tailor each ad to who you’d like to reach. The analytics that are provided from the social media ad managers can be extremely intuitive, but it’s smart to manually target as well. If your song is youthful, it might be a good idea to have a low, tighter age range for your ad, for example. You also don’t only have to focus on getting your music in front of individual consumers based on genres or similar artists. You can also focus your campaign to be geared towards companies (like labels, distribution, development) and job titles (managers, A&R, etc). This way you are also targeting those folks that are looking to discover people like yourself.
Incentivize fans to join your mailing list
By using Patreon, or just a landing page on your email service, you can reach out on all of your social media platforms to announce that fans can hear a new release or see a new music video a few days to a week early to incentivize them to sign up for your mailing list. Social media posts get buried, fake accounts follow you and hurt your engagement, and while yes, people can miss an email, mailing lists are about the most intentional and direct way of reaching out to fans.
Aim for third-party playlists
Artists can sometimes be too hyper focused on getting a Spotify editorial placement. It looks really good on socials, it spikes your listeners, etc. However, not only are the odds slim of securing those types of playlists, but what happens when your listeners spike and then fall dramatically once you’re taken off? Using third party lists can assist with getting around the gatekeepers and cutting through the noise on your own.
While there are certainly scam-like companies out there ( here’s our advice on how to detect those red flags), third-party playlist companies can be a great tool for artists. They can help artists and bands gain new listeners, forge relationships with independent curators on the platform, and trigger Spotify algorithms.
Streaming Promotions CEO Michael Sloane had a great response to the Forbes article that warned against them, saying, “We know there’s nothing more than submission that can get you on Spotify Editorial. It’s the very reason we focus on user-generated content (UGC). If you don’t get on editorial (40,000 songs are released on Spotify everyday, so your chances are unfortunately slim), they’re basically saying you’re screwed and back to the ‘figure 8’ — releasing your music, just like your social content, to the same people over and over again…with no one discovering you.
“The framing of that (Forbes) article is 100% about editorial lists. And we agree,” Sloane continues. “Anyone telling you they can get you on there is a scam. It’s all label relations and the artist portal. What he isn’t taking into account is that traction can happen outside of the Spotify Editorial ecosystem. Releasing music and gaining organic/non-editorial audience is paramount in growing fans and an audience which will then increase metrics, hopefully triggering larger audiences to hear the music through algorithms, and this step-by-step process hopefully gets you that editorial placement. UGC or independent playlist promotion breaks that figure 8 cycle.”
It’s no secret that touring is a huge sustainer of the music industry. And not only is it a key sustainer, it’s a relatively immune one to music’s constant modernization.
While we’ve had to endlessly pivot from physical sales, to digital downloads to streaming, live music has remained a relatively unchanging constant.
Well, until now.
“Because of our unprecedented, tenuous position, for the first time in history, there is legitimate fear for our collective existence.”
This is a quote from the NIVA’s letter to Congress back in April imploring them to help save our constant sustainer, live music. NIVA is short for the National Independent Venue Association and is a conglomerate of over 800 of the most impactful and influential indie venues in 48 states across America.
You can read their letter here. It thoughtfully lays out arguments for the cultural and economic importance of live music and lists a breakdown of how Congress can help.
Since then, Senators Amy Klobuchar and John Cornyn (from Minnesota and Texas respectively) have introduced the Save Our Stages bill, endorsed by the NIVA.
Virtual shows, though stepping up their game production/organizational wise, are not sustainable. And not only are they not very lucrative for the artists putting them on, they do nothing to bolster their local economies or uphold the culture of their cities.
In NIVA’s letter they address some compelling evidence of the financial and social impacts of live music.
Some of their economic arguments include:
“Our entertainment hubs are important economic multipliers for our local economies and tax bases as employers and tourism destinations, and revenue generators for neighboring businesses such as restaurants, hotels, and retail. One Chicago impact report estimated that forevery $1 spent on a ticket, a total of $12 in economic activity was generated.”
&
“While we [independent music venues] are small businesses, the estimated direct annual economic impact we bring to our local communities is nearly $10 billion.”
They are addressing a crucial point — live shows don’t just generate revenue for the venue, artist, staff and vendors, though important in and of itself, they also have countless ancillary impacts. There’s the obvious ones like local restaurants, hotels/air b&b’s, airfare (if applicable), etc. but then also think about the outfit and makeup you might purchase for that evening, or the uber you ride both ways, and more. Concerts are a holistic money generator for the cities in which they occur.
NIVA’s main cultural argument is:
“We are the steadfast incubators and launch pads for the most popular talent in the world…The world could be without the next Lady Gaga, Kenny Chesney, Chance the Rapper, or Bruce Springsteed if we cease to exist.”
I have a friend in booking who intentionally doesn’t want to “graduate” to booking arenas and stadiums because she knows the contagious, sweaty energy of a smaller venue where an artist or group is just on the cusp of commercial success. It’s like living in “the good ole days” of music indefinitely. These venues that make up the NIVA give their communities this vibrancy.
We could potentially be robbing the world of this life-blood.
With Live Music, Culture & The Economy Go Hand In Hand.
These components are directly related and proportional in live music.
The venues represented by the NIVA have broken so many artists that go on to have huge cultural and economic impacts individually. Think about the private jets, the mansions and the numerous high-end cars major artists purchase; and then think about the charities they bolster, the communities they lend a helping hand to (remember when Taylor Swift gave $1 million to Nashville after a tornado ripped through it in February?) and the influence they can have in social causes.
