The Ultimate Guide to Spotify Playlist Promotion
How to find free, legitimate, high-quality playlists for your music.
Table of Contents
Why Spotify playlists matter
Paying for placements
How to find contact details for playlist owners
How to find playlists you can submit to for free
10 ways to avoid fake playlists
The best way to contact curators
How to write the perfect pitch
Our free playlist pitching template
Playlist promotion vs. Facebook ads
10 ways to spot legitimate playlists
Understanding playlist acceptance rates
Playlisting 101
If you're new to playlist pitching, here's what you need to know.
Why Spotify Playlists Matter
Spotify has the lion's share of the streaming market, and the vast majority of streams on Spotify come from playlists.
If your music isn't featured on Spotify playlists, you're missing out on the biggest listening audience of any music platform in 2022.
Paying for Placements
If a curator asks for money in return for a guaranteed placement, they're breaching Spotify's terms of service. Any playlist owner offering a guaranteed number of listeners is using bots to inflate their numbers. Avoid these services at all costs.
There are some curators of large playlists who ask for a small fee for their time spent considering a song, given the volume of submissions they receive. There's nothing wrong with paying a legitimate curator to consider your music.
How to Find Contact Details for Playlist Owners
Fortunately, we have just the tool for you!
OKTIV.IO is an AI playlist finder that lets you search Spotify in realtime and find contact details for thousands of curators.
Our platform automatically extracts social media handles (Instagram/Facebook/Twitter), email addresses and submission form links, saving you countless hours every time you release a song.
Better yet, our AI engine calculates which playlists are the best fit for your song, and lets you filter out curators that other users have flagged for offering fake streams or suspicious services.
How to Find Playlists you can Submit to for Free
6 tips to save you time and money.
1. Target Playlists with 100-2000 Followers
The more followers a playlist has, the less likely it is to have grown organically, and the more likely it is that the curator will ask you to pay for a placement.
Using our AI playlist finder at OKTIV.IO, you can filter playlists by number of followers to find high-quality curators in your niche.
2. Reach out to Other Artists in Your Scene
Musicians usually have their own playlists on Spotify and are happy to trade places in your playlists for playlists in theirs. This is also a great way to grow your network and these conversations often lead to other forms of collaboration.
3. Avoid Curators Blacklisted by Other Users
On OKTIV.IO, users can blacklist curators selling guaranteed placements or fake streams. We flag playlists owned by these curators to other users so they can safely avoid dodgy services and save time wasted pitching for them.
4. Look for Toneden and Other Website Links
On OKTIV.IO, you can search and filter by the different types of contact details we have for curators. Some of the best free submissions can be found by looking at the 'Other Links' column on the Search or My Mix page. Many curators use Toneden forms for submissions. There's usually no fee for these, you just have to follow their playlist on Spotify before you can submit.
5. Use Free Credits on SubmitHub
It's safe to say the music community is pretty divided on SubmitHub. Plenty of artists lament the harsh and irrelevant feedback, and low acceptance rates. But if you have the time, there's nothing to lose by using your free credits.
6. Keep Track of the Great Curators you Find
It can be challenging to find the high-quality curators who are genuinely influential in your genre or scene. But when you find them, make sure you keep track of them and pitch to them every time you release a new song. The easiest way to do this is by adding these curators to your favourites on OKTIV.IO.
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