6 Pro Tips for a Raving Spotify Fan Base

6 Pro Tips for a Raving Spotify Fan Base

by | Jun 30, 2021 | Spotify, Tips

Some songs become earworms, while some others fail to impress and push listeners to skip them immediately. Music enthusiasts are often on a quest to find their next favorite song that will lead to a new favorite and another one.

You and I need to admit that our music taste has evolved since we became Spotify users. Because most of us, in our streaming journey, found that one unknown band who stayed forever in our ‘Heavy Rotation,’ the remarkable artists of whom we became huge fans of, or maybe that groovy beat we played on repeat during the whole summer. These songs often lead us to another artist who takes us to a third one, and when we realize, we are emerging in a new musical style.

These experiences result from Spotify’s algorithm matching music lovers and music they will love. At the same time, it helps us expand our musical knowledge and evolve our taste every day.

However, growing a fan base and standing out on the most popular streaming service in the world are not easy tasks. Independent musicians from all over the globe are fighting for the same ears, developing strategies to

leverage Spotify’s algorithm and get more exposure and organic traffic. In order to help your music stand out and expand your fan base on Spotify, we listed six precious tips that will help you find your fans on the platform. Check them out!

1. Submit Your Music To Playlists

The best way to reach out to new fans and increase the number of people listening to your music is to submit it to playlists on Spotify. Most streaming services  base their music discovery system on playlist engagement, and Spotify is no different. A large percentage of the universal streams on the platform come from the most popular playlists, being those Algorithmic – created automatically by the app and tailored to our music taste; Editorial, the ones curated by a team of Spotify curators; User-Curated, the ones curated by the users. Even though editorial playlists tend to be more significant as Spotify highlights on the platform, user-curated playlists can also have a broad reach. Some of these playlists – curated by brands, artists, influencers, and regular users – fall into the category. 

There are three main possibilities for getting your music featured on Spotify playlists:

A – Submit your track to Spotify editorial playlists via the Spotify for Artists app. The process is smooth and quick, but you need to submit your songs at least six weeks prior to the release. (essa frase ta incompleta)

b – Look for appealing user-curated playlists. Search for curators online and find ways to get in touch. There are services such as curators databases and playlist pluggers if you prefer to have professional help.

C- You could use services like IndieMono, Submithub, and Soundplate. Some of these are free to use.

2. Create Pre-Save Campaigns

Pre-Save campaigns are a great way of generating awareness and creating expectations prior to your music release. These campaigns help artists build momentum before a new music campaign, keeping them warm and ready for more.

When a listener decides to pre-save an album, they receive a notification on Spotify as soon as the expected single, EP, or collection is out so that they can listen to it immediately. Amazing, right? 

3. Create Your Own Playlists

Creating your playlist and highlighting it as your “artist’s pick” on Spotify can bring positive results when promoting your music and fostering fan engagement. Your music selection will also help your audiences to have a deeper connection with your work.

By presenting your music to your fans through a well-curated selection—side-by-side with different artists from the same genre—you can set a great mood and shape your fans’ perception of building the proper branding around your work. When curating your own playlist, add some of your songs together with music from similar artists, your influences, and inspirations. Promote this playlist on your social channels and send a message to the artists you featured so that they might do the same.

But remember: keep your playlist fresh, with constant updates and constantly add new songs. Regularly sharing a list of songs will direct more attention to your music and increase listeners’.

4. Make Sure You Have Some Budget for Online Ads

Integrated digital marketing campaigns are vital for the success of any independent musician. You have to reach new fans where they are hanging out, and it’s most likely this place as social media.

If you are a starting musician without a substantial audience yet, or already an established performer with several thousands of fans, creating paid ad campaigns on social media might be a no-brainer. These campaigns are perfect to immediately boost your reach when thinking about promoting your releases and starting a conversation with your listeners.

5. Use a Download Gate Strategy

Download gates are link aggregators that allow you to give away a downloadable gift in exchange for a requested action, usually social platforms interaction such as follow, like, or subscribe. This tool is often accessible via a website. It allows artists to rapidly accelerate their fan base growth when offering something as the download of an unreleased track in exchange for one or a few actions.

Follow-to-Download Links or simply download gates foster two important dynamics; expanding the reach of your music and improving the quantity and the quality of your following. Most gateways will allow you to add multiple gating steps, such as combining two or more of these social interactions.

In other words, you can make that secret recording available for your fans and only deliver it to those who agree to follow your profile, save your album, or like your playlist on Spotify. These actions can even work together with interactions on other social media channels, such as following your Instagram, subscribing to your YouTube channel, or liking your Facebook page.