All of these insanely important aspects of the American landscape would not be possible without the live shows that first incubated their success.
If you are concerned about the economy, live music should be on your list of the country’s current, pressing ailments.
Take action by reaching out to your local legislators:
Now that we live in a world without live music, Spotify pages have become essential to the dissemination of an artist’s work.
Cultivating a following has much more to do with numbers and algorithms than tours and meet and greets. The pressure for artists to make a strong presence on any social media (including Spotify) has only increased. When it comes down to it, Spotify can be likened to any marketplace — with the sellers needing credibility and popularity in order to make a profit. This is what has created the opening for fraudulent third parties to “help” an artist beef up their digital resume.
On the first day of 2021, more than 5,000 recording artists were dismayed to see that their work was removed from the Spotify platform. After major confusion and conversation between creators online, the common thread between these artists affected was that most were indie artists using independent distributors and promoters. Though no official statement was made by the company, they did offer a link to their Spotify for Artists resource page which has plenty to say on the topic of “artificial streams.”
To save you the time of combing through the resources, their stance is summarized below. Spotify defines “artificial streams” as:
“a stream that doesn’t reflect genuine user listening intent, including any instance of attempting to manipulate Spotify by using automated processes (bots or scripts).”
They go on to explain that using any third-party services that guarantees streams in return for payment is in violation of their terms and conditions. They also detail which actions they may take if they detect that you have been gaining fraudulent streams. These include: withholding royalties, correcting numbers, as well as removing any “manipulated content.” It seems that they’ve received enough feedback from indie artists because they also include this disclaimer: “If this happened to you but you believe your streams were earned authentically, you should share information with your distributor or label about the methods used to genuinely promote the content in question. They’ll work with our team to review, and hopefully get the problem solved quickly.”
Not only is contracting with these third-parties that provide fraudulent numbers against the terms of use, but it also has a naturally negative impact.
When the amount of money you can throw at a curator increases, they will place you on any high impacting playlist they own, regardless of whether or not it fits. Quality of music and congruence with the theme becomes much less of a factor compared to what you have in your wallet. This leads to what’s referred to as playlist erosion. Basically, the argument is that by buying and selling placements on a playlist, the effectiveness of being on a playlist declines. These playlists will lose their following because what originally drew the listener there (good music that fits the mood) is no longer present. On top of the playlist losing credibility, as soon as the artist stops paying for these placements, they are taken off and numbers begin to decline again. It simply isn’t sustainable for any artist to create any natural or incremental growth this way.
All of this is not to say that the business of creative third-party marketing on the Spotify platform is unethical or ineffective.
But great care should be taken when deciding on where to spend that promotions budget. An artist can and should be aware of their performance on Spotify and be actively looking for ways to expand it. However, doing this manually takes countless hours of research and outreach. This entails finding your own audience: where are your potential fans, and which playlists are they listening to? After you’ve found that group of like-minded listeners, you need to track down the owner and simply self-promote. But in order for any of this to make a difference in the organic growth of your project, this process needs to be repeated many, many times. Some playlist owners do not give out contact information, some aren’t looking for new music, and others will simply decline based on their own taste. It’s a trial and error process that can only be streamlined by doing adequate research on your project’s own demographics. This is why so many artists look to outsource this important aspect of promotion to other parties.
There are many claims that Spotify took down projects that did not violate terms of use, and this is all the more reason for artists to closely monitor exactly how and why their Spotify stats are moving.
If you don’t have complete transparency with who you’re contracting with, they could be using these back-door methods without your knowledge. At Streaming Promotions, we take great care to find and collect real, independent curators. No money on the table, just one fan to another saying “hey, I think you might like this.” By building this network, we are able to represent artists and get as many ears as possible on a new project. In addition to research and outreach, we also have a team of curators who provide feedback as to why they would or would not add the music to their lists. This gives artists and their teams a pulse on their project and how they should adjust in order to fit in this changing marketplace. The team also includes a group of analysts who report all numbers and growth in a clean and easy to understand way. The true value of any third-party business that works to increase your audience is the ability to provide a holistic service with descriptive data.
We are a boutique, third-party playlisting service, we are not payola, we are not botted streams.
We are transparent with expectations because we want our clients to know exactly what is happening with their campaigns. Creating growth the right way on Spotify takes time and every project will perform differently. There is no average expectation of how a playlisting campaign will go, and any company who promises you an exact science that works every time is not abiding by the terms and conditions of the platform. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Spotify is one of the main authorities on who hears what in the music industry in this day and age. It would be imprudent to ignore the importance of your project’s performance on streaming platforms. However, as it is the new marketplace, it is not surprising that the Spotify team is taking steps to regulate it. Though at the moment there is a lot of confusion on how Spotify came up with this list of songs to nix from the platform, it’s likely we can expect to see even more sweeps of this nature in Spotify’s attempt at creating a more equitable economy. This means that in order for artists to make a real difference with their promotion efforts, whichever method is chosen must be ethical in order to be effective.
Becca Wig is the Marketing and Social Media Coordinator at Nashville-based Streaming Promotions, a boutique digital strategy and music marketing agency specializing in the strategic placement of music in streaming services, specifically Spotify. You can submit on the website and read more content from Streaming Promotions on Medium.
