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The three best ways to hit Spotify’s algorithm
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The fastest way to grow on Spotify is through its three most popular algorithmic playlists—Radio, Release Radar, and Discover Weekly. Technically speaking, Spotify has more than three algorithmic playlist options; however, in my experience, success on the others generally comes downstream of mastering these first three. A quick look at my lifetime playlist data as an artist on Spotify serves as a great example:
Because Spotify’s algorithmic playlists are so powerful, let’s take a look at what makes these three tick and have a peek at what it takes to maximize our chances for success on each one. RadioSpotify’s Radio playlist is the easiest nut for most artists to crack on this list. With only a few streams and a handful of listeners, it’s theoretically possible you might start to see some streams coming your way from Radio rather quickly. Of course, the more listeners you get, and the more streams you get, the more Radio attention you’re likely to get as well. Getting onto Spotify’s Radio playlist has everything to do with surrounding yourself with similar artists. Because Radio is essentially an infinite autoplay, it relies heavily on mixing your music with other artists and songs that fit alongside it. That’s how it keeps listeners happy. Of course, that hinges on Spotify having the correct understanding of your music and listener base. This is why it’s so critical to send the right traffic to your music via ads and organic content rather than spraying and praying for user-generated playlist adds that might place your music alongside the wrong artists and genres. If you can get the right people to your music—fans of similar artists and the right genre—you can unlock Radio fairly quickly and increase your artist discovery on Spotify. Tip for success: my favorite way to quickly match an artist with the right genre and songs on Spotify is to send traffic to the artist’s playlist. Ideally, this is a playlist created by the artist that lives on their profile and includes their music as well as songs from other artists whose fans they want to reach. Release RadarI think of Release Radar as a springboard to Discover Weekly and potentially even editorial playlists on Spotify. If done correctly, this one playlist can catapult your latest release to a much wider audience on Spotify than you otherwise might have gotten without it. By default, if you pitch your music to Spotify’s editorial team (read: algorithm) at least seven days ahead of your release date, your song will end up on the Release Radar playlists of your followers. Now whether or not they listen to Release Radar is another story (note: don’t expect a ton of action here—if you’re seeing 5% or more of your followers listening to your new song on Release Radar, you’re winning). Having said that, if you can get enough action to your song within the first week of release (around 2,400 streams), you can potentially end up with a Release Radar “push” wherein your song is added to the Release Radar playlists of users who don’t follow you. Which, of course, leads to more discovery. One of the additional upsides here is that if you’re discovered by new Release Radar listeners (and they choose to follow you), then you’ll end up with a higher percentage of followers who are more likely to consume your music via Release Radar on day one because they have a proven history of consuming music via that playlist in the first place. And that creates a positive feedback loop that will see your Release Radar success increase even more over time. Tip for success: my favorite way to maximize chances at a Release Radar push is to spend at least $50 per day for the first seven days of a release, pushing traffic directly to the song link on Spotify. This causes the track to autoplay and, given enough traffic, will push a ton of streams within a relatively short time, triggering the algorithm and throwing the song to a wider audience the following Friday, one week after the release date. Discover WeeklyI believe Discover Weekly is the most powerful playlist on Spotify. Hands down. This playlist is an absolute engine for artist growth and listener discovery, hence the name. But, of course, it’s not easy to get onto. As an example, my two most successful songs to date, Hero, and Lions, have generated a combined 1.2 million streams for my catalog. And of those 1.2 million streams, Discover Weekly has been responsible for over 350,000—roughly 28%. In short, Discover Weekly is a beast. It takes a bit more work to get a song on there than it does Release Radar (roughly 9,000 streams within 28 days), but if you can pull it off, your song will potentially ride a wave of new streams and listeners forever if you can keep the popularity score up. If you do get on Discover Weekly, you’ll most likely see a big spike on Monday, nothing the following week, and another spike the week after that. A noticeable push every other week is pretty common. That means if you can get two or more songs hitting Discover Weekly on opposite weeks, you’ll have a gasoline-fueled fire of music discovery (nailed it) on your hands. Tip for success: to maximize the chance of hitting Discover Weekly, I like to focus on the top songs in an artist’s catalog—the first 1-5 songs on an artist’s profile, depending on the success of each. By focusing on an artist’s proven winners (and sending traffic to the artist’s profile link), we can simultaneously build in new followers for future releases, generate streams for multiple winning songs, and lift the popularity scores of those tracks to reach Discover Weekly over time.
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The One Thing
One high-leverage idea to scale your audience (and your business). Delivered every Tuesday.
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