6. Share your music with QR Codes

QR codes can be an excellent way of promoting your music both online in the physical space. When aimed at a cellphone’s camera, they are quick response codes that can direct the user to specific addresses on the internet. In this case, drive people to listen to your music! You can send them on emails, post them on your social media channels, print them on your flyers, your promo CDs, or your business card… The possibilities are endless!

Wrapping it Up

Spotify is the leading music streaming platform in the world. Therefore, gathering listeners, attracting followers, and fostering a fan base on the platform is essential for any music artist. The advantages of having your fans on your reach are enormous. The more people play, like, share, and engage your music through your music, and the more people will see your music recommended exponentially.

We hope these six pro tips for building a Spotify fan base will help you create this virtuous cycle and take you to the next step in your music career.

Spotify Popularity Index: A Little Secret to Help You Leverage the Algorithm

Spotify Popularity Index: A Little Secret to Help You Leverage the Algorithm

by | Jun 8, 2021 | Highlight, Spotify, Tips

In a digital age where independent artists are trying to break through the barriers installed by putative gatekeepers of the music industry, the golden key to becoming a successful artist is data. Without data, successful campaigns cannot be recreated and the unsuccessful ones cannot be learned from.

Spotify for Artists only gives  basic information regarding listeners’ demographics and track performance. The information displayed on the artist dashboard only includes the number of streams, listeners, followers, top playlists, and top songs.

This approach, however, fails to take into account other key factors for measuring your songs’ performance. From track attributes – such as danceability, liveness, positiveness, key, loudness, energy – to data regarding how listeners interact with your music. Yet, these hidden indicators are used by the algorithm to rank, recommend, display, and playlist songs on the biggest music streaming platform.

But keep in mind: when it comes to the Spotify algorithm, no song is rated in isolation. 

What is Spotify’s Popularity Index?

The Spotify Popularity Index is a 0-to-100 score that ranks how popular an artist is relative to other artists on Spotify. As your numbers grow, you’ll get placed in more editorial playlists and increase your reach on algorithmic playlists and recommendations. Some say that the magic number is 50!

The Index can be used to monitor and influence the progress of new releases. Each track has its own SPI calculated influencing the artist’s overall index. Yet, while the Popularity Index is majorly determined by recent stream count, other factors like save rate, the number of playlists, skip rate, and share rate can indirectly bump up or push down a song’s popularity index.

How to Influence the Popularity Index in your Favor

To successfully influence your Spotify popularity index, you need to understand that every stream, save, share, like, and playlist recommendation counts. All ways lead to Rome.

Do not forget that the algorithm is the major player here and the index is just one of the factors it considers when recommending booming songs to Spotify’s ever-demanding listeners. 

Spotify Algorithm - BART

Running a pre-save campaign weeks before the release days would give your track all the juice it needs to appeal to your first listeners. The algorithm will have no other choice than to keep recommending your songs to your perceived audience and lookalike audience. If your campaign success is consistent during the first week, there is a great likelihood that you will be placed on several algorithmic playlists.

Your pre-save campaign can give you all the traction you need to “convince” the algorithm to give you a playlist boost. According to Chartmasters: 

“A song is not successful because it is a part of a large playlist. It only gets into large playlists when it’s successful”.

You do not have to leave the fate of your track in the formulaic hands of the Spotify algorithm since you can also appeal to tastemakers by pitching your music to editorial playlists.

Although Editorial playlists give your tracks more exposure compared to algorithmic playlists, songs fall off the editorial playlists easily and quickly unlike algorithmic playlists. You can remain on algorithmic playlists for months.

How to check Spotify Popularity Index

There are several tools you can use to check your Spotify Popularity Index, namely; Musicstax, Chartmetric, Songstats, and Spotify for Developers. The first three tools are the simplest while Spotify for Developers can be confusing to users with no coding skills.

Musicstax is a simple music analysis tool that allows you to check the popularity score by searching for the artist’s name or song. The free tool can also be used to analyze features of a song such as loudness and danceability. The only disadvantage of using Musicstax is its inability to provide real-time metrics, meaning the database is not always up-to-date.

Chartmetrics provides market-level data to artists who want to up their game and understand their growing fanbase. You can get a panoramic view of how many people are discovering your songs on playlists, popularity rating, and growth over a long span of time, conversion ratio, and playlist reach to followers ratio via Chartmetric.

Songstats is an amazing tool that provides artists with the data needed to effectively manage their campaigns. It lets you observe the impact of your campaign strategy and growing popularity index on your track performance.

Conclusion

  • Improve your understanding of your fanbase using advanced tools to crawl data from your Spotify page. Tools like Chartmetric, Songstats, and Musicstax make it super easy.

  • Monitor your popularity growth in the first week of release and make informed decisions using real-time metrics.

  • Use the popularity score as a currency to bypass the gateways of algorithmic playlists.

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