8 Effective Ways to Get More Playlist Followers on Spotify

man listening to spotify

man listening to spotify

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By Laura Buckler

Spotify promises to make music “available to anyone.” This enormous platform is already streaming millions of songs made by talented artists, and as with any growing platform, the competition is starting to get fierce. As a Spotify tastemaker, you want your playlists to be played as much as possible.

After all, Spotify is approaching the status of a social network. With the right promotional strategies and implementation, any producer has the ability to grow their following, and playlisting is one such strategy.

So let’s talk about how easy it is to develop your playlist followers and grow your popularity in a short time.

1. Understand Your Listeners’ Wants and Needs

Even if your main forte is song creation, Spotify playlists give you the opportunity to think entrepreneurially about your target audience. You’re entering a zone in which the better you promote your art, the more success you’ll see. Therefore, you must put yourself in your fans’ shoes and think about their main desires and interests. First, define your target audience. Who are they? If you think they’ll like your music, what else will they like? What other genres do you like, even though you don’t make that type of music?

Only after thinking through the interest patterns of your fans can you start to actually reach them.

2. Plan Your Marketing Efforts

Brian Tracy once stated that “every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution.” Take a piece of paper and jot down all of the possible ways (that you know of) to widen your Spotify-playlist audience. Keep them all in one place as a reference, and break each strategy down into smaller chunks of tasks. Stick to one thing until you see/don’t see results, then adjust and optimize.

3. Take Advantage of Social Platforms

If you want a famous Spotify playlist, you need to leverage social networks. Everyone’s spending time on social media, so that’s where you should be, too. Create a professional page with a professional brand name and design. Post relevant content and give value to your target audience. Grow your page’s followers, and begin promoting your Spotify playlists.

4. Discover and Enroll in Playlisting Websites

There are certain websites and networks of curators like Playlists.net and Sound Plate that are purposely designed to help you promote your playlists. For example, Playlists.net collaborates with the “Playlist a Day” app, which you can find in both Android and iOS app stores. Basically, this app gives users a random Spotify playlist based on a theme they’ve chosen. Add your playlists, and find new, random fans each day!

spotify

5. Post Your Playlist on Reddit

In case you didn’t know, there’s a special subreddit called “Spotify Playlists” which regularly hosts competitions in which the best playlists are prized. All you have to do is link to your playlist in the “Spotify Playlists” subreddit. Then, organic traffic will start flowing immediately because Reddit is a high-ranking authority in search engines, and the website’s user engagement can make any post go viral within hours. Scale by adding more playlists!

6. Use the “Playlist Exchange” Feature

Spotify has a special forum in which you can post your playlists followed by a brief description of your genre, your mission, and your target audience. Make certain that you don’t forget to tag related genres and keywords, as this helps expand the reach of your forum post.

7. Get in Touch with Other Playlist-Makers

One of the best ways to grow your playlist’s popularity is to build a network with the music creators in your extended community. Find out who your fans also listen to, take note of which bands and artists you play shows with, or other bands and artists that share your label, and get in touch. This will open up avenues to cross-promote each others’ work and offer your fans something they might also like since it’s coming from a related artist community.

In a similar vein, using influencers who even aren’t musicians themselves can help extend your reach. Find out who your fanbase follows, and reach out to those people with a polite ask to share your playlist on their social channels, perhaps in exchange for writing a track for them for free or sending them band merchandise. Again, it’s all about cross-promotion and growing your audience through shared extensions.

8. Stay Consistent, and Keep Creating Content

Finally, it’s important to note that becoming a successful Spotify tastemaker takes more than just luck or talent. In order to win at this game, you must stay consistent, develop your brand, and use mood to your advantage. Your actions should follow a strategic roadmap, but the specifics of which are up to you! Keep creating content, keep satisfying your audience, and try to keep on a schedule.

Spotify is a platform that offers you a ton of potential. If you manage to put together some minor successes, make sure you stay active and continue to feed people what they’ve proven they want. Test, test, test. Then optimize. As we’ve stated earlier, the more you grow your community as a playlist tastemaker, the more you can leverage it alongside your music-making as well. Good luck!

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Laura Buckler is a freelance writer for Essays Scholaradvisor and a passionate music fan. She worked as a social media marketer in the past and now Laura has vast experience in marketing and PR. 

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