aaamusic | On 27, Nov 2020

As artists, the online world offers a great deal of opportunity to promote your work. It offers excellent exposure and you can make your work available to a wider audience, and more easily accessible which allows you to receive instant feedback and to grow and develop your work further. Theoretically, platforms like Spotify should allow you to have your work discoverable in a fairly simple and streamlined manner. This is partially true, but you still need to know how to play the game. The following are a few tips and tricks to help you get a successful playlist going on Spotify.

Who is Your Audience

The first thing you need to ascertain is who your audience will be, and assess the growth potential of said audience. Try to envision what they would want to listen to, and do your best to produce original content that will be appealing – drawing on their favorite works, but without pandering or ripping them off. Also, figure out what they could be doing as they listen to the playlist. Help create a particular vibe, whether it is music that they could listen to while running, working out, reading, studying, having a dinner date at home, and so on. Approach it in the same manner you would as how you would create a playlist solely for yourself. 

How it Begins

All insiders will tell you that people will approach a playlist and their decision to subscribe based on their assessment of the first three to five songs. As most top 10 playlists show, the first three tracks tend to be crowd-pleasers, songs that have great energy to them and help create a specific world for the listeners. So, how you set the pace in your playlist can be a defining moment for whether your audience decides to stick around or not.

Pay Attention to Imagery

A sleek profile that captures the imagination is one definite key to success. Imagery is key to our current digital landscape, so it doesn’t make sense to leave your profile lacking in that regard. Both your profile name and image need to be catchy and have imagery that draws people in and makes them feel part of a fun and interesting world. Even if you don’t have your own photographs to draw from, there are a lot of free images available online with which you can get creative. 

The Text

Another part of your Spotify profile that you need to pay attention to is both your name and your playlist bio. Make sure that your profile name is both evocative and catchy, and be careful to never change it repeatedly since that is an easy way to lose some of your audience. The bio is equally important since it’s a direct way of communicating who you are to the audience, your music tastes, and so on. You can even take things further with some clever SEO, wherein you add a few artists to your bio and link to their pages so that their followers will inevitably find your profile and playlist. This is vital to help grow your base as quickly as possible. 

Keep Things Fresh

Work to update your playlist regularly, in the same manner, that you would keep your blog fresh. Rotate a few songs in and out of your list, and never leave it idle for more than a month. Ideally, you would update things once a week. At the same time, try not to have too many tracks by the same artists, whether it’s yourself or your favorite musician, keeping things surprising and fresh is important to retaining and expanding your audience. Otherwise, your Spotify playlist will languish and die early on.

Spread the Word

While you can only share your Spotify playlist a few times, make sure to have people share yours and champion them to their own audiences. Artists or like-minded curators usually like to share content on their social media channels, so ask for them to help you, and then return the favor. The online ecosystem is fairly circular, and Spotify is no different. This is why even the basic implementation of SEO techniques and soft people skills is so important. Spreading the word is a combination of both skill sets, and is crucial to your playlist earning more subscribers.

While there is quite a lot of work that goes into making your Spotify playlist successful, at the end of the day, it is important to enjoy what you’re doing and have fun. Audiences can feel when something comes across as forced, and it just causes them to run away. So, do the work, but also make sure to also have a good time